$78,500 in total project funding awarded for promising faculty members
The Department of Geography and Environmental Management has gotten off to a great start in 2014, with the announcement that two young researchers have been offered financial support for their internationally acclaimed work.
The Dr. John R. Evans Fund, awarded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), is designed to help universities attract and retain the very best of today and tomorrow’s researchers at a time of intense international competition.
The fund offers universities the opportunity to acquire infrastructure for their leading research faculty to undertake cutting-edge research and create competitive packages of research support in the form of infrastructure. The fund also covers a portion of the operating and maintenance costs from the CFI, coupled with direct research costs from partner organizations.
Funding recipients and their projects:
Project: Geospatial Mobility Lab: a testbed for merging geographic information and mobile technology.
Funding amount: $28,500
Project: Infrastructure for Modeling Human-Environment Interactions in Agricultural Systems.
Funding amount: $50,000
Peter Johnson, who joined the Faculty of Environment’s department of Geography and Environmental Management in 2012, expects the funding to have a tremendous impact on his research.
"CFI support of the Geospatial Mobility Lab will enable me to become an international leader on the geospatial aspects and implications of the shift towards mobile vs. desktop computing,” he says. “CFI infrastructure will be used to create a first of its kind testbed to evaluate geospatial aspects of mobile technology. No comparable set of equipment exists at any university in Canada, making this infrastructure a significant increase in Canadian research capacity in the area of mobile devices and geospatial technology."