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Ottawa, Ontario Invest in U of G Research
SSHRC, Ministry of Research and Innovation support wide range of projects across campus
This summer brought federal and provincial funding boosts for nine faculty in the arts and social sciences and five in the sciences.
In late August, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) awarded $630,000 to Guelph as part of a $76-million investment in some 900 top Canadian researchers over the next three years.
Earlier in the summer, the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation provided a total of $700,000 in Early Researcher Awards, a highly competitive program open to researchers during the first five years of their career.
The SSHRC recipients include Prof. Heather Keller, Family Relations and Applied Nutrition, who received $148,000 for her study on what mealtime means for older adults with dementia.
“This funding will allow us to have one of the longest and most in-depth research projects with data collected from both people with dementia and partners in care,” says Keller.
Other recipients are:
- Prof. Tara Abraham, History, $28,000 to study cybernetics and the sciences of brain and mind in 20th-century America;
- Prof. Christine Bold, English and Theatre Studies, $56,522 for her project “U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860 to 1920 — Creole and Other Wild Wests 1885 to 1924”;
- Prof. Peter Eardley, Philosophy, $32,585 to examine the origins of ethical secularization from Aquinas to Luther;
- Prof. Matthew Hayday, History, $33,000 to explore the history of how bilingualism was promoted and received by English-speaking Canadians from the 1960s to the 1990s;
- Prof. Alice Hovorka, Geography, $123,950 for her work on gender and urban food security in Botswana;
- Prof. Sofie Lachapelle, History, $37,000 for the project “Science on Stage: Recreational Physics, White Magic and Scientific Wonder in 19th-Century France”;
- Prof. John Smithers, Geography, $115,800 to study the needs and prospects of the short food-supply chain; and
- Prof. Thanasis Stengos, Economics, $59,000 for his research on “Univariate and Bivariate Maximum Entropy Density Estimation: Some Theory and Applications.”
The five recipients of Early Researcher Awards are Profs. Chris Bauch, Mathematics and Statistics; Paul Garrett, Physics; Hafiz Maherali and Ryan Norris, Integrative Biology; and Jaideep Mathur, Molecular and Cellular Biology. They were each awarded $140,000 to further their research and build teams of graduate students, research associates and post-doctoral researchers.
Bauch will use the award to further his research on simulation modelling to help improve public health policy.
The funding will help Garrett accelerate his research on testing and constraining new theories of matter beyond the standard model, work that will ultimately lead to a better understanding of why the universe looks the way it does.
Maherali and his team are testing new ideas about the capacity of dominant native species to resist invaders. A related goal is understanding how plants and ecosystems respond to climate change.
Norris is also looking at the effect of environmental change. He and his team are developing chemical markers and radio telemetry techniques to track migratory animals.
Mathur will use his award to support his research on how plants adapt to climate change, pollution and other environmental effects.