Early Researcher Award Recipients (ERA) - Ministry of Research and Innovation

The Early Researcher Award program is a successor to the Premier's Research Excellence Award (PREA) program. It aims to help promising, recently-appointed Ontario researchers (i.e. within the first five years of starting an independent academic research career) build their research teams of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and research associates. Recipients of an ERA in the Faculty of Science are:

2007

Dr. Daniel Mennill, Department of Biological Sciences received $100,000 with matching funds of $50,000 for the project “Acoustic location systems: an environmental technology for exploring the ecology and evolution of animal communication networks and the ecology of endangered species”. The award will allow Dr. Mennill to involve more than six additional graduate students (three master’s and three doctoral students) in a study employing an innovative acoustic location system he developed which uses synchronized recordings from multiple microphones to locate individuals within a population. Additional graduate students over the next five years will allow Dr. Mennill to study bird populations in the Windsor area, northern Ontario, and the rain forests of Costa Rica.

2006

Dr. Tricia Breen Carmichael (L), Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry received 30,000 per year for five years for her project “Self-Assembled Monolayers on Ultrasmooth Surfaces.”

Dr. Chuck Macdonald (C), Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry received $30,000 per year for five years for his project “Low Oxidation State Chemistry: Unique Routes to New Phosphorus-Containing Polymers.”

Dr. Rob Schurko (R), Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was awarded 30,000 per year for five years for his project “Probing Metal Sites in Heterogeneous Catalysts with Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy.”