More than half of the new Canada Research Chairs being announced today by the University of Western Ontario have been recruited from top U.S. schools. Four of seven researchers will join Western from south of the border, with the remaining three positions filled by Canadian researchers.
Attract leading researchers from top universities abroad is designed to further the university's competitive advantage in engineering, health, science and social science research, Western's vice-president Ted Hewitt said in a statement.
The Canada Research Chairs program is a federal program to recruit and retain top research talent in Canada.
Robert Batterman, of Ohio State University, will seek to understand the connections between philosophy, physics and mathematics as Tier One Rotman Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Science.
Bertram Gawronski , from Northwestern University, will research a better understanding of human behaviour by examining the mutual interplay between automatic - or impulsive - and controlled determinants as Tier Two Canada Research Chair in Social Psychology.
Martin Houde, recruited from the California Institute of Technology, is studying interstellar magnetic fields as Tier Two Canada Research Chair in Star Formation.
Lior Kogut, from the University of California at Berkeley, is a Tier Two Canada Research Chair in Micro- and Nano-scale Interfacial Phenomena, conducting research into microelectromechanical systems, a growing interdisciplinary field concerned with the
design, manufacture and analysis of microdevices.
Among Canadians, Tim Doherty is researching the effects of aging, exercise, immobility and disease states in the neuromuscular system as Tier Two Canada Research Chair in Neuromuscular Function in Health, Aging and Disease.
Ravi Menon has helped develop a technique called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging used to measure changes in blood flow and oxygenation that accompany neural activity in the brain, and will research the highest magnetic filed MRI systems to enhance sensitivity of the MRI technique as Tier One Canada Research Chair in Functional and Molecular Imaging.
Charles Weijer's research program investigates research ethics to help ensure that participants of research are protected as much as possible. He is Tier One Canada Research Chair in Bioethics.