The Connaught Fund supports University of Toronto researchers through its ten programs that provide a broad scope of funding opportunities across the disciplines.
Safia AididDepartment of HistoryConnaught New Researcher Award 2022-2023 Professor Aidid’s research addresses anticolonial nationalism, territorial imaginations, borders and state formation in the Horn of Africa, with a particular focus on modern Somalia and Ethiopia. Her current book manuscript, titled Pan-Somali Dreams: Ethiopia, Greater Somalia, and the Somali Nationalist Imagination, traces the history of Pan-Somali nationalism and its desire for a state form, a Greater Somalia, commensurate to the geography of Somali identity. |
Kamran BehdinanDepartment of Mechanical & Industrial EngineeringConnaught Global Challenge Award 2021-2022 Professor Behdinan’s research includes the design and development of light-weight structures for aerospace, automotive and nuclear applications, the multidisciplinary design optimization of aerospace and automotive systems and the multi-scale simulation of nano-structured materials and composites at elevated temperature. He is the founding director and principal investigator of the University of Toronto Institute for Multidisciplinary Design and Innovation, an industry-centered project-based learning institute launched in partnership with aerospace and automotive companies. |
Leo ChouInstitute of Biomedical EngineeringConnaught New Researcher Award 2020-2021 Professor Chou’s research aims to develop a novel methodology of formulating sub-unit vaccines, which contains multiple components including protein fragments of a pathogen called antigens and signaling molecules called adjuvants. This is emerging as a promising and safer alternative to traditional vaccines based on live pathogens. His other research interests include DNA nanotechnology, molecular engineering and synthetic biology. The Chou Lab is developing artificial, self-assembling molecular devices for biomedical applications for biomarker discovery, diagnostics and therapeutics. |
Prentiss DantzlerDepartment of SociologyConnaught New Researcher Award 2022-2023 Professor Dantzler’s research focuses on urban poverty, neighbourhood change, race and ethnic relations, housing policy and community development. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he explores how and why neighbourhoods change and how policymakers and communities create and react to those changes. His current research explores the relationship between housing subsidies and neighbourhood change across the Greater Toronto Area, as well as nonprofits and diverging views of gentrification. |
Devon HealeyOntario Institute for Studies in EducationConnaught New Researcher Award 2022-2023 Professor Healey’s research is grounded in her experience as a blind woman. This is guided by a desire to show how blindness specifically, and disability more broadly, can be understood as offering an alternate form of perception and is thus, a valuable and creative way of experiencing and knowing the world. She is the author of Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative, and is an award-winning actor and the co-founder of Peripheral Theatre. |
Renée HložekDavid A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & AstrophysicsMcLean Award 2021 Professor Hložek’s research explores a variety of problems in theoretical and observational cosmology, focusing on understanding what the Universe is made of, its structure and how it is changing with time. Her work uses data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the upcoming Simons Observatory and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in the Chilean desert, which will scan the sky to deliver data about cosmic transients or observed phenomena in the sky. She works on supernova science to answer questions about dark energy. |
Qian LinDepartment of Cell & Systems BiologyConnaught New Researcher Award 2022-2023 Professor Lin’s research explores the link between the abstract mind and biological substrates, the surface on which organisms grow or attach to in biology. She combines neural imaging and computational tools on behaving animal models to study the neural mechanisms underlying cognition. Believing that cognition arises from brain-wide information integration, she works with the zebrafish model to capture whole-brain neurodynamics with single-cell resolution via cutting-edge microscopies. Her goal is to develop data-driven computational models that predict decisions and behaviours from neural activity and derive patterns of neural activity from the architecture. |
Yanfei LuDepartment of Linguistics, UTSGConnaught PhDs for Public Impact Fellowship 2023-2024 Ms. Lu’s research focuses on revitalizing and documenting the endangered North American Indigenous language, Oneida. She is dedicated to helping adult learners acquire Oneida more efficiently by analyzing how they learn the sentence, word and sound structures of Oneida. She also develops resources and tools tailored to the interests and needs of Oneida learners and Oneida communities. She is currently collaborating with the Twatati Adult Oneida Immersion program and the Indigenous Languages Technology project team at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) to develop a digital Oneida verb conjugator. |
Madeleine MantDepartment of Anthropology, UTMConnaught New Researcher Award 2022-2023 Professor Mant's research focuses on the biocultural examination of health inequities in marginalized and institutionalized human groups through time, and through the integration of bioanthropological, archival and survey and interview datasets. She has a particular interest in trauma and infectious disease. Her current work includes investigating children's morbidity in 18th-century British hospitals, highlighting health experiences in 19th-century prison and poorhouse records and a longitudinal study of young adult experiences and vaccine confidence during the COVID-19 pandemic. |
Angela Mashford-PringleDalla Lana School of Public HealthConnaught Community Partnership Research Program 2022-2023 Professor Mashford-Pringle works with Indigenous communities with issues related to Indigenous health including cultural safety, land-based learning, climate action and policy analysis and development. The basis of many of her projects focus on land-based learning, spirituality and the Indigenous social determinants of health, and their relationships to health, healing and cultural resurgence. She is Algonquin (Timiskaming First Nation/Bear Clan) and was the second Indigenous graduate from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health where she is now the Associate Director at the Waakebiness Institute for Indigenous Health. |
Notisha MassaquoiDepartment of Health & Society, UTSCConnaught Major Research Challenge for Black Researchers 2022-2023 Professor Massaquoi is an advocate for advancement in healthcare for Black communities. She is one of Canada's leading experts in developing equity-responsive organizations, and her research and advocacy have supported Canadian institutions in addressing anti-Black racism and the collection of race-based data. Most notably she co-chaired the Anti-Racism Advisory Panel of the Toronto Police Services Board and was responsible for producing the first mandatory race-based data collection policy for a police service in Canada. |
Pedro Mateo PedroDepartment of LinguisticsConnaught Community Partnership Research Program 2022-2023 Professor Mateo Pedro’s research focuses on the documentation, acquisition, and revitalization of Mayan languages. His current project is about the revitalization of Itzaj, an endangered Mayan language of Guatemala, which is a collaborative project with the Comunidad Lingüística Itzaj of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. As part of this project, he has trained Itzaj speakers on a teaching method and created a pedagogical grammar following the Oxlajuj Aj immersion program. In addition to his revitalization project, he continues his research on the acquisition of Mayan languages, such as Q’anjob’al, his native language. |
Paromita NakshiDepartment of Geography & PlanningConnaught International Doctoral Scholarship 2021-2022 Ms. Nakshi’s research focuses on topics related to travel behaviour, accessibility and equity issues in transportation, application of technological advancements in transportation and land use transport interaction and their policy implications. Her master's thesis explores multimodal accessibility and travel behaviour in Dhaka, Bangladesh, presenting an alternative way to incorporate the temporal perspective in accessibility analysis under limited-data environments and explores the impact of accessibility on travel behaviour in Dhaka. |
Sophie RousseauxDepartment of ChemistryMcLean Award 2022 Professor Rousseaux’s research focuses on the development of new strategies to address current limitations and explore new areas in catalysis and synthetic organic chemistry. She leads the Rousseaux Group lab, which explores aspects of supramolecular chemistry, organometallic chemistry and reaction mechanism elucidation. The lab’s projects include the use of scaffolding strategies and molecular self-assembly to control catalyst configurations in solution and reaction product outcomes. |
Joseph SebastianInstitute of Biomedical EngineeringConnaught PhDs for Public Impact Fellowship Program 2023-2024 Mr. Sebastian’s research focuses on the application of biomedical ultrasound imaging in regenerative medicine for pre-clinical research. He uses ultrasound to non-invasively probe the acoustic, mechanical and contractile properties of hearts-on-chips, an alternative to animal models. His tenure in the Connaught PhD for Public Impact Fellowship will focus on the public communication of his interdisciplinary work in pre-clinical drug testing and public education on the alternatives to animal studies for pre-clinical drug testing. |
Molly ShoichetDepartment of Chemical Engineering & Applied ChemistryConnaught Innovation Award 2019-2020 Professor Shoichet’s research seeks to advance the science of polymers (natural or synthetic substances composed of very large molecules) and enable technologies of drug delivery and tissue regeneration. She is a world leader in the areas of polymer synthesis, biomaterials design and drug delivery in the nervous system (brain, spinal cord, retina) and 3D hydrogel culture systems to model cancer. Her research is unique in its breadth, focusing on strategies to promote tissue repair after traumatic spinal cord injury, stroke and blindness and enhance both tumour targeting through innovative strategies and drug screening via 3D cell culture with new hydrogel design strategies. |