Researchers

Update for employees and graduate students

Earlier this week, the requirement to wear a face covering in common indoor spaces on campus took effect. 

If you are approved to return to campus, you must wear a face covering in common areas of university buildings. 

After listening to feedback from the campus community and discussing further with medical consultants, we have made some changes to our guidance on face coverings.

Update for faculty and researchers

We have approved some researchers to proceed with their work on-campus as part of our phased return to campus plan. To ensure that we welcome you back to campus safely, we have increased sanitization of high touch surface areas and are offering additional supplies to help you stay healthy.

In accordance to Public Health guidance, we recommend that you continue to practice physical distancing, but have cloth face masks available for researchers to use on-campus where maintaining a physical distance of two meters is challenging.

Update for faculty

The Central Planning Group of the Integrated Co-coordination and Planning Committee, including the President, Vice-Presidents and Deans, has been active in developing a phased plan for restarting research on campus, with support from the Research Restart Working Group. 

Last week, the Province opened the door for institutions to begin to implement phased returns to on-campus research activity by announcing that professional services related to conducting research and experimental development may begin to resume activity. This announcement has moved us into the first Phase of our planned return and as such, we will be expanding the criteria for permission to access to campus to conduct research activities.  

Update for employees

In October last year, we finalized our new Strategic Plan. Developed after a year of intense collaboration across the University of Waterloo, none of us could have predicted precisely how relevant that plan would be today.

We said it was a plan for an era of rapid change. Who could have known how rapid and how significant that change would be? 

Update for researchers

On March 20, we made the difficult decision to suspend all non-critical lab operations on campus in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We know that many of you have important research, contracts and/or grants in collaboration with industry partners that may have been interrupted.