Congratulations to UTTRI associated faculty, Assistant Professor Shoshanna Saxe of Civil & Mineral Engineering, and Associate Professor Birsen Donmez of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering who have been named Tier 2 Canada Research Chairs.
Tier 2 Canada Research Chairs are for exceptional emerging researchers, acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field. A Chair is tenable for five years and renewable once.
The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, today announced that the Government of Canada is investing approximately $195 million to support 259 new and renewed Canada Research Chairs at 47 institutions across Canada.
“Our government is taking action to attract and retain the world’s brightest and most distinguished researchers. For over 20 years, the Canada Research Chairs Program has been mobilizing Canada’s most esteemed academics to train and mentor the next generation of researchers and pursue groundbreaking research that responds to society’s economic, social and health needs. Congratulations to the new and renewed Canada Research Chairs! I look forward to seeing where your research and innovation leads us.” – The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry
The Canada Research Chair program recognizes that diversity is indispensable to research excellence and is committed to working alongside Canadian institutions to achieve its equity targets and reflect the diversity of Canada’s population by 2029. Among the 259 Canada Research Chair recipients announced today, 26% self-identified as racialized minorities, 5% as Indigenous Peoples, 10% as persons with disabilities and 51% as women.
Dr. Shoshanna Saxe is a new Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure.
She investigates the relationship between the infrastructure we build and the society we create to identify opportunities – and pathways – to better align infrastructure provision with sustainability. Past research includes investigations of the environmental impacts of transport infrastructure, quantitative measures of cycling infrastructure provision, holistic systems thinking for transportation infrastructure, and timelines of transport infrastructure design and delivery.
Dr. Saxe is a former Action Canada fellow, sits on Waterfront Toronto’s Capital Peer Review Panel and the board of the International Society for Industrial Ecology. She has been recognized by Clean 50 as one of Canada’s emerging environmental leaders and was awarded the Ontario 2019 Engineering Medal – Young Engineer. Her research and commentary have been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The BBC, The Toronto Star, The Financial Post, Spacing Magazine and Wired.
Dr. Birsen Donmez’s Canada Research Chair in Human Factors and Transportation has been renewed.
Her research interests are centered on understanding and improving human behavior and performance in multi-task and complex situations, using a wide range of analytical techniques. In particular, her research focuses on operator attention in multitask activities, decision support under uncertainty, and human automation interaction, with applications in various domains including surface transportation, healthcare, mining, and unmanned vehicle operations. Dr. Donmez received the inaugural Stephanie Binder Young Professional Award from the HFES Surface Transportation Technical Group (2014), an Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation of Ontario (2015), the Early Career Teaching Award from the U of T Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (2013), a Connaught New Researcher Award from the University of Toronto (2011), the Dr. Charles H. Miller Best Paper Award from the Canadian Association of Road Safety Professionals (2010), and a Dwight David Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Transportation (2006). Her research has been featured by the Global TV News, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star.
Dr. Donmez acted as Chair of the Automotive UI ’18 conference which took place in Canada for the first time September 23-25, 2018 in Toronto.
About Canada Research Chairs
- There are currently 1,922 active chairholders across Canada.
- The program is a tri-agency initiative of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). It is administered by the Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat, which is housed at SSHRC.
- Announcement: Government of Canada makes largest investment in Canada Research Chairs Program and celebrates 20th anniversary, December 16, 2020.