Lassonde faculty receive NSERC Discovery Grants & Research Tools and Instruments in Fall 2021 competition

Results for the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Fall 2021 grant competitions were released in April. For the NSERC Discovery Grants (DG), the Lassonde School of Engineering received a total of 17 DG grants totalling $2.86M.

The Discovery Grants support ongoing programs of research with long-term goals rather than a single short-term project or collection of projects, recognizing the creativity and innovation at the heart of all research advances.

NSERC also posted the results of the Research Tools and Instruments (RTI) competition. Congratulations to Assistant Professor Shooka Karimpour from the Department of Civil Engineering who was one of the grant awardees.

The RTI grants foster and enhance the discovery, innovation and training capability of university researchers in the natural sciences and engineering by supporting the purchase of research equipment.

Below is a list of the successful applicants at Lassonde along with the title of their research program.

NSERC DC

Civil Engineering

• Ahmed Eldyasti, Novel approach to the production of high-value biochemicals and simultaneous removal of organic and other contaminants from waste streams using High-Rate Biomass Bioreactors
• John Gales, Fire Resilience of Hybrid Tall Timber Structures
• Magdalena Krol, Multiphase Mass and Heat Transport in Low Permeability Media
• Stavroula (Voula) Pantazopoulou, Application of Strain Hardening Cementitious Materials in Seismic Design and Retrofit of Structures

Earth & Space Science & Engineering

• Michael Daly, The Analysis of Planetary Surfaces
• Jinjun Shan, Intelligent Adaptive Autonomous Systems: Essential Technologies and Applications
• James Whiteway, Experimental Investigation of Planetary Atmospheres

Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

• Amirali Amirsoleimani, HAINEM: Hardware-Software Co-Design Solutions for Ultra-Efficient Artificial Intelligence and Neuromorphic Systems by Using Emerging Memory Technologies
• Parke Godfrey, Planning and Factorization for Graph Database Query Optimization and Evaluation
• Michael Jenkin, Interactive autonomous machines
• Yves Lesperance, Using Abstraction in Reasoning about Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
• Manos Papagelis, Deep Learning Models for Mobility Data Mining
• John Tsotsos, Towards Understanding How Active Observers Solve Visuospatial Tasks
• Yan Shvartzshnaider, Building Privacy-aware Systems using Contextual Integrity Principles

Mechanical Engineering

• Siu Ning (Sunny)Leung, Porous Polymeric Materials for Environmental Sustainability
• Nima Tabatabaei, Molecular-Specific Sensing and Imaging of Biological Samples
• Dan Zhang, Structural Synthesis and Performance Study of Generalized Parallel Manipulators

NSERC RTI

Civil Engineering

• Shooka Karimpour, Particle Image/Tracking Velocimetry (PIV/PTV) for Hydrodynamic Characterization of Microplastics

Congratulations to all the researchers and special thanks to our Research Support team at Lassonde and the College of Internal Peer Review at Lassonde for supporting and reviewing the applications.