Posted on June 20: New opportunities for McMaster researchers
Fifteen promising young researchers new to the university in the last year have been awarded more than $2.5 million from the New Opportunities Fund of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).
The researchers, recruited from world-class institutions across Europe and North America, were awarded grants to purchase specialized equipment for their research projects and to initiate new work in their fields of expertise.
“Recruiting excellent faculty is a high priority for McMaster and this program has allowed us to do just that,” said Mamdouh Shoukri, vice-president research and international affairs. “This investment will help our new faculty to expand their research programs and build their research capacity.”
Of the 46 universities that received $43.5 million in infrastructure for 237 projects, McMaster ranked third with 14 projects funded. To date, 69 research projects have been awarded a total of $12,563,477 from the New Opportunities Fund.
The projects were selected on the recommendation of experts who thoroughly assessed each project against the three CFI criteria:
- Quality research and the need for infrastructure
- Contribution to strengthening the capacity for innovation
- Potential benefits of the research to Canada
“These awards recognize new researchers whose work will surely be of direct benefit to Canadians in a wide range of fields,” said CFI President & CEO, David Strangway, “These projects were selected following a highly competitive process and will help ensure that researchers and students at our universities have access to a world-class research and training environment.”
The CFI is a federally funded, non-profit corporation that provides Canadian universities with an opportunity to attract cutting edge researchers from around the globe.
McMaster's New Opportunites Fund Recipients are:
Sarah Dickson, assistant professor, civil engineering, Carlos Felipe, assistant professor, chemical engineering, awarded $487,374 for infrastructure to enable research in water, the environment and public health.
Takashi Imai, associate professor, physics and astronomy, awarded $359,984 to establish the McMaster Low-Temperature High-Magnetic-Field Laboratory for new materials research.
Peter Kruse, assistant professor, chemistry, $240,000 to fund a variable temperature UHV-STM for the study of compound semiconductor surface chemistry.
Murray Junop, assistant professor, biochemistry, awarded $236,522 for crystallographic studies of DNA repair proteins and novel antibiotic inhibitor-protein complexes.
Gillian Goward, assistant professor, chemistry, received $200,000 for Solid-State NMR: a tool for characterizing electrochemically relevant materials.
Christian Baron, associate professor, biology, $180,086 for functional genomics studies in infectious disease research.
Ian Fearon, assistant professor, biology, $150,000 for cellular and molecular studies of ion channels an neurotransmitter receptors and their responses to physiological and pathological stimuli.
Mel Rutherford, assistant professor, psychology, awarded $150,000 to study the development of social perception in children with autism and in typically developing children.
Raja Ghosh, assistant professor, chemical engineering, $112,981 for equipment for bioseparations engineering research.
Alan Chen, assistant professor, physics and astronomy, awarded $112,600 for a McMaster detector laboratory for nuclear astrophysics and nuclear structure with exotic beams at TRIUMF.
Stephen Veldhuis, assistant professor, mechanical engineering, awarded $100,000 for manufacturing process investigation tools.
Patricia Liaw, assistant professor, medicine, received $96,681 for basic and clinical studies of activated protein C, a new anti-sepsis drug.
Christopher Anand, assistant professor, and Wolfram Kahl, associate professor, computing and software, awarded $91,623 for automatic code generation of efficient and probably correct image processing and relational programs.
Gerald Moran, assistant professor, Medical Physics and Applied Radiation Science Unit, awarded $69,681 for electric impedance tomography: biomedical engineering, muscle physiology and cardiac MRI.
