The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering research in Canada. NSERC directly funds university professors and students as well as Canadian companies to perform research and training. With funding from the Government of Canada, NSERC supports the research of over 41,000 students, trainees and professors at universities and colleges in Canada with an annual budget of CA$1.1 billion in 2015. Its current director is Alejandro Adem.
Alexis Brandeker is a Swedish astronomer at the Stockholm Observatory and discoverer of minor planets.
David H. Dolphin, is a Canadian biochemist.
Margaret Elizabeth Cannon is a Canadian engineer specializing in geomatics engineering and president Emerita of the University of Calgary. From 2010 to 2018, she served as the university's eighth president and vice-chancellor, the first alumna to hold that position.
Shana O. Kelley is a scientist and Neena B. Schwartz Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. She is affiliated with Northwestern's International Institute for Nanotechnology and was previously part of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Pharmacy and Faculty of Medicine. Kelley's research includes the development of new technologies for clinical diagnostics and drug delivery. In 2023, she was chosen as president of Chicago's new Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
Calvin Barth Netterfield, known as Barth Netterfield, is a Canadian astrophysicist, and a Professor in the Department of Astronomy and the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto. He is a leading expert in the development of balloon-borne telescopes. These are astrophysical experiments that are lifted into the stratosphere by high-altitude balloons where they conduct observations that would be hindered by atmospheric interference if done on the ground. Netterfield is primarily known for his work in observational cosmology, specifically in developing instrumentation to observe the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Most notably, he was a key member of the instrument team for BOOMERANG, the experiment that made one of the first accurate determinations of the age, geometry, and mass-energy content of the universe. More recently, he has delved into the field of submillimetre astronomy and the physics of star formation, through his involvement with the BLAST telescope. Netterfield was featured prominently in BLAST!, a documentary film about the 2005 and 2006 flights of BLAST from Sweden and Antarctica.
Kevin Leyton-Brown is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2003. He was the recipient of a 2014 NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, a 2013/14 Killam Teaching Prize, and a 2013 Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize from the Canadian Association of Computer Science. Leyton-Brown co-teaches a popular game theory course on Coursera.org, along with Matthew O. Jackson and Yoav Shoham. Leyton-Brown serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, the Artificial Intelligence journal, and ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation, and was program chair for the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce in 2012. Leyton-Brown and coauthors have received the IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize, the ACM SIGKDD test-of-time award for his work on Auto-WEKA, and numerous medals in international SAT competitions (2003–12). He was elected an AAAI Fellow in 2018.
Sheelagh Carpendale is a Canadian artist and computer scientist working in the field of information visualization and human-computer interaction.
Mark Lautens, OC, is a Canadian organic chemist and is a University Professor at the University of Toronto and current Chair of the Chemistry Department.
Rachel Bean is a cosmologist, theoretical astrophysicist, professor of astronomy, and senior associate dean for math and science at the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University.
Joëlle Pineau is a Canadian computer scientist and Associate Professor at McGill University. She is the global Vice President of Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), now known as Meta AI, and is based in Montreal, Quebec. She was elected to the Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023.
Erin Johnson is a Canadian computational chemist. She holds the Herzberg–Becke Chair at Dalhousie University. She works on density functional theory and intermolecular interactions.
Gilles Fontaine was a professor of astrophysics at the Université de Montréal in Quebec, Canada.
Paul D. McNicholas is an Irish-Canadian statistician. He is a professor and University Scholar in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University. In 2015, McNicholas was awarded the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Statistics. McNicholas uses computational statistics techniques, and mixture models in particular, to gain insight into large and complex datasets. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Classification.
Julia Kathleen Baum is a Canadian marine biologist. In 2017, she was named to the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. She was awarded a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation in 2017 and an EWR Steacie Fellowship in 2018.
Edward H. Sargent is a Canadian scientist, who serves as University Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Vice-President of Research and Innovation, and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Toronto. He also is the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology. He will join the Departments of Chemistry and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University, and will be affiliated with the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern.
The Steacie Prize is a scientific prize awarded to a scientist or engineer of 40 years or younger for outstanding research in Canada. The Steacie Prize is advertised as Canada’s most prestigious early career award. It was first awarded in 1964, to Jan Van Kranendonk, and it has since been given annually. The award is named in honor of Edgar William Richard Steacie and is funded from the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fund, which was established via contributions from colleagues and friends of Steacie.
Leah Elizabeth Cowen is a Canadian mycologist and the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Toronto.
Marc Johnson is a professor of biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He is the Canada Research Chair for Urban Environmental Science, and was the first Director of the Centre for Urban Environments from 2018-2023.
Aaron R. Wheeler is a Canadian chemist who is a professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering at the University of Toronto since 2005 with cross-appointment at Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research. His academic laboratory is located at Lash Miller Chemical Laboratories and Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at the University of Toronto. In 2005, Wheeler was appointed as assistant professor and Tier II Canada Research Chair then promoted to associate professor in 2010, full professor in 2013, and in 2018 he became the Tier I Canada Research Chair in Microfluidic Bioanalysis.
