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Research chairs & honorary positions

Research Chair Farouk Nathoo
Farouk Nathoo is a UVic statistician and the Canada Research Chair in Biostatistics for Spatial and High-Dimensional Data

Research Chairs & Honorary Research Professor positions are designations for world-class faculty, known for advancing the frontiers of knowledge in their fields through their research and teaching. These positions are used to attract and retain the best research talent from around the world.

Faculty of Science Canada Research Chairs

The  helps universities to attract and retain the best talent from around the world, assisting universities like UVic to achieve research excellence. 

Name
Tier
Chair title
Unit
2
Quantum Computing for Modeling of Molecules and Materials
Physics & Astronomy
2
Medical Physics
Physics & Astronomy
2
Microfluidics for Drug Assays
Chemistry
2
Virology
Biochemistry & Microbiology
2
Ocean Carbon Dynamics 
Earth & Ocean Sciences
1
Genomics and Molecular Biology
Biology
2
Earthquake Geophysics
Earth and Ocean Sciences
2
Advanced Functional Materials
Chemistry
2
Cell Biology Biology
2
Biostatistics and Bioinformatics
Mathematics & Statistics
See the full list of UVic Canada Research Chairs.

Endowed Academic Chairs

Endowed Academic Chairs are established through the generosity of donors who want to support research and teaching excellence at UVic. Learn how you can . 

Current endowed academic Chairs include:

    • Francis Juanes, the Liber Ero Chair in Fisheries Research
    • Mark Lewis, Gilbert and Betty Kennedy Chair in Mathematical Biology
    • Amanda Bates, Impact Chair in Ocean Ecosystem Change and Conservation

Honorary Research Professors

This Faculty of Science designation recognizes truly exceptional adjunct professors involved with the research taking place at UVic and to strengthen their connection to the Faculty and the University. Honorary Research Professor appointments are recommended by the ARPT committee of the nominating unit and decided upon by the Dean of Science. Appointments last a term of 5 years.

Kelin Wang

Dr. Kelin Wang (Earth & Ocean Sciences) is a Senior Research Scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada (Pacific Geoscience Centre). He is a world leader in the study of the geodynamics of subduction zones and related earthquake and tsunami hazards, plus a range of other topics linked to the thermal, mechanical, and hydrogeological processes of Earth’s lithosphere. He has published about 200 papers, gathering around 10,000 citations. He is Editor-in-Chief for the journal Tectonophysics, and has served on Editorial Boards for the Journal of Geophysical ResearchGeologyJournal of GeodynamicsScience in China (Earth Science), and Earthquake Science. He was formerly the Secretary of the Canadian Geophysical Union (CGU) and Chair of the International Professionals for the Advancement of Chinese Earth Sciences. In 2015 he was awarded the J. Tuzo Wilson Medal, the CGU’s highest career honour. In 2015, he also presented the prestigious Birch Lecture at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference. In 2016, he was elected an AGU Fellow, an honour reserved for only 0.1% of the AGU’s 62,000 members each year.


Nathan Gillett

Dr. Nathan Gillett (Earth and Ocean Sciences) is the Manager of and a Research Scientist with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (CCCma), the Environment and Climate Change Canada research lab responsible for developing and applying Canada’s earth system model to analyze past climate change and project future climate change. His research focuses on the detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate changes, the climatic influences of ozone depletion, and the global carbon cycle (particularly the long-term fate of anthropogenic carbon emissions).  He has published more than 90 papers with over 10,000 citations. Dr. Gillett has been a Lead Author for chapters of both the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the 2010 and 2013/14 WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessments of Ozone Depletion.  He is a recipient of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society's President's Prize for Research, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Outstanding Scientific Paper Award, and the UVic Craigdarroch Research Award. He has served as an editor of Journal of Climate and organizer of many international workshops and meetings.

Randy Sobie

Dr. Randy Sobie (Physics and Astronomy) is an Institute of Particle Physics (IPP) Principal Research Scientist. A world leader in developing the tools to utilize cloud computing for experimental high-energy physics, Sobie joined UVic in 1992 and has carried out research with the OPAL experiment at the CERN Large Electron Positron Collider and on the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. He is active within the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Randy has multiple strands to his research activity in experimental particle physics. He is an expert in the physics of the tau lepton, and has led many analyses and graduate supervisions on OPAL and BaBar, focusing on the search for new physics through precision measurements of rare tau lepton decays. Randy is currently the Director of HEPnet/Canada, which is responsible for national and international high-energy physics networks in Canada, itself a key component to the worldwide computing network used by the ATLAS collaboration. Randy also spearheads a world-leading group in research computing, with significant contributions to grid and cloud computing for particle physics research. This work has been recognized by numerous grants, and contracts with commercial partners, as well as frequent invited talks at scientific computing conferences. Most recently, Randy was appointed as the incoming Director (from July 2017) of the VISPA Research Centre.


Rob McPhersonDr. Robert McPherson (Physics and Astronomy) is an Institute of Particle Physics (IPP) Principal Research Scientist. McPherson is in a rarefied category, currently holding one of the highest profile positions globally in experimental high-energy physics, as Deputy Spokesperson of the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. Since joining the UVic group in 1997, he has carried out research on the OPAL experiment (over 500 people) at the CERN Large Electron Positron Collider, and then transitioned to the ATLAS experiment (over 3000 people) at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. He played major roles in the operation of both the OPAL and ATLAS detectors in multiple areas including online data processing, software and computing tools, data quality and calorimetry. An internationally recognized expert in collider searches for supersymmetric phenomena, Rob has contributed to a large array of physics analyses with the main focus on searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, especially searches for evidence of supersymmetry. He has successfully supervised many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows within both OPAL and ATLAS. Rob's scientific expertise and leadership skills have been and remain in high demand. He served as OPAL Physics Coordinator, and has held progressively more senior leadership positions on the ATLAS experiment, including Principal Investigator of the ATLAS Canada Collaboration (over 150 people, 2007-2015) and Principal Investigator of the ATLAS Victoria group (2003-2015). Most recently, he was seconded to CERN to serve as Deputy Spokesperson of the global ATLAS Collaboration (2015-2017) and as such is leading a significant fraction of the active particle physicists in the world.


Francis ZwiersDr. Francis Zwiers (Mathematics & Statistics) has pioneered the use of many statistical techniques for investigating challenging problems in climate change: the detection and attribution of change in the climate system, the analysis of temperature and precipitation extremes in present and future climates, climate predictability and variability, seasonal prediction, and the quantification of uncertainties associated with global climate models’ predictions. His approaches have been adopted in the scientific activities and organizations such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the World Climate Research Program (WCRP). Zwiers is director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC) as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Meteorological Society. In 2016 he appeared on the Thompson-Reuters highly cited researchers list. In the IPCC he was co-leader on the Chapter of the Fourth Assessment Report that presented the evidence supporting the key IPCC assessment that most of the warming during the past 50 years is very likely due to human influences on the climate system.


Dr. Robert MoodyDr. Robert Moody (Mathematics & Statistics) is known to mathematicians around the world for his discovery of a class of affine Lie groups known today as Kac-Moody algebras, which were also independently found by Victor Kac. They are of huge importance in mathematics and theoretical physics, especially in conformal field theory and the theory of exactly solvable models. In 1996, Moody and Kac were co-winners of the Wigner Medal, a top international award “designed to recognize outstanding contributions to physics through group theory.”  Moody was also the first Director of the Banff International Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS), an institute of top international reputation.