Thursday, March 12th 2009

By sylvia guirguis

The Canada Research Chair Program is home to 68 of McMaster University’s professors, three of whom just recently had their chairs renewed in a federal research investment totaling nearly 3.7 million dollars.

The program was created by the Government of Canada in 2000 in order to establish 2000 research professorships in universities across the country. In the efforts of attracting and retaining some of the most accomplished and promising minds in the world, 300 million federal dollars are invested annually. At McMaster, Pavlos Kanaroglou, Jeffrey Weitz, and Gregory Slater have each received a small share of that investment as encouragement to continue in their research. As tier 1 chairs, acknowledged as world leaders in their fields, Kanaroglou and Weitz have been awarded 1.4 million dollars. Meanwhile, Slater, an exceptional emerging researcher with the potential to become a leader in his field, is a tier 2 chair and has received 500,000 dollars. In addition, Slater and Weitz have also been given a total of nearly 400,000 dollars for research-related infrastructure.

“Canada Research Chairs are research stars in their fields. These are some of the top researchers in the world,” said Fiona McNeill Chair in the Department of Medical Physics and Applied Radiation Sciences and Associate Vice-President of Research at McMaster University, “The program was set up to ensure that, within Canada, we can recruit and retain some of these top researchers. It was felt that Canada was losing some of its intellectual research capacity.”

In the university’s Strategic Research Plan – a document explaining how funding from chairs will be used to attract and retain world experts – McMaster lists one of its key objectives as, “To strengthen and expand existing undergraduate and graduate programs, and develop innovative new programs”. By presenting Kanaroglou, Weitz, and Slater with funding, both undergraduate and graduate students can benefit.

“These chairs take a lot of graduate students so it gives these students the opportunity to work with them. They also contribute to teaching…people are getting the chance to be taught by some of the very best researchers that are the very best in their fields and are transferring that knowledge to the undergraduate level,” said McNeill. Pavlos Kanaroglou, Canada Research Chair in Spatial Analysis, is recognized as a leading international scholar in geography and among the top dozen researchers employing spatial choice modeling in their research.  Using mathematical modeling and spatial analysis, Kanaroglou’s research is designed to help formulate public policy on issues such as health facilities and household energy savings through an understanding of the environmental impacts.

Jeffrey Weitz, Canada Research Chair in Thrombosis, focuses his research on identifying and treating the underlying sources of blood clot formation in order to develop improved therapies that could reduce costs to the health care system and, moreover, improve the quality of life for patients. Further research could even identify the proteins to be targeted as part of a gene therapy, which should combat the disorder at the very root.

Gregory Slater, Canada Research Chair in Environmental Isotope Biogeochemistry, is developing new compound specific isotopic analysis techniques in the search for understanding the degree to which microbial communities degrade organic contaminants in the environment.  Ultimately, the goal of the research is to optimize the potential role of microbial communities in cleaning up the environment of these contaminants.

These are three researchers with three important goals in mind. Thus, with the surge of federal funding to help stimulate their research proceedings, it should not be too long before we hear from them again.

Tags: Canada Research Chair, Fiona McNeill, funding