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Canadian Foundation for Innovation &
McMaster's Advanced Materials ResearchIn 1997, Ottawa established the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), an independent corporation endowed with $800,000,000. CFI's five-year mandate is to strengthen Canada's capability for research in the areas of health, environment, science, and engineering, by funding new research instruments and research space. Ontario has since announced a provincial counterpart, the five-year Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund (ORDCF), endowed with $500,000,000. ORDCF aims to match CFI's infrastructure investment, and to enable universities and hospitals to hire and retain world-class researchers.
Both CFI and ORDCF support is actively pursued by McMaster University. This summer, two applications with significant participation by the Department of Chemistry received full funding: an Institute for Applied Radiation (see this article), and an upgrade to McMaster's Advanced Materials Research. This latter award provides $9,750,000 for research equipment in the areas of semiconductors (III-V) and inorganic materials, polymer chemistry and processing, and photonics research. It includes $2,000,000 towards an expansion of the chemistry research laboratories, as well as $1,000,000 for shared state-of-the-art chemical characterization instruments, placed in different facilities.
Together with the new 21st Century Chair program, announced in the recent throne speech, that aims to create 1200 new faculty research positions in Canadian universities over the next few years, CFI and ORDCF open a new era of research funding for Canadian universities.
Harald Stöver
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