NSERC Invests in 69 High-Impact Science and Engineering Research Projects at Carleton

Fifty-six Carleton University researchers and 13 graduate students have been awarded funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for 2014 to conduct groundbreaking research projects.

The awards cover research in fields ranging from biology and neuroscience to electronics and systems and computer engineering. They include NSERC’s Discovery Grants, Discovery Accelerator Supplements, Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarships, NSERC Postgraduate Scholarships and Postdoctoral Fellowships. The funding covers Carleton projects over a span of one to five years and totals $11.7 million.

“Carleton University employs some of the world’s best researchers in science and engineering, as evidenced by their phenomenal success in this funding round,” said Kim Matheson, vice-president (Research and International). “NSERC’s support for cutting-edge research at Carleton will bolster the university’s position as a leading research institution.”

Six Carleton researchers received Discovery Accelerator Supplements worth a total of $720,000. They provide substantial and timely resources to an exclusive group of researchers whose proposals explore high-risk, novel or potentially transformative concepts. They include:

• Lenore Fahrig, Biology – How big is a landscape: Diversity and abundance of species in relation to characteristics of the landscapes in which they live.
• Thomas Sherratt, Biology – Understanding the diversity of anti-predator defence
• Jayne Yack, Biology – Linkages between behaviours and nervous systems for larval and adult insects
• Minyi Huang, Mathematics and Statistics – Looking at the effects of stochastic random variation on dynamic events
• Ronald Earle Miller, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering – Simulations of plasticity and fracture: the atomic-scale mechanisms of hydrogen embrittlement in engineering alloys
  
• John Chinneck, Systems and Computer Engineering – Large Scale Optimization: algorithms and applications

Notably, all nine full-time faculty members in the Department of Biology who applied received NSERC Discovery grants in 2014. “This is a phenomenal success that attests to the excellence of research being done in biology at Carleton,” said Myron Smith, chair of the Department of Biology.