On August 29th, the Honourable Randy Boissonnault, Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages, on behalf of the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, and of the Honourable Mark Holland, Minister of Health, announced support for over 4,700 researchers and research projects across Canada.
Among the awards announced by the federal government were the Tri-Agency Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships. This year, the 70 recipients received a total of $9.8 million through CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC. Of the NSERC Banting fellowships, three were awarded at the University of Waterloo, two in the Department of Physics and Astronomy to Dr. Joshua Foo and Dr. Ian Roberts, and one within the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences to Dr. Saraswati Saraswati. Congratulations to all three awardees!
We are particularly proud of Dr. Saraswati’s receiving one of the two-year Banting Fellowships. Dr. Saraswati is a member of the Ecohydrology Research Group (ERG). During her Banting Fellowship, Dr. Saraswati will be investigating rewetting of Canada's degraded peatlands as a Nature-Based Solution (NBS) to help mitigate climate warming caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a part of this research, Dr. Saraswati will collect peat samples from different peatlands (e.g., rewetted, peat extracted, and undisturbed peatlands) in Canada and conduct laboratory experiments combined with isothermal calorimetry to quantitatively describe the potential degradability of peatland soil organic matter, which will then be used as input to a novel, bioenergetics-informed reaction network model of soil organic matter decomposition and the resulting GHG emissions.