What Scholars are Saying About Graduate Study in Canada
Timothy Caulfield
"The bottom line: the opportunities provided to me in Canada have made my career. The uniquely Canadian research funding sources, such as the Canada Research Chairs program and the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, have allowed me to work with wonderfully interdisciplinary research teams, an approach that is essential to my field of study, the exploration of the legal and ethical issues surrounding cutting edge science. The academic community is tremendously open, energized and forward looking. There is a clear desire to both do world class research and have a meaningful impact on Canada and the world. "
Timothy Caulfield,LLM
Canada Research Chair in Health Law & Policy Research; Director, Health Law Institute; Professor, Faculty of Law and School of Public Health
University of Alberta
Victoria Kaspi
"My research is in astrophysics - specifically on an exotic type of star called a pulsar. My research team and I use the world's largest telescopes, both ground- and space-based, to study these amazing objects.
Seven years ago I chose to leave a plum job in the U.S. for my McGill faculty position in Montreal, Canada. Although I was happy in the U.S., I have never looked back. My research has flourished in Canada, thanks to the very welcoming research atmosphere, excellent research funding opportunities, and superbly talented and motivated undergraduate and graduate student pool. I believe Canada offers, in many ways, a more nurturing, humane environment for research, by providing many graduate fellowships, keeping university overheads to a minimum, offering significant funding pools for infrastructure and manpower, as well as crucial social services like excellent health care, maternity leaves and childcare."
Victoria M. Kaspi
Professor of Physics
Lorne Trottier Chair, Canada Research Chair
McGill University Physics Department
McGill University
Françoise Baylis
"If you are interested in graduate studies or an academic career in bioethics, Canada, and more specifically Dalhousie University in Halifax, is the place to be. I moved to Dalhousie from the University of Knoxville-Tennessee in 1996 to find myself in an intellectually stimulating research environment surrounded by motivated and supportive colleagues from across the campus. In the intervening years many of these informal working relationships have been formalized through the
Novel Tech Ethics research team which now has dedicated research space in the Intellectual Commons through generous funding from the
Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program and the
Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) program.
Bioethics is a uniquely interdisciplinary endeavour and, at Dalhousie, faculty in Medicine, Arts and Social Sciences, and Law collaborate on a wide range of timely and important issues in ethics and health policy including, publicly-funded health care, research involving humans, assisted human reproduction, genetics, neuroscience, and human enhancement.
To be sure, there are lots of places to study bioethics and great faculty at a number of North American universities. However, there are few places where you will find a similarly unique cluster of like-minded, nationally and internationally renowned scholars working together at the frontiers of contemporary bioethics, challenging mainstream views on what should and should not be done in pursuit of the common good.
Much of this good work – traditional academic work and public policy work – has been well funded through peer-reviewed grants from national and international funding agencies and through research contracts. With these funds it has also been possible to provide talented doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows with high quality training in a rich academic environment. Many of these trainees have gone on to successful careers in Canada and abroad, which is very rewarding for us all. It is worth noting that in The Scientist's 2007 report on the "Best Places to Work in Academia," Dalhousie ranked number one in the international category."
Françoise Baylis,
PhD, FRSC, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy
Dalhousie University
Katherine Borden
"As a Canadian who was a member of faculty at Mt Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, I am asked frequently what motivated me to return to Canada (specifically to the
Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) at the University of Montreal). The most important factor was the sense that I could carry out science at the level I was carrying it out in New York or London, where I had worked before. Obviously, one must have access to infrastructure, facilities and funds in order to conduct high quality research. Federal programs, specifically the
Canada Research Chairs program and the
Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI),have made it possible to run laboratories with infrastructures equivalent to those anywhere else in the world. Salary support through the Canada Research Chair programs has enabled scientists to devote their entire research budget to research. The CFI enables institutes, like IRIC, to be built and to be furnished with state-of-the-art core facilities such as microarrays, flow cytometry, microscopy, NMR, mass spectrometry etc. In addition, the federal government has increased the size of operating research grants (from the CIHR and NCIC) substantially, so that, in many instances, these are in the same range as NIH RO1s. Furthermore, the Canadian research community is close knit and keen to collaborate. For instance, we have been able to collaborate with physicians to initiate a clinical trial on a novel cancer therapy we found in our lab. Together, these aspects- substantial research funding, support for infrastructure and core facilities, salary support and a collaborative
environment- make Canada an exciting “research destination.” "
Katherine Borden, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, University of Montreal, Principal Investigator, Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer Canada Research Chair in Molecular Biology of the Cell Nucleus
Université de Montréal
