Research chairs & honorary positions

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

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

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

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.

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 Research, Geology, Journal of Geodynamics, Science 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.

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.

Dr. 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.

Dr. 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 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.