Internal Awards

Every year, the Sarwan Sahota Ryerson Distinguished Scholar Award is presented to a Ryerson faculty member who has made an outstanding contribution to knowledge or artistic creativity in their area of expertise. The contribution to SRC may be a long-term, cumulative contribution or a single, particularly insightful or seminal idea, experiment, application or interpretation.

We are pleased to congratulate this year’s recipient, Farrokh Janabi-Sharifi (Mechanical and Industrial Engineering) for his world-leading expertise in optomechatronics, the study of vision-based control systems for robots. His outstanding work in exploring the use of robots in cardiac interventions, such as atrial fibrillation, has led to the filing of four US/PCT patent applications and has been recognized internationally through fellowships, best paper awards/certificates and visiting professorship awards from several world-class organizations.

The Social Innovation and Action Research Award is bestowed annually for a completed research project that advances the social goals inspired by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, such as gender equality and decent employment. Community partnerships are often involved to enhance process improvements. Wendy Cukier (Information Technology Management) received the award for her 20-plus years of applied research aimed at advancing diversity and inclusion at the societal, organizational and individual levels. She has cultivated change in government and in the private sector to reform legislation and organizational policies and practices promoting equity for underrepresented Canadians.

The Collaborative Research Award is presented to researchers involved in projects undertaken as part of a multidisciplinary or multi-institutional team and who excel at creating and maintaining collaborations with industry, university and/or community partners to facilitate research that effects positive change. In the 2017–18 year, the award went to two Ryerson faculty members:

Anatoliy Gruzd (Business Management) is widely recognized by scholars, industry and media for advancing research into online communities, social networks and scholarly practices in the social media age. As Canada Research Chair in Social Media Data Stewardship, and as Director of Research at Ryerson’s Social Media Lab, he works with academic collaborators and industry partners with the broad aim of providing decision makers with new tools and methods for analyzing and visualizing social media data for application in multiple fields, from communication to management. 

Catherine Beauchemin (Physics) is the founder of the field of “virophysics,” which makes use of computer and math modelling to analyze virus infection dynamics, within a cell culture or a person, and has led to significant advances in virology. Clinicians and pharmaceutical companies, as well as global collaborators across different disciplines, are utilizing this breakthrough work in areas such as predicting drug efficacy and virus mutations. 

Recognizing the value of facilitating conversations and collaborations beyond the Ryerson campus, the Knowledge Mobilization and Engagement Award goes to a researcher whose SRC activities with communities and organizations significantly generate and shape new ideas to foster social change or understanding in areas such as healthcare, technology and the arts. In 2017–18, Marusya Bociurkiw (RTA School of Media) received this award for her contributions to feminist archives, LGBTQ migration activism and queer media studies. As director of the Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought, she produces public presentations, a speaker series, books and films that highlight arts-based social justice research and activism. 

The Early Research Career Excellence Award is presented to emerging researchers who, within the first five years of their academic careers, have made significant SRC contributions to their areas of expertise. The two recipients of the 2017–18 academic year were:

Jamin Pelkey (Languages, Literatures and Cultures), who during his first four years at Ryerson produced 34 publications, was appointed to five prestigious international editorial positions and established the Language, Culture and Cognition Lab at Ryerson. His decade-plus research in the fields of linguistic anthropology, embodied cognition and semiotics has taken place in countries such as China, Thailand and Australia.

Umberto Berardi (Architectural Science) has come up with innovative ways to incorporate more sustainability into the built environment. As research director of the BeTOP lab, he has investigated and developed building systems and materials with very low thermal conductivity and high thermal capacity in order to reduce energy consumption.