The Research Committee | Research and innovation

About

The Research Committee members are made up of all levels and areas of expertise, without distinction of their membership to other institutes or centres. More specifically, its members:

Evaluate the research merit of proposals submitted for consideration to the institute. This includes evaluation of the unifying, interdisciplinary nature of the proposal and the relevance of the research lines of inquiry and projects to the uOttawa strategic plan and the mission and vision of the Institute. It also includes evaluation of proposals that are destined to external partnership contracts and agreement;
Provide advice to the Steering Committee with regards to research direction, outcomes and dissemination;
Transmit research committee’s classification of proposals with constructive comments to the Steering Committee;
Report to the Steering Committee.

Members of the Research Committee

Brian Ray

Faculty of Arts, Research Committee Lead

Brian Ray is currently the Vice-Dean Research in the Faculty of Arts. A member of the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, his research generally revolves around the ways in which people organize their everyday lives in multi-ethnic cities. Brian’s research interests include discrimination, racism, and anti-racism in Canada, evolving linguistic landscapes in Ottawa-Gatineau, housing affordability and homeownership among refugees and immigrants, gender inequality, social networks, and the geographic dimensions of employment in large metropolitan areas. Some of Brian’s recently funded research projects include the Toronto Second Generation Project (with York University) and Ottawa-based projects in association with the Migration and Resilience in Urban Canada/Immigration through a SSHRC-funded grant.

Vincent Tabart-Cossa

Faculty of Sciences

Dr. Tabard-Cossa's research program is in the area of nanoscale biophysics. His current research is dedicated to the development of novel techniques and methods to manipulate and characterize single-molecules using nanopore devices, to unravel the basic physics governing the behaviour of biological molecules and polymers in nanoconfined geometries, and ultimately to translate these discoveries into new tools for the Life sciences, medical diagnostics, or next-generation digital data storage.

Michelle Giroux

Faculty of Law

Michelle Giroux, LL.L. (Ottawa), M.A. Medical Law and Ethics (London, UK) is Full Professor at the Faculty of Law, Civil Law Section, at uOttawa and Member of the Québec Bar. She is also a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory on the Rights of the Child, of the Centre for Health Law, Policy & Ethics and of the LIFE Institute, at uOttawa. She is a specialist in family and persons law, medical law, bioethics, multidisciplinary approach and comparative law methods. She is interested in the issue of end of life care, including medical aid in dying. In 2012, Professor Giroux was on the panel of legal experts appointed by the government of Québec to implement the report of the Select Committee on Dying with Dignity. In September 2015, the Law Commission of Ontario invited her to sit as a member of the Advisory Group for the Project on Improving the Last Stages of Life. She speaks at conferences and publishes in Canada and abroad, namely in the field of healthcare at the end of life. As the President of the Québec Society of Comparative Law, in 2014, she organized a conference on the Québec law reform on end of life care at McGill University, spoke in a symposium on advance car planning at the Age Well in the 21st century—International Congress of Francophone Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics. She is actually working on a comparative research study on advance medical directives and end of life care.

Victor Emerson

Faculty of Social Sciences

Dr. Victor Emerson graduated from McGill University in 1971 with a major in Psychology and a minor in Chemistry. He completed his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at Queen’s University in 1976, followed by a double post-doctoral fellowship in Visual Neurophysiology and Animal Behavior at Cambridge University from 1977 to 1979. Upon returning to Canada, he taught at Concordia University and later at Queen’s University. In 1983, he joined the User Needs Assessment group at Bell-Northern Research, where he conducted user-centered research and earned two patents in wireless communications. After leaving Bell-Northern Research in 1993, he founded and led Acuity Research Group Inc., a user-centered research consultancy that worked with clients in Canada, the US, and Europe until its closure in 2023. From 1993 to 2008, Dr. Emerson volunteered on a hospital Research Ethics Board. Between 2002 and 2012, he taught part-time in the School of Business at Queen’s University, and since 2007, he has been teaching part-time in the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa. An avid soccer player until the age of 58, he now stays fit by cycling and swimming after sustaining injuries to his ankles and knees.

Juana M. Liceras

Faculty of Arts

Juana M. Liceras is a Distinguished University Professor and a professor of Hispanic and General Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and the Department of Linguistics of the University of Ottawa as well as the director of the Language Acquisition Research Laboratory of the Faculty of Arts of this university. She is the Director of the Nebrija-Santander Global Chair in Spanish as a Migrant and Refugee Language and a Senior Researcher in the Applied Languages Program of the Universidad Nebrija (Madrid, Spain). She is also editor-in-chief of Languages and of the Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics (RESLA/SJAL), a member of the editorial board of several periodicals, among them Second Language Research, Journal of Spanish Language Teaching and Lengua y Migración, as well as a member of the editorial board of the John Benjamins’ book series Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory and Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. Her research interests and publications centre around the relationship between linguistic theory and language acquisition, bilingualism in typically and non-typically developing populations, psycholinguistics, comparative grammar and language contact.

Linda Garcia

Faculty of Health Sciences

Linda Garcia is a Professor in the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences and Founding Director of the LIFE Research Institute (LRI). Her personal research interests focus on the impact of physical, social, technological and clinical environments on the quality of life of individuals with neurological disorders, especially dementia. She is interested in developing interventions that include approaches based on human interactions, especially in long-term care living environments. Prior to joining the University of Ottawa in 1993, she worked for over 10 years in a large teaching hospital as a Speech-Language Pathologist. After completing her PhD with Dr. Yves Joanette, and helping found the Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Program, she created the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences and became its first Director in 2010, prior to becoming Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences from 2014 to 2017.