This year’s annual report celebrates impact extending beyond our labs and lecture halls to touch communities, inform policy, and shape how we understand our world.
You will find in this report, the inspiring stories prepared through collaborative efforts from our Research Office and communications team. What follows is merely a glimpse of the transformative work happening across our faculty.
Our researchers are addressing the far-reaching effects of environmental change, from transformations unfolding across ecosystems to the evolving conditions that define our natural environments. In biology, Jules Blais continues three decades of environmental detective work, using lake sediments to uncover the chemical fingerprints of human activity, offering new insight into how oil spills could affect Pacific salmon habitats and how historical uranium mining has shaped the chemistry of northern lakes. In Earth and environmental sciences, Kyra St. Pierre leads a collaborative project examining how glacier loss cascades through the Atlin Lake watershed’s aquatic ecosystems in the Yukon.
Progress in the mathematical sciences is redefining the tools that guide decision-making today and the quantum innovations that will transform the future. In mathematics and statistics, Aaron Smith develops computational tools that cut through overwhelming data. Meanwhile, Hadi Salmasian and Alistair Savage have replaced complex equations with intuitive visual diagrams to understand quantum groups—a foundational work for future quantum computing advances.
Impact also extends to urgent public health needs. From the Department of Biology and the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences, Cory Harris and Adam Shuhendler launched RADAR (Rapid Access Drug Analysis and Reporting) a program that strengthens harm reduction by providing rapid drug-testing to safe injection sites in Downtown Ottawa.
