Leadership Team
Directors
Meredith Rocchi (she/her)
Principal Investigator and Co-Founder
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa
Meredith Rocchi is an award-winning quantitative methods professor with research expertise in effective interpersonal communication, measurement validation, and data literacy education. She is passionate about data and statistics and sharing this passion with her students. She is committed to teaching excellence through reducing the stigma surrounding methods courses, making quantitative methods education more accessible, and helping alleviate students’ anxiety towards math and numbers. As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, Meredith is overseeing a large multi-year SSHRC-Funded project (The Data Literacy Project) aimed at improving quantitative methods courses for students in the humanities and social sciences.
Simon Beaudry (he/him)
Co-Founder and Training Director
Manager, Research & Innovation, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ottawa
Simon Beaudry completed an undergraduate degree (B.Sc.) in science and a Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Ottawa. During his graduate studies, he developed a passion for the creation of research tools and the development of shared research resources. Simon worked in developing the School of Psychology’s first research participant pool in 2005, a human participant recruitment tool that started very small but now spans multiple departments and manages close to 10,000 research participants per year, greatly impacting research productivity on campus.
Towards the end of his Ph.D., Simon started working with a team to conceptualize a shared interdisciplinary space dedicated to research on human behaviour. Instead of heading toward a traditional tenure-track professor position, Simon focused on the creation and management of that space, which would eventually become the INSPIRE Lab, serving over 150 researchers on campus and one of the only core facilities in Canada specialized in research on human behaviour. Simon has been leading all operational, financial, human, and scientific aspects of this successful core facility since its conception. In addition to his role at INSPIRE, Simon also teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in research methods, quantitative methods, and social psychology. He was the recipient of an Excellence in Teaching award from the Faculty of Social Sciences in 2014. Simon is also active in research as co-director of the uOttawa Data Literacy Laboratory, publishing in the fields of human motivation, data literacy and the scholarship of teaching and learning. In 2021, he was awarded a Chair in University Teaching from the University of Ottawa to conduct research in academic resilience. Finally, Simon is the co-chair of the uOttawa Research Data Management Advisory Group, responsible for the creation of our institutional strategy on research data management.
Christopher Gravel (he/him)
Co-Founder and Research Director
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa
Christopher Gravel obtained his Ph.D. (2015) and M.Sc. (2009) in Probability and Statistics from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Carleton University. He then completed a post-doctoral fellowship in biostatistics in 2017 at the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University. Prior to joining the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa as an assistant professor in 2021, Christopher was a senior epidemiologist and biostatistician at Health Canada where he focused on the use of real-world evidence to support regulatory decision-making. Christopher’s research program focuses on the development and improvement of statistical methods for pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacovigilance. He has interests in methods for causal inference, measurement error models, and the analysis of real-world observational studies with applications using large administrative healthcare databases. Christopher has explored validation sampling approaches to correct for outcome misclassification in binary and time-to-event data and is currently focused on the development of simultaneous systematic bias correction methods. He is also interested in disproportionality analysis for signal detection in spontaneous reporting data and other drug and vaccine safety surveillance methodologies.
Felicity Tayler (she/her)
Co-Founder and Outreach Director
Librarian, University of Ottawa
Felicity Tayler’s research interests include metadata modeling, data visualization and the print culture of literary and poetic community. Felicity holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University (2016); prior to joining the University of Ottawa as the Research Data Management Librarian, Felicity was a Faculty of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto (Jan. 2017-Sept. 2018). She is currently the PI on an SSHRC RDM Capacity Building Initiative grant, developing a Data Primer for RDM in Digital Humanities.
Felicity is also a co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership, which foregrounds a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study and digital development, with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond. Felicity is an active member of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada National Training Expert Group.
Research Personnel
François Thibeault (he/him)
Doctoral Candidate, Department of Communication, University of Ottawa (2027)
Michelle Bartleman (she/her)
Doctoral Candidate, Department of Communication, University of Ottawa (2026)