Canada Research Chairs
Jennifer Adams
Associate Professor
SSHRC CRC II in Creativity in STEM Education
Chemistry
Dr. Adams’ research has focused on two areas: 1) urban place-based and environmental education and 2) informal science learning a) teacher learning, identity and agency and b) youth agency and identity. Underlying her work are critical and decolonizing stances towards science and science teaching and learning. Her research will now extend into examining the intersection of creativity and STEM in postsecondary science teaching and learning contexts. Dr. Adams will emphasize design towards increasing the creative capacities of STEM learners and theorizing a critical stance towards creativity and STEM. View contact information.
Karoly Bezdek
Professor
NSERC CRC I in Computational and Discrete Geometry
Mathematics and Statistics
Karoly Bezdek's main field of research is convex and discrete geometry, which is a rapidly developing discipline on the boundary of mathematics and computer science. Dr. Bezdek is also the director of the Center for Computational and Discrete Geometry (CCDG) at the University of Calgary (U of C). He started the Fejes Toth lectures series in 2009, which brought to U of C many world-class mathematicians, whose visits generated important joint research works. The refereed e-journal Contributions to Discrete Mathematics (CDM) is dedicated to publishing significant results in several areas of pure and applied mathematics. Bezdek started CDM in 2006 and since then he has been serving as a Co-Editor-in-Chief. View contact information.
Christopher Cully
Associate Professor
NSERC CRC II in Space Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Dr. Christopher Cully’s research interests include:
- Wave-particle interactions in space plasmas
- Electric field structure in the magnetosphere and ionosphere
- Space plasma electric field instruments
- Kinetic plasma solutions
- Ion outflow
He is the principal investigator for ABOVE. Dr. Cully is also a co-investigator on ESA's Cluster and Solar Orbiter missions, a science team member on NASA's Themis and CSA's ePOP missions, and a member of the EFW instrument team on NASA's Van Allen Probes. View contact information.
Joe Harrison
Associate Professor
CIHR CRC II in Biofilm Microbiology and Genomics
Biological Sciences
Dr. Harrison’s laboratory uses molecular genetics, genomics, biochemistry and experimental evolution to investigate two important aspects of biofilm microbiology. One aspect of his research program is to understand how bacteria in biofilms can establish chronic infections. He is particularly interested in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that makes biofilms in the airways of patients with the genetic disease cystic fibrosis (CF). A second aspect of his research is focused on understanding how biofilms can withstand antimicrobial treatments and aims to devise new strategies to control them. This research utilizes Escherichia coli, a well-studied model organism that has informed nearly all aspects of basic and applied microbiology. View contact information.
Susana Kimura-Hara
Assistant Professor
NSERC CRC II in Analytic and Aquatic Chemistry
Chemistry
Dr. Kimura-Hara’s research interests are in the areas of drinking water treatment, analytical chemistry and toxicology. She is interested in the identification and formation mechanisms of unregulated disinfection by-products using advanced mass spectrometry instrumentation and techniques. She has a particular interest on the formation and toxicity of emerging disinfection by-products and contaminants of concern derived from oxidation and membrane-based technologies developed to remove contaminants from municipal wastewater effluents. View contact information.
Justin MacCallum
Associate Professor
CIHR CRC II in Biomolecular Structure and Design
Chemistry
Dr. MacCallum’s lab studies protein structure and biomolecular recognition using a combination of computational modeling and biophysical experiments. He aims to understand basic driving forces and to use this knowledge for practical applications, including new approaches to structure determination and the design of new biomolecules. The lab’s focus is on the development and application of powerful computational modeling tools, which we validate and improve through complementary experimental studies. Current efforts in the lab focus on two main directions: (1) alternative approaches to structure determination and (2) design of protein-protein and protein-peptide interactions using physical modeling and free energy simulations. View contact information.
D. Khoa Nguyen
Assistant Professor
NSERC CRC II in Number Theory and Arithmetic Geometry
Mathematics and Statistics
Numbers, fractals, and dynamical systems are ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Integers are whole numbers such as 0, 1, 2, 999, 2147483647, etc. that not only appear in every ancient civilization but also continue to play a fundamental role in our modern society through coding theory and data security. Fractals are stunning objects with repeating patterns such as the shapes of snowflake, tree roots, etc. A dynamical system consists of the state a(n) such as the coordinate, weight, temperature, etc. of an object after n units of time in which the state a(n) depends on the previous state a(n-1) by a predetermined rule. Dr. Nguyen’s research area involves all of the above subjects under the principle of unlikely intersections which suggests that two random objects in dynamics should have a small intersection. This principle gives rise to the Pollard’s rho algorithms for the factorization and the discrete logarithm problems which are crucial in cryptography. Dr. Nguyen's research group uses tools from algebra, number theory, and dynamics to obtain progress in the mentioned theme of unlikely intersections and related aspects. More specifically, they investigate the dynamics of d-dimensional algebraic objects such as affine spaces and tori. Such systems model the physical world when d=3 and the data are taken from the real numbers. On the other hand, when our data are taken from finite fields (i.e. certain structures with only finitely many elements in which we can perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), their research has potential applications to information theory. View contact information.
Warren Piers
Professor
NSERC CRC I in Mechanisms of Homogeneous Catalytic Reactions
Chemistry
Dr. Piers’ research aims at developing robust, selective and sustainable catalysts for generating fuels from the end products of combustion, reactions driven by renewable energy. This includes the development of synthetic applications of perfluoroaryl boranes, mechanistic organometallic chemistry in catalysis, and the development of novel boron-based organometallic materials.
His current research focus is on:
- Rigid electron-rich PCP pincer ligands for small molecule activation
- Pentadentate ligand platforms for small molecule activation
- Perfluorarylboranes and boron-nitrogen heterocycles
- Electrocatalytic reduction of CO2
Emma Spanswick
Assistant Professor
NSERC CRC II in Geospace Dynamics and Space Plasma Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Dr. Spanwick seeks to further develop observational techniques that broaden the scope of available information about the near-Earth space environment, using these techniques to study a range of fundamental space science problems and advancing applications for space weather monitoring and prediction.
Focus areas include:
- Dynamics of the Near-Earth Space Environment
- Ground-Based Remote Sensing of the Space Environment
- Ground-Based Remote Instrumentation Development
- Satellite Auroral Imager Design and Development
Peter Tieleman
Professor
NSERC CRC I in Molecular Simulation
Biological Sciences
Peter Tieleman’s research interests focus on biological membranes and simulation methods for membrane systems. His group is using theoretical methods and powerful computers to better understand how membrane proteins function, how cells interact, how signals are transmitted through cell membranes, and how molecules enter and leave cells. Some examples of current projects include the mechanism of ABC transporters, fundamental interactions within membrane proteins and between proteins and lipids, the mechanism of lung surfactant, nanoparticles for drug delivery, and the development of improved lipid models. View contact information.
Mathilakath Vijayan
Professor
NSERC CRC I in Environmental Physiology and Toxicology
Biological Sciences
Dr. Vijayan’s research program is focused on the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in stress tolerance. Specifically, the goal is to discover novel cellular signaling molecules and transduction pathways activated by stressors, revealing hormonal regulation of these stress adaptive pathways, and the integration of these responses at the whole animal level to regain homeostasis
Dr. Vijayan’s research topics can be broadly categorized under:
- Elucidating the pathways that are corticosteroid responsive and critical for developmental programming, growth and metabolism
- Identifying pathways that are sensitive to toxicants (critical window) during the early developmental phase
- Determining the long term, including multigenerational, implications on growth and performance associated with endocrine disruption by maternal transfer of xenobiotics in fish
Wesley Willett
Associate Professor
NSERC CRC II in Visual Analytics
Computer Science
Wesley Willett is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. His interests span information visualization, social computing, new media, and human computer interaction, and his research focuses on pairing data and interactivity to support collaboration, learning, and discovery. At the UofC, he leads the Data Experience Lab, and is a faculty member in the department of Computer Science and the Computational Media Design program. View contact information.
Philipp Woelfel
Professor
NSERC CRC II in Randomized and Distributed Algorithms
Computer Science
Dr. Woelfel and his team aim to ensure that computers and networks work quickly and reliably, by finding efficient ways to implement scheduling, resource allocation and process coordination. Modern computing increasingly relies on the ability of multiple hardware components to work in parallel but designing efficient programs for these concurrent systems is difficult. They work to solve computer and network problems by using programs that make random choices and are significantly simpler, more robust, and more efficient than traditional programs. Focus areas include:
- Randomized algorithms and data structures
- Computational complexity
- Theory of distributed computing