New chairs boost research

By Barbara Black

Concordia has just acquired seven new Canada Research Chairs, bring the university’s total to 10. All the recipients are on the cutting edge of their fields of study, and will greatly enhance the university’s research profile.

Mark A. Ellenbogen, CRC in Psychopathology, looks at what makes children vulnerable to social, academic and mental health problems. He looks at the developmental antecedents of behavioural and emotional problems in high-risk adolescents and young adults. He comes to us from the Université de Montréal.

Donal Hickey, CRC in Genome Evolution, has been at the University of Ottawa. He studies the patterns of genome evolution, using bioinformatics tools. The results of his research are relevant to molecular medicine and environmental protection.

Sivakumar Narayanswamy, CRC in Laser Metrology and Laser Micromachining, came to Canada from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Laser metrology is the science of measurement. Laser micromachining involves investigating problems at the subatomic level that relate to sub-surface defects, surface finish and deformations, features that are very important for the high performance of advanced materials.

Nigel Rapport, CRC in Globalization, Citizenship and Social Justice, tackles the big questions facing society, including, in his words, “the cosmopolitan experience of the citizen and the openness of a just society.” He is coming to Concordia from Scotland to become director of a new Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, and we hope to tell you more in a future issue of CTR.

Uri Shalev, CRC in Neurobiology of Drug Abuse, uses animal models of drug-taking and mental illness to study the interactions between underlying neural mechanisms and energy balance systems. This could obviously benefit the treatment of drug addicts. He is coming to Concordia’s Centre for Studies in Behavioural Neurobiology from D-Pharm Ltd., in Rehovot, Israel.

Christopher Wilds, CRC in Biological Chemistry, is the first of the seven to arrive, and you can read about his work on page 3.

Yong Zeng is the new holder of the Canada Research Chair in Design Science. He is developing methods to study the fundamental principles governing design activities. This multidisciplinary pursuit can be of crucial help to manufacturers, since about 80 per cent of the cost of new products can be traced back to decisions made in the design stage.

Hickey and Rapport are Tier 1 CRCs, which means $1.4 million in support over seven years; the others are Tier 2, which carries $500,000 over five years.

Welcome to these new members of the Concordia community, who join Canada Research Chairs Andreas Arvanitogiannis, CRC in Behavioural Neurobiology, Vaclav Chvatal, CRC in Combinatorial Optimization, and Adrian Iovita, CRC in Research in Number Theory.