Fifteen University of Waterloo researchers will receive $2 million from the provincial government to advance Ontario’s knowledge-based economy.
Mike Harris, MPP for Kitchener-Conestoga, and Amy Fee, MPP for Kitchener South-Hespeler, announced 11 Early Researcher Awards (ERA) and four Ontario Research Fund-Research Infrastructure (ORF-RI) awards today. The announcement is part of a larger investment by the Province of Ontario aimed at advancing Ontario’s competitive edge.
Two faculty members from the Department of Chemistry received funding at today's announcement:
Early Researcher Awards
Derek
Schipper
received
an
Early
Researcher
Award
for
his
project,
"Organic
Chemistry
solutions
for
intractable
problems
in
materials
and
nano-science."
The Early Researcher Awards program recognizes promising new researchers with $140,000 each to build a research team.
Additional recipients from the Faculty of Science included:
- Paul Craig (Biology): Using biological tools to predict impacts of climate change and contaminants on aquatic health
- Kazi Rajibul Islam (Physics and Astronomy): Building a trapped ion quantum simulator for studying arbitrarily connected spin models
- Chris Yakymchuk (Earth and Environmental Sciences): Radioactive heat generation in the Earth’s crust through time and space
Ontario Research Fund – Research Infrastructure (ORF-RI) Awards
The ORF-RI fund helps support infrastructure needs such as equipment and modern facilities.
Rodney Smith was awarded $130,000 in research infrastructure funding for his project, "Spectroelectrochemical analysis for heterogeneous electrocatalysts."
ORF-RI Receipients from the University of Waterloo also included:
- Grit Liebscher (German and Slavic Studies and Cognitive Science): Social interaction, Language and Culture Laboratory
- Sushanta Mitra (Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering): Infrastructure to characterize capillarity and wetting for under-liquid systems
- Bin Ma (Cheriton School of Computer Science): Software for peptide identification and quantification from large mass spectrometry data using data independent acquisition
Congratulations, Professor Schipper and Professor Smith!