posted on April 4: New Canada Research Chairs study nanostructured materials, bioinformatics

Nanotechnology and bioinformatics will be the focus of research by McMaster's two newest Canada Research Chairs.

The two new chairholders, Gianluigi A. Botton and Brian Golding, bring McMaster's total of Canada Research Chairs to 30.

Botton, an associate professor in the Faculty of Engineering, is the Canada Research Chair in Electron Microscopy of Nanostructured Materials.

Botton will use TEM/EELS technology to achieve three goals: improve techniques to detect signals from few
atomic layers at interfaces and nanostructures; develop models to describe the analytical data in terms of structure and bonding changes; and describe the relationships between the observations and the properties of the materials.

Golding, a biology professor in the Faculty of Science, is the Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics.

Bioinformatics is a new, multi-disciplinary field combining biology, computer science and mathematics to analyze data generated by genomics and to extract knowledge from it. The long-term objectives of Golding's research program are to determine the patterns and mechanisms of molecular evolution and influences of the natural processes of mutation, gene transfer, and selection on sequence evolution.

The federal government allocatted $900 million to the Canada Research Chairs program in 2000 to help Canadian universities attract and retain the best researchers and achieve excellence in natural sciences and engineering, health sciences, social sciences and the humanities.

The goal is to have 2,000 chairholders in place by 2005.

To date, 532 chairholders have been awarded. Sixty of the chairholders represent a “brain gain” as they have either come to Canada from the U.S. or overseas or returned home to pursue their research.