Recent Research Chairs in the Faculty of Science

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.

Professor
NSERC/COSIA Industrial Research Chair in Oil Sands Wetland Reclamation
Biological Sciences

Dr. Ciborowski’s research seeks to develop a transformational methodology to characterize and assess the ecological condition of wetlands in the Athabasca Oil Sands reclamation landscapes, and to ultimately enable industry to better reclaim land and promote biodiversity. His IRC program will answer the following questions:

• How can industry best predict the early development, biodiversity, and persistence of wetlands in a reclaimed landscape, using knowledge of the environment and landscape?
• What environmental or biological indicators best reflect long-term resilience and/or persistence in young wetlands?
• What reclamation features will promote young wetlands’ formation, resilience and persistence?

He and his team will study the functionality (based on wetland size, depth and water exchanges), water quality (amounts of salts and other compounds) and surrounding disturbance features of newly forming wetlands in the post-mining landscape. Biological surveys (aquatic invertebrates, plants, and birds) will show which of these features are most important in sustaining biodiversity as wetlands age.  View contact information.

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.

Professor
CIHR CRC II in Biofilm Microbiology and Genomics
Biological Sciences

Dr. Harrison is a microbiologist, biochemist and molecular geneticist that holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Biofilm Microbiology and Genomics from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR). His research aims to better understand chronic infectious diseases and to devise new ways to defeat them. Harrison chairs the Biofilm Research Group (BRG) and has helped to define institutional strategic research policy as part of the “Infections, Inflammation and Chronic Diseases” and “One Health” thought leaders’ groups. Harrison is a co-lead for Integrated Microbiome Platforms for Advancing Causation Testing and Translation (IMPACTT), which is the CIHR-funded Canadian Microbiome Core. During his PhD, Dr. Harrison had a key role in developing and commercializing the MBEC assay, which is used for biofilm antimicrobial susceptibility testing. This technology was commercialized to create a spinoff company acquired in 2006 by Innovotech Incorporated, which is now listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Harrison has sat on many scientific advisory and peer-review committees nationally and internationally and Chaired the Scientific Advisory Committee for Cystic Fibrosis Canada in 2020.  View contact information

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.

Professor
Campus Alberta Innovation Program Chair in Aquatic Ecosystem Health
Biological Sciences

Dr. Munkittrick’s research is primarily field-based and focused on measuring the responses of wild fishes to natural and anthropogenic stressors including pulp mills, oil refineries, oil sands operations, agriculture), and municipalities, on examining the suitability of laboratory studies for predicting field effects, and on the use of alternate approaches for detecting impacts.  Most recently his focus has been on developing adaptive, tiered and triggered monitoring frameworks, and in linking the various monitoring programs exist to a common philosophical foundation and integrated management framework.  Long term data sets are used to define “normal ranges” for monitoring parameters ranging from water quality measurements and benthic invertebrate community information, to fish population metrics.  His academic studies are focused on testing hypotheses about the role that variation in fish reproductive life histories plays in species differences in sensitivity to environmental contamination.  He developed an effects-based ecosystem health assessment approach focused on fish life history information on growth rates, reproductive rates, survival, and indicators of condition which is used to generate and test site-specific hypotheses related to identifying stressors responsible for changes in fish populations.  View contact information.

Professor
NSERC/TELUS Industrial Research Chair in Information Security
Computer Science

Rei Safavi-Naini's research interests are cryptography, information theoretic security, security protocols and systems, and data privacy. Her research is driven by, (i) security questions that arise by advances in computer and communication technologies and their applications in everyday life, and (ii) fundamental information theoretic questions and limits of providing security in different scenarios. Her recent research directions are, cloud security, communications security, user authentication, and data sanitization and protection.  View contact information.

Professor
UCalgary Research Excellence Chair
Chemistry

Thangadurai designs and develops highly conductive solid electrolytes exhibiting proton, lithium and oxide ion and highly electrochemically active electrodes for solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), solid state metal (Li, Na) batteries and gas sensors. Developing solids with desired functional properties is a key towards the successful commercialization of next generation clean electrochemical energy devices. His research work is specifically concentrated on a fundamental understanding of the role of structure and composition on the electrical properties of solids, in order to tailor their ionic and electronic conductivities, and chemical stability, to environments encountered within SOFCs, batteries, and sensors. His work lead to the development of a wide range of solid ceramic electrolytes, especially LI-based garnets with high voltage stability of 6 V that are able to conduct lithium ions, for advanced robust and safe all-solid state lithium ion batteries. View contact information

Associate Professor
Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists Chair in Exploration Geophysics
Geoscience

Dr. Trad specializes in signal processing and inversion, in particular in applications to improving seismic data through inverting transformations that contain the physics of seismic acquisition and wave propagation. He has developed several software packages and modules for seismic processing and migration-inversion. His pioneering work on five-dimensional interpolation has become widely used worldwide. More recently he has focused on Least-squares migration, deblending and Machine learning and Quantum computing.  View contact information.

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

View contact information.

Associate Professor
Alberta Innovates Health Solutions Translational Health Chair in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Biological Sciences

Natural environments are highly variable and biological constraints often prevent a single individual from performing best in all conditions. Specialization through genetic adaptation to the local environment provides one way to cope with a heterogeneous environment, and has been observed in a wide range of species, from lodgepole pine to threespine stickleback. Dr. Yeaman’s research aims to understand how organisms adapt to both spatially and temporally heterogeneous environments and how this process shapes the genetic and genomic architecture of complex traits. He uses a combination of population genetic theory and individual-based simulations to formulate hypotheses and seek to test these hypotheses using comparative genomics and studies of genomic variation in natural populations. Understanding how evolution shapes the genomic basis of complex traits has important implications for medicine, personalized genomics, and predicting the response of natural populations to climate change.  View contact information.