On September 30, 2008, the Canada Research Chairs Program announced the appointment of 123 new CRCs, including McGill University researcher Ross Andersen as the new Canada Research Chair in Physical Activity and Health. Andersen joins McGill’s two other new CRCs announced on June 10: Delphine Collin-Vézina (child welfare) and Samer Faraj (technology, management and healthcare). In addition to the three new chairs, 16 McGill CRCs were renewed:
• Gary J. Bennett, pain control
• Maxime Bouchard, kidney disease
• Eric Fombonne, child and adolescent psychiatry
• Alyson Fournier, regenerative neuroscience
• Imed Gallouzi, cellular information systems
• Yosef Grodzinsky, neurolinguistics
• Reghan J. Hill, colloids for advanced materials
• Hans C.E. Larsson, vertebrate paleontology
• Jeffrey S. Mogil, the genetics of pain
• Keith Murai, molecular control of synaptic structure
• Arnim Pause, molecular oncology
• Salman T. Qureshi, host resistance to fungal pathogens
• Bruce A. Reed, graph theory
• Peter Swain, systems biology
• David Y. Thomas, molecular genetics
• Debra A. Titone, cognitive neuroscience of language and memory
The 19 chairs have a value of $15.8 million. The Canada Foundation for Innovation is also investing $582,686 to fund research infrastructure essential to the work done by Andersen, Collin-Vézina, Fournier, Gallouzi and Hill. McGill is now home to 137 CRCs. The Government of Canada created the CRC program in 2000 to establish 2,000 research professorships across the country by 2008, with the aim of making Canada one of the world’s top five countries for research and development. McGill has since used its CRCs to recruit exceptional international researchers and to repatriate outstanding Canadian and Quebec researchers.