McMaster researchers awarded $19.4M in SSHRC and NSERC grants

McMaster researchers have been awarded for their excellence and impact through investments from the federal government.

Read the full story here and find the full list of recipients below.

New Frontiers in Research Fund – Exploration

Three researchers were awarded a total of $750,000 through the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) Exploration Competition.

• Shahram Shirani, Faculty of Engineering: Enhancing success rate of fertility treatment through AI driven personalization
• Lesley MacNeil, Faculty of Health Sciences: Using computer vision to identify gene function and drug action
• Dawn Martin-Hill: Faculty of Social Sciences: Interfacing Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science through Community-Centred Projects

SSHRC Insight Grants

Sixteen McMaster researchers were awarded a total of over $1.9 million in Insight Grants.

• Marshall Beier, Faculty of Social Sciences: Childhood and public memory: place, presence, and everyday pedagogies of remembrance
• Lawrence Grierson, Faculty of Health Sciences: Poisoning the Pre-Matriculation Well: Effects of Admissions Policies on Aspiring Professional Student Wellbeing
• Jeffrey Racine, Faculty of Social Sciences: A Foundational Framework For Functional Data Analysis
• Nikolaos Yiannakoulias, Faculty of Science: Environmental echo-chambers: using a game experiment to understand the spread and impact of misinformation on social media
• Ellen Badone, Faculty of Social Sciences: Ethnographic Perspectives on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada
• Lisa Kaida, Faculty of Social Sciences: Firm segregation of women, racialized people, and immigrants: New evidence from Canada
• Ivona Kucerova, Faculty of Humanities: Nominal integration in associative, comitative and accompaniment structures: A comparative syntax study
• Alfred Liu, DeGroote School of Business: Topics and Language in U.S. and Canadian Corporate Climate Risk Disclosures
• Jordan Mansell, Faculty of Social Sciences: Stress and Polarization: The Effects of Political Competition on Personal and Democratic Health
• Chris Muris, Faculty of Social Sciences: New Methods for Linear and Nonlinear Panel Data Models with Feedback Effects
• Sudipto Sarkar, DeGroote School of Business: Climate Beliefs and Attitudes, Economic Distress, and Pollution
• Yana Stainova, Faculty of Social Sciences: Communities of Joy: Art Practices and Creative Survival from Veracruz to East Los Angeles
• Robert Wilton, Faculty of Science: Contesting medical inadmissibility: immigration, disability and the politics of non-citizenship
• Seungjin Han, Faculty of Social Sciences: A Theory of Contracting with Limited Commitment and its Applications
• Zachary Mahone, Faculty of Social Sciences: The Impact of Entrepreneurial Dynamics on Firm Entry, Growth, and Exit
• Inder Marwah, Faculty of Social Sciences: Gandhi’s Politics of Service

SSHRC Insight Development Grants

Sixteen researchers were awarded a total of $975,000 in Insight Development Grants.

• Kai Lesage, DeGroote School of Business: Provenance and patriotism: exploring product origin across multichannel contexts
• Vanessa Tomas, Faculty of Health Sciences: Advancing understandings of ‘culturally’ adapting evidence-based frameworks: the what, how, and why
• Manish Verma, DeGroote School of Business: An incentive mechanism to reducing avoidable food waste in Canada
• Yair Berson, DeGroote School of Business: The Effects of Exposure to Rudeness on Cognitive Functioning and Task Outcomes: A Neuroscience Perspective
• Phillipa Chong, Faculty of Social Sciences: The stories we tell: A cross-platform analysis of ADHD narratives
• Loa Gordon, Faculty of Social Sciences: Understanding Collective Care as Mental Health Self-Care
• Benson Honig, DeGroote School of Business: Selling beauty, building power: Women entrepreneurs in the emerging markets of medical aesthetics
• Ala Mokhtar, DeGroote School of Business: The effect of subjectivity in performance evaluation, superior-subordinate trust, and observability of evaluation on employee effort and overwork
• Berk Gorgulu, DeGroote School of Business: Designing Fair Allocation Mechanisms for Food Rescue and Allocation
• Jarita Greyeyes, Faculty of Social Sciences: Understanding Indigenization: Perspectives from Indigenous Academic Leaders
• Lingling Shi, DeGroote School of Business: Economic and Environmental Impacts of Repurposing and Recycling Used Electric Vehicle Batteries in a Circular Economy Framework
• Afroza Sultana, Faculty of Health Sciences: Exploring the political ecology of dementia and fighting dementia stigma with South Asian communities in Canada
• Anthea Christoforou, Faculty of Science: Characterizing supplemented foods in Canada and consumer engagement with their labelling
• Cansu Ekmekcioglu, DeGroote School of Business: Understanding and improving accountable use of generative artificial intelligence in human services: Insights from the non-profit immigrant settlement organizations in Ontario
• Zhifan Luo, Faculty of Social Sciences: The transformation of the digital public sphere: discourses of censorship on Twitter from 2006 to 2022
• Myriam Nafte, Faculty of Social Sciences: Evolving practices in anatomy education, prosectorship, and the afterlife of human remains: A cross-cultural study

SSHRC Partnership Development Grants

Three researchers were awarded a total of $598,000 in Partnership Development Grants.

• Catherine Connelly, DeGroote School of Business: The show must go on: Supporting Canadian professional musicians
• Andrew Roddick, Faculty of Social Sciences: Making Pots, Tracing Residues: Towards a More Collaborative Indigenous and Settler Archaeology in Ganyadaí:yo (Ontario)
• Soyeon Kim, Faculty of Health Sciences: Co-Developing Screen Time Management Tools (STMT) for Rural Youth

NSERC Discovery Grants and Subatomic Physics Grants

58 researchers were awarded Discovery Grants and one researcher received a Subatomic Physics Discovery Grant, for a total investment of over $14.1 million.

• Berk Gorgulu, DeGroote School of Business: Control of Stochastic Queueing Networks with Endogenous Effects
• Shane Saunderson, DeGroote School of Business: Neurophysiological Feedback for Understanding and Designing Humanlike Technologies
• Giancarlo Dalle Ave, Faculty of Engineering: A three-pronged approach to increasing variable renewable energy uptake in Canada
• Kamil Khan, Faculty of Engineering: Developing new approaches for global dynamic process optimization
• David Latulippe, Faculty of Engineering: Developing membrane technologies for integrated continuous biomanufacturing
• Boyang Zhang, Faculty of Engineering: Seeing is believing: Integrating light-sheet microscopy with organ-on-a-chip systems for high-content discovery
• Younggy Kim, Faculty of Engineering: Carbon recovery, wastewater treatment and algal bloom monitoring using (bio)electrochemistry and artificial intelligence
• Moataz Mohamed, Faculty of Engineering: Electric Bus Transit Resilience Framework: Integrating System Configuration, Operational Management, and Decision Support
• Saiedeh Razavi, Faculty of Engineering: SynchroDelivery: Federated Proactive Planning for Cooperative Project Delivery in Construction
• Tingting Xu, Faculty of Engineering: Advancing Geological Carbon Storage: From Multiphysical Modeling to Field Optimization
• Christian Brodbeck, Faculty of Engineering: Neuro-Computational Foundation of Human Speech Recognition
• Jacques Carette, Faculty of Engineering: Program your Declarations
• Ryszard Janicki, Faculty of Engineering: Concurrency and Approximate Reasoning
• Alan Wassyng, Faculty of Engineering: Assuring Safe and Secure Remote Operation of Software Intensive Safety-Critical Systems
• Charles Welch, Faculty of Engineering: Perspectivist Language Understanding with Pluralist Language Models
• Rong Zheng, Faculty of Engineering: Toward Foundation Models for Wireless Human-Centered Sensing
• Jennifer Bauman, Faculty of Engineering: A New Path Forward to Accelerate the Widespread Transition to Sustainable Transportation
• Sorina Dumitrescu, Faculty of Engineering: Task-Oriented Scalar Quantization
• Qiyin Fang, Faculty of Engineering: Multiplexed multi-dimensional imaging of dynamic molecular biological processes
• Ray LaPierre, Faculty of Engineering: Hyper-dimensional metamaterials for photonic, energy, and quantum applications
• Peter Mascher, Faculty of Engineering: Design, Fabrication and Characterization of Functional Thin Film Structures for Photonics Applications
• David Novog, Faculty of Engineering: Advanced Nuclear Imaging For High Reliability and Non-Destructive Testing
• Leyla Soleymani, Faculty of Engineering: Development of fully-integrated wearable electrochemical biosensors for real-time health monitoring
• Michael Welland, Faculty of Engineering: Holistic modelling of nuclear and energy materials to support the future of clean energy in Canada
• Oleg Rubel, Faculty of Engineering: Computational discovery and characterization of topological quantum materials based on predictive physical modelling
• Ryan Ahmed, Faculty of Engineering: Advancing Battery Systems for Extended First and Second Life Applications
• Duncan Cree, Faculty of Engineering: Preparation and characterization of fully biodegradable polyhydroxybutyrate/eggshell biocomposites for automotive applications
• Zahra Keshavarz Motamed, Faculty of Engineering: Development of in-vitro subject-specific diagnostic and interventional predictive frameworks for cardiovascular disease
• Philip Koshy, Faculty of Engineering: Advancing electrical discharge machining in jet engine manufacture
• Sara Andres, Faculty of Health Sciences: Understanding mechanisms of bacterial genomic integrity
• Eric Brown, Faculty of Health Sciences: Understanding the genetic and regulatory networks of Escherichia coli
• Kathleen Houlahan, Faculty of Health Sciences: Accurate and unbiased somatic mutation detection leveraging the human pangenome reference
• John Whitney, Faculty of Health Sciences: Characterization of a novel interbacterial antagonism pathway in plant-associated Gram-positive bacteria
• Colin Kretz, Faculty of Health Sciences: Deep protease profiling as an advanced tool to characterize protease specificity
• Sarah Svenningsen, Faculty of Health Sciences: Normal and Irregular Breathing Patterns During Advanced Quantitative Free-Breathing 1H MRI: Repeatability, Robustness, and Reconstruction
• Thomas Hawke, Faculty of Health Sciences: Cell discovery and validation for use in the cultivated meat industry
• Waliul Khan, Faculty of Health Sciences: Understanding the impact of enteric parasite on host autophagy in the context of epithelial cell function and immune response
• Irena Rebalka, Faculty of Health Sciences: Defining the relationship between mitochondrial homeostasis and amino acid flux in skeletal muscle
• Geoffrey Golding, Faculty of Science: Discovering and understanding patterns in evolution
• Grant McClelland, Faculty of Science: Evolution and plasticity of fuel metabolism at high altitude
• Adam Hitchcock, Faculty of Science: X-ray SpectroMicroscopy of biological magnetism and electro-catalysts for CO2 conversion
• James Inkster, Faculty of Science: 2-Substituted Pyridinium and Quinolinium Salts as Non-lipophilic, Thiol-Selective Modifiers of Peptide-based Molecular Imaging Agents and Targeted Radio-therapeutics
• Jose Moran-Mirabal, Faculty of Science: Complex 3D printed scaffolds as tissue biomimetic microenvironments
• Yurij Mozharivskyj, Faculty of Science: Functional Solid-State Materials: from Design of Experiment and Machine Learning to Synthesis and Applications
• Darren Scott, Faculty of Science: Advancing Shared Micromobility Research: Methods, Tools, and Insights for Achieving a “Greener” and More Equitable Urban Future
• Bradd Hart, Faculty of Science: Interactions between model theory and quantum physics
• Hari Kunduri, Faculty of Science: New Geometric inequalities for black hole solutions of the Einstein equations
• Patrick Speissegger, Faculty of Science: O-minimal structures, transseries and dynamical systems
• Alan Chen, Faculty of Science: Nuclear Astrophysics at McMaster with Stable and Radioactive Ion Beams
• Cecile Fradin, Faculty of Science: Time-resolved fluorescence measurements of protein concentration, diffusion and clustering for quantitative modeling of intracellular processes
• Bruce Gaulin, Faculty of Science: Exotic Ground States in New Quantum Materials
• William Harris, Faculty of Science: Galaxy Evolution Witnessed Through the Oldest Stellar Systems
• Wenjie Ji, Faculty of Science: Highly Entangled Quantum Matters and Topological Holography
• Duncan O’Dell, Faculty of Science: Theory of singularities in quantum waves
• Ralph Pudritz, Faculty of Science: Filamentary Hierarchies and the Origin of Stars and Their Biogenic Planets
• Alison Sills, Faculty of Science: Star Cluster Formation from High Redshift to the Solar Neighbourhood
• Christine Wilson, Faculty of Science: Under pressure: the role of cluster environment in galaxy evolution
• Reuven Dukas, Faculty of Science: Cognitive ecology of social behaviour and response to light
• Paul Faure, Faculty of Science: Bioacoustics, hearing, and the integrative physiology of bats

NSERC Research Tools and Instruments

Five researchers were awarded a total of $729,000 through NSERC’s Research Tools and Instruments (RTI) grants program.

• Charles-François de Lannoy, Faculty of Engineering: Liquid-Liquid Porometer: General purpose pore measurement device critical in energy materials, biomaterials, porous polymer materials, concrete, and more
• Telex Magloire Ngatched Nkouatchah, Faculty of Engineering: Testbed for Visible Light Communications Systems
• Graham Scott, Faculty of Science: Mito-POWER – an integrated platform for studying mitochondrial physiology of wildlife in extreme regions
• Jose Moran-Mirabal, Faculty of Science: Advanced Photopolymerization 3D Bioprinters to Produce Tissue Mimetics
• Greg Slater, Faculty of Science: Purchase of used thermos Finnigan 253 isotope ratio mass spectrometer for analysis of organic and microbial biogeochemistry of environmental samples