Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Eight years ago, to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary, the Government of Canada invested $117 million to launch a new initiative aimed at enhancing Canada’s reputation as a global centre for science, research and innovation excellence. 

The Canada 150 (C150) Research Chairs program set out to attract top-tier internationally-based scholars and researchers to Canada – with two international researchers joining the University of Waterloo. 

As their C150 terms come to an end, both Dr. Anita Layton and Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn, who will continue as professors at Waterloo, look back at their terms fondly and ahead to the future. 

As C150 Chair in Intelligent Robotics, Dautenhahn says the Chair was a tremendous opportunity to open the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory (SIRRL) and relocate her family to Canada following her previous role in the United Kingdom. 

“This has worked out really well, and Waterloo is a great place. Collaboration across the University and with the faculties is encouraged, which is needed as my work is very interdisciplinary,” says Dautenhahn, who is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “I couldn’t have done these projects without Waterloo. It’s a place with a lot of opportunities.” 

Since arriving at Waterloo, she has advanced and furthered her research in therapeutic and educational usage of social and intelligent robots. The robots have demonstrated the benefits and support that can be provided to children with speech and language challenges, along with helping children to learn about bullying and empathy.  

Additionally, intelligent robots offer a tremendous opportunity to teach people without judgement, says Dautenhahn, making them highly suited for the role of a public speaking coach or a mental wellbeing coach, allowing students to practice skills and techniques. 

“I really believe that there are many applications where robots can be beneficial, not replacing people, but taking advantage of the specific characteristics of robots,” she says. 

For Layton, the C150 Chair in Mathematical Biology and Medicine, the different funding landscape in Canada meant more research prospects. 

“With my research funding, I was able to have a large group of students, branch out, collaborate, get more support — and do the things I found exciting,” Layton says. “I learned a lot about chronic disease and drug simulation — and was able to take my knowledge to the public through the media.” 

She is a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics, cross-appointed to Computer Science, Pharmacy and Biology, and this interdisciplinary lens is central to her research. 

Her research team uses computational modelling tools to better understand health and disease, in an approach she describes as using mathematics as a microscope. Through the use of computer simulations and mathematical analysis, her research has revealed insights into the progression and treatment responses of chronic diseases, and how sex hormones may explain individual differences. One of her recent studies found adding more potassium-rich foods to a diet may have a greater impact on blood pressure than reducing or eliminating sodium. This work gained significant media attention for promoting a simple change that can make a difference to many people. 

As her seven-year term as a C150 Chair comes to an end, she has been named a University Professor at Waterloo. 

Her plans include working with collaborators and the community, supporting the advancement of faculty, guiding postdoctoral fellows in knowledge translation, and training students to become independent thinkers who initiate research direction and communicate research. 

“I want to do more to elevate others,” Layton says. 

Maple Leaf Collection now available at W Store

A message from Print + Retail Solutions.

It’s not just a maple leaf — it’s a tribute to life at the University of Waterloo. Look closer, and you’ll see it’s made up of tiny icons and symbols that represent everything from late-night study grinds to goose sightings and all the unforgettable moments in between.

Each element is a nod to campus life in Canada, and together they form a design that celebrates the bigger picture — the shared experiences, the challenges, the triumphs, and the community that make up the Warrior journey and Canadian spirit.

Designed proudly in Canada and uniquely for UWaterloo, the Maple Leaf Collection is for every Warrior – whether student, alum or anyone who’s ever called this campus home.  

Now available at W Store. Come find your piece of the puzzle. Shop the collection online at wstore.ca.

You're invited to the Spring 2025 Joint University of Waterloo–St. Jerome’s University Legal Studies Seminar

On Thursday, June 26 at 1:00 p.m., Dr. Philip Kaisary will be speaking on "'The Lost Unity of Social Life': Law and Literature in the World-System" online via Zoom.

About the talk

When it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature cast itself as a “movement.”  However, the radicalness and political praxis implicit in the rhetoric of a “movement” promised more than the field could deliver.  The field’s eschewal of historicized and materialist hermeneutic methods resulted in a field ill-equipped to respond to the conundrum of the coexistence of bourgeois democratic legal norms with the unevenness, inequality, terror, and violence of the modern capitalist world-system.  This context provides this paper with its point of departure which can be conceived of as a thought experiment: What if Fredric Jameson’s landmark text, The Political Unconscious, first published in 1981, not James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, were Law and Literature’s foundational text?  Considering Jameson’s The Political Unconscious as a text that offers a compelling but as yet untaken path for Law and Literature scholarship, this paper begins the theoretical work of developing a materialist and worldly approach to Law and Literature.  Following Fredric Jameson, my aim is to “restore, at least methodologically, the lost unity of social life,” to demonstrate that such “widely distant elements of the social totality” as law and literature “are ultimately part of the same global historical process.”   

About the speaker

Dr. Philip Kaisary is the 2023–25 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor in Cultural Mediations and an Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.  He is the author of From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (SUNY Press, 2024) and The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (University of Virginia Press, 2014).  Effective July 1, 2025, he will be Professor of Law and Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University.  He is currently at work on a new book project titled, Worlding Law and Literature: A Materialist Critique and Reconstruction, which is forthcoming with Palgrave in their New Comparisons in World Literature series.

About the seminar series

The Joint Legal Studies Seminar Series features biannual seminars showcasing a range of legal studies scholarship.  The series is hosted by the Departments of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo and St. Jerome’s University.  

Register for the talk.

For more information please contact Drs. Honor Brabazon, Allison Chenier, and Andrea Quinlan with any questions.  

Visiting researcher to give talk on the social aspects of energy use

On Friday, June 27, Dr. Mahsa Bagheri, from the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI in Karlsruhe, Germany, will be speaking on Shaping future housing policies: Behavioural trends and sustainability insights for a “sufficient” built environment. Dr. Bagheri's research interests focus on the social aspects of energy use.

This event is being held within the context of a binational relationship between Canadian (Waterloo Region) and German (Freiburg-Karlsruhe) researchers on sustainable energy transitions, individuals and communities (https://balsillieschool.ca/canada-germany-virtual-workshop-sustainable-energy-transitions-individuals-and-communities/).

The event takes place from 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. in EV1-35. All are welcome to attend. For more information, please feel free to contact Professor Ian Rowlands, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at irowlands@uwaterloo.ca. 

Additional details can be found on the School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability website.