Researcher Council

The NDRIO Researcher Council is a key initiative to help advance the work and growth of the New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization (NDRIO). It is a critical component of NDRIO’s Governance Structure and By-Laws.

Multi-disciplinary candidates, with extensive experience and expertise in DRI domains including advanced research computing, research software and data management, were selected after a national recruitment process, including extensive community consultations and calls for nominations by NDRIO Primary Members and independent applications. Principles of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) were considered throughout the nomination and selection process. The Researcher Council is a work in progress, with an ongoing focus to ensure that its membership and the work of NDRIO truly reflect the diversity of Canada’s research enterprise.

Approved by the Board and announced at NDRIO’s AGM held on September 24, 2020, the 22 members of the inaugural Researcher Council are below. Researcher Council members will serve terms of up to three years with a maximum of two terms, subject to renewal after one year.

Supporting documentation related to the Researcher Council may also be found at these links:

Interim Chair Guillaume Bourque, McGill University

Dr. Guillaume Bourque, PhD joined McGill University in 2010 and is a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics and the Director of Bioinformatics at the McGill Genome Centre. He leads the Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics (C3G), a Genome Canada bioinformatics platform, and the McGill initiative in Computational Medicine (MiCM).

Karen Bakker, University of British Columbia

Dr. Karen Bakker, BASc, PhD is a Canada Research Chair and Professor at the University of British Columbia, with expertise in environmental governance, innovation and digital technologies. She is the author of more than 100 academic publications and seven books. She is also a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellow and member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She obtained her PhD from Oxford University (where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar) and her BASc from McMaster University in 1995.

Girma Bitsuamlak, Western University

Dr. Girma Bitsuamlak, BASc, MS, PhD is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Wind Engineering. His research expertise is in the area of climate-resilient and sustainable buildings and neighborhoods. Currently, his team is actively working on the modeling of (i) extreme wind effects on civil infrastructure (e.g. hurricane and tornado), and (ii) interplay between aerodynamics and other micro-climate stressors for assessing sustainable building thermal and energy performance, natural ventilation, and wind-driven-rain/snow effects.

Bruno Blais, Polytechnique Montréal

Dr. Bruno Blais, PEng, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Polytechnique Montreal. Before this, he was a Research Officer with the Automotive and Surface Transportation Portfolio of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC AST).

Susan Brown, University of Guelph

Dr. Susan Brown, PhD is Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship, Professor of English at the University of Guelph, and Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta. Her research explores intersectional feminisms and the potential of online tools and platforms to support new models of collaborative knowledge production.

Carolyn Côté-Lussier, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique

Dr. Carolyn Côté-Lussier, BA, MA, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Centre Urbanisation Culture Société of the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa. She holds a BA (Carleton University) and an MA in criminology (University of Toronto), a PhD in social research methods (London School of Economics and Political Science) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in social and preventive medicine (Université de Montréal, CHU Sainte-Justine, Research Centre of the CHUM).

Constance Crompton, University of Ottawa

Dr. Constance Crompton, BA, MA, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa and at Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities. She directs the University of Ottawa’s Labo de données en sciences humaines/Humanities Data Lab.

Carl D’Arcy, University of Saskatchewan

Dr. Carl D’Arcy, BA, MA, PhD is a Senior Researcher and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, College Medicine and the School of Public Health at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon. He is also the Academic Director of the Saskatchewan Research Data Centre (SKY-RDC), a joint University of Saskatchewan – Statistics Canada research data platform.

Rebecca Davis, University of Manitoba

Dr. Rebecca Davis, BSc, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manitoba. Dr. Davis’s expertise lies in the areas of catalysis and computational chemistry. Her experience in both experimental method development and computational small molecule design has equipped her to build an innovative, interdisciplinary, and internationally recognized research program.

Philippe Deprés, Université Laval

Dr. Philippe Després, MSc, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Optics and a member of the Cancer Research Center at Université Laval. He also is a Medical Physicist at CHU de Québec – Université Laval and a regular researcher at its affiliated Research Center. He was trained at Université Laval (MSc 2000, Physics), Université de Montréal (PhD 2005, Physics) and University of California, San Francisco (postdoc 2005-2007, Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Imaging).

Erin Dickie, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Dr. Erin W. Dickie, BSc, MSc, PhD is an Early Career Scientist in the Kimel Family Translational Imaging-Genetics Laboratory and the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She is also an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.

Benoît Dupont, Université de Montréal

Dr. Benoît Dupont, PhD is a Professor of Criminology at the Université de Montréal, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity, as well as the Research Chair in the Prevention of Cybercrime. He is one of the co-founders and Scientific Director of the Smart Cybersecurity Network (SERENE-RISC), one of Canada’s Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE).

Laura Estill, St. Francis Xavier University

Dr. Laura Estill, MA, PhD is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. Her research explores the reception history of drama by Shakespeare and his contemporaries from their initial circulation in print and manuscript to its online transmission today.

Benjamin Fung, McGill University

Dr. Benjamin Fung, PEng, PhD is a Canada Research Chair in Data Mining for Cybersecurity, a Full Professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University and a Co-curator of Cybersecurity in the World Economic Forum (WEF). His research focuses on developing novel data mining and machine learning solutions to tackle different challenges in privacy, cybersecurity, healthcare and transportation systems.

Anne Martel, Sunnybrook Research Institute

Dr. Anne Martel, BSc, PhD is a Senior Scientist at Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, a Professor in Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto and a Vector Faculty Affiliate. Her research program is focused on the development of advanced machine learning methods for medical image analysis, digital pathology and personalized medicine.

Erika Merschrod, Memorial University

Dr. Erika Merschrod, AB, PhD is a Professor of Chemistry at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), located on Mi’kmaq land, where she leads a research group that combines computational and experimental tools to develop new functional materials. Her trainees have gone on to a range of careers in academia, policy, and the private sector, with several founding their own tech companies.

Marie-Jean Meurs, Université du Québec a Montréal

Dr. Marie-Jean Meurs, PhD is a Professor of Computer Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She has a Master’s in Applied Mathematics and a Doctorate in Computer Science with specialization in natural language understanding in dialogue systems. Her main field of expertise is Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular machine learning for natural language processing.

Rebecca Pillai Riddell, York University

Dr. Rebecca Pillai Riddell, BA, MA, PhD, CPsych is currently Associate Vice-President Research at York University. Dr. Pillai Riddell is also the Director of the Opportunities to Understand Childhood Hurt Laboratory or The OUCH Lab (www.yorku.ca/ouchlab). As both a basic behavioural scientist and a clinician-scientist, Dr. Pillai Riddell leads a research program in infant and young child pain that is funded by all three federal Canadian research councils (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council).

Erik Rosolowsky, University of Alberta

Dr. Erik Rosolowsky, BA, MA, PhD is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Alberta, where he studies the connections between generations of stars in galaxies and develops new approaches for teaching physics in the university labs and classrooms. Dr. Rosolowsky and his research group develop novel computational tools to compare the data from radio and millimetre wave telescopes to the latest theoretical models in the field.

Pekka Sinervo, University of Toronto

Dr. Pekka Sinervo, BSc, PhD is an experimental particle physicist and a professor of physics at the University of Toronto since 1990. He had a leading role in the discovery of the top quark in 1995 and has subsequently measured many of its properties. He is a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, which co-discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, and he continues to search for new phenomena at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

Randall Sobie, University of Victoria

Dr. Randall Sobie is an Institute of Particle Physics Research Scientist, Professor and Director of the Subatomic Physics and Accelerator Research Centre at the University of Victoria. He is the Director of HEPNET/Canada, which coordinates the national and international research network connectivity for the Canadian subatomic physics community. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal SoftwareX.

Amol Verma, Unity Health Toronto

Dr. Amol Verma, MD, MPhil, BSc (Hon), FRCPC, is a physician, scientist and Assistant Professor in General Internal Medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital and the University of Toronto. He works to study and improve hospital care using data from electronic health records.