Queen鈥檚 STEM research awarded $7M investment

Research Funding

Queen鈥檚 STEM research awarded $7M investment

The Discovery and New Frontiers in Research Fund programs support world-leading innovation in the sciences and engineering.

By Kayla Dettinger, Manager, Strategic Communications Initiatives

July 15, 2025

Share

Ontario Hall

More than 200 Queen鈥檚 researchers and projects will be receiving a combined $25.4 million to accelerate their research as part of this major federal funding announcement.

During a last week, the Government of Canada announced an investment of close to $550 million in science and engineering research. The Honourable M茅lanie Joly, Minister of Industry, made the $1.3 billion announcement in support of programs across the federal tri-agencies responsible for research funding, including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). The program, designed to support research excellence in STEM, received the most investment with more than $500 million, with an announced specifically for subatomic physics research. Queen鈥檚 researchers have secured $5.4 million to support 57 projects ranging from the exploration of the particles that make up the universe to the development of the technology that powers green energy.  

Additionally, Queen鈥檚 researchers were awarded $2 million from the (NFRF). The fund鈥檚 Exploration stream supports projects that bring disciplines together to reach beyond traditional disciplinary approaches. It is an investment in interdisciplinary, high-risk/high-reward, transformative research led by Canadian researchers working with Canadian and international partners. NFRF is designed to support world-leading innovation to enhance Canada鈥檚 competitiveness and expertise in the global, knowledge-based economy. Eight of the 101 funded projects are hosted at Queen鈥檚.

鈥淭he Government of Canada鈥檚 continuous support for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ensures Canadians have the knowledge and means to pursue their 成人大片 ambitions. That support has created a legacy of innovation that includes breakthroughs like lithium-ion batteries, quantum cryptography, and artificial intelligence.鈥

鈥 Dr. Alejandro Adem, President, NSERC

See the full list of Queen鈥檚-funded NFRF and NSERC projects below. To learn more about other research at Queen鈥檚 funded as part of this announcement, read 鈥More than $20 million awarded to advance Queen鈥檚 research鈥 in the Gazette.

 

NFRF 鈥 Exploration

Qian Zhang (Mining Engineering): Can Nature-based Solutions Enable Responsible Investment in the Minerals Sector for Climate Transition Risk Mitigation? 鈥 $250,000

Xiaying Xin (Civil Engineering): Invasive Mussel Control using Nanobubble-Generating Robotics and Biopesticide 鈥 $250,000

Laurent B茅land (Mechanical and Materials Engineering): Moving Beyond Bone Mineral Density: Computer Models to Simulate Fracture Propagation and Help Diagnose Bone Fragility 鈥 $250,000

Qingguo Li (Mechanical and Materials Engineering): Engineering Next Generation Smart Personal Protective Equipment to Combat Heat, Load And Radiation Exposure in Clinical Environments 鈥 $250,000

Amy Wu (Mechanical and Materials Engineering): Breast Pump Designed with Ecological Breastfeeding in Mind 鈥 $250,000

Zihang Lu (Public Health Sciences): Leveraging Interpretable Machine Learning Approaches to Improve Child Health for All: From Single Diseases to Multimorbidity 鈥 $250,000

Sara Nabil (School of Computing; Cultural Studies): Weaving Next-Gen Health: Smart Textile Sensors in Medical Wearables for Future Health Professions Education 鈥 $250,000

P. Andrew Evans (Chemistry): Revolutionizing Antiviral Therapy: Novel Prodrug Strategies for Broad-Spectrum Efficacy 鈥 $250,000

 

NSERC Discovery

Subatomic Physics 鈥 Application

Mark Chen (Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy): SNO+ Neutrino Physics and Double Beta Decay (2025-2028) 鈥 $1,080,000

Ken Clark (Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy): Commissioning and Operation of the Scintillating Bubble Chamber 鈥 $95,000

Subatomic Physics 鈥 Major Resources Support

Carsten Krauss (Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy): The Institute of Particle Physics National Resource 鈥 $1,450,000

Discovery

Gunnar Blohm (Biomedical and Molecular Sciences): Distributed Motor Planning and Control 鈥 $96,000

Ahmed E. Hassan (School of Computing): Software Engineering 3.0: From AI-Assisted SE (SE 2.0) to AI-Native SE (SE 3.0) 鈥 $81,000

Paul Kubes (Biomedical and Molecular Sciences): The Biology of Cavity Macrophages Mast Cells and Nerves as Sensors of Danger 鈥 $80,000

Yan-Fei Liu (Electrical and Computer Engineering): Single-Stage Three-Phase Bi-Directional AC-DC Converter for EV Fast Charging and Energy Storage System Applications 鈥 $75,000

Tucker Carrington (Chemistry): New Collocation and Variational Methods for Computing Rovibrational Spectra and Inelastic Rate Constants 鈥 $74,000

Kim B. McAuley (Chemical Engineering): Combining Fundamental Chemical-Process Models with Data 鈥 $64,000

Chris Mechefske (Mechanical and Materials Engineering): Surrogate-based Modeling for Improved Acoustic Performance of Electric Machines 鈥 $64,000

Bhavin Shastri (Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy): Photonic Computing for Ising Machines and Cognitive Radios for Classical and Quantum Applications 鈥 $63,000

Bram Adams (School of Computing): Semantic Versioning in the Foundation Model Era 鈥 $62,000

David Zechel (Chemistry): From Genes to Molecules: Mining Bacterial Genomes for New Enzyme Reactions 鈥 $61,000

Joseph Bramante (Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy): Discovering Dark Matter at the High Mass Frontier 鈥 $60,000

Shelley Arnott (Biology): Understanding the Importance of Context for Multiple Stressor Responses 鈥 $55,000

Gabriel Ciccarelli (Mechanical and Materials Engineering): Deflagration-to-Detonation Transition in Hydrogen-Methane Mixtures 鈥 $55,000

Randy Flanagan (Psychology): Coordination and Control of Gaze and Hand Movements in Goal-directed Action Tasks 鈥 $55,000

Martin Guay (Chemical Engineering): Data Driven Control of Nonlinear Systems in Unknown Environments 鈥 $55,000

Ian D. Moore (Civil Engineering): Advances to Design, Installation, and Rehabilitation of Buried Pipe Infrastructure 鈥 $55,000

Ugo Piomelli (Mechanical and Materials Engineering): Large-eddy Simulations of Complex Turbulent Flows 鈥 $55,000

Lidan You (Mechanical and Materials Engineering): Engineering the Next-Generation Mechano-Organ-on-a-Chip with Integrated Mechanical Loading and Mechanobiology Analysis 鈥 $55,000

Xiaodan Zhu (Electrical and Computer Engineering): Exploring Robust Natural Language and Reasoning Models with Deployment in High-stakes Applications 鈥 $55,000

Bahman Gharesifard (Mathematics and Statistics): Mathematical Foundations of Verifiable Autonomy 鈥 $54,000

Philippe Di Stefano (Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy): Classical, and Exotic, Rare Decays 鈥 $51,000

Dongmei Chen (Geography and Planning): AI-based Methods and Tools for Improving Change Detection from Multi-scale Time Series Remotely Sensed Environmental Data 鈥 $50,000

John Allingham (Biomedical and Molecular Sciences): Molecular Mechanisms of Proteins and Small Molecules That Control Microtubule and Actin Polymerization Dynamics 鈥 $49,000

Stephen Lougheed (Biology): Evaluating Impacts of Human-driven Habitat Loss and Climate Change on At-risk Reptiles and Amphibians in Canada 鈥 $49,000

Jennifer Day (Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering): Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical (THM) Coupled Processes in Geologically Diverse Brittle Rocks for Excavation Damage Zone (EDZ) Science 鈥 $48,000

Carlos Escobedo (Chemical Engineering): Controlled Assembly of Plasmofluidic Structures for Ultrahigh Sensitive Chemical Sensing 鈥 $48,000

Vahid Fallah (Mechanical and Materials Engineering): Irradiation-Tolerant High Entropy Alloys for Next-Ge neration Nuclear Plants 鈥 $48,000

Yves Filion (Civil Engineering): Managing Growth and Removal of Biofilms and Metals from Drinking Water Pipes 鈥 $48,000

Il-Min Kim (Electrical and Computer Engineering): Advancing Federated Edge Learning: A Secure and Adaptive Framework of Artificial Intelligence 鈥 $48,000

Michael Greenspan (Electrical and Computer Engineering): Machine Learning Based General 6DoF Pose Estimation 鈥 $47,000

Hossam Hassanein (School of Computing): Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Edge Computing 鈥 $47,000

Jun Gao (Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy): Surfaces and Interfaces of Polymer Ionic/Electronic Mixed Conductors 鈥 $45,000

Lawrence Widrow (Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy): Galactic Dynamics in the Era of Large Surveys 鈥 $45,000

Vicki Friesen (Biology): The Interaction Between Gene Flow and Genetic Adaptation: The Good, the Bad and the Neutral 鈥 $44,000

Eva Kaufmann (Biomedical and Molecular Sciences): Exploration of a Distinct Hematopoietic Stem Cell Population in the Lungs 鈥 $44,000

Fady Alajaji (Mathematics and Statistics): Information-Theoretic Methods for Two-Way Communication, Trusted AI and Network Contagion Mitigation 鈥 $43,000

Keyvan Hashtrudi-Zaad (Electrical and Computer Engineering): Fundamental Solutions for High-Fidelity Human Haptic Interaction 鈥 $ 43,000

Christopher Pickles (Mining Engineering): Zero-Emission Metal Recovery: Microwave-Assisted Techniques for Sustainable Extraction and CO2 Conversion 鈥 $43,000

Effie Pereira (Psychology): Uncovering the Basic Mechanisms that Drive the Temporal Dynamics of Selective Attention 鈥 $42,000

Farhana Zulkernine (School of Computing): Advancing Machine Perception for Situation-Aware Goal-Oriented Human Machine Interaction 鈥 $42,000

Bingshu Chen (Public Health Sciences; Mathematics and Statistics): Statistical Models and Inferences for Biomarker Effects in Clinical Trials: Deep Learning and Bayesian Methods 鈥 $40,000

Frances Bonier (Biology): Avian Responses to Urbanization, from the Local to Global Scale 鈥 $39,000

Fady Abdelaal (Civil Engineering): Performance Evaluation of Bituminous Liners for Environmental Protection against Emerging Contaminants of Concern in a Changing Climate 鈥 $38,000

Pouya Amiri (School of Kinesiology and Health Studies): Central and Peripheral Mechanisms of Human Balance Control 鈥 $38,000

Barbara L. da Silva (Mechanical and Materials Engineering): Flow and Wake Interactions Around Surface-mounted Bluff Bodies 鈥 $38,000

Geoffrey Eichhorn (Civil Engineering): Climate Resilient Buried Pipe Infrastructure for Canadian Communities 鈥 $38,000

Jianbing Ni (Electrical and Computer Engineering): Security, Privacy, and Robustness in Machine Learning at the Network Edge 鈥 $38,000

Laura Wells (Chemical Engineering): Poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate)-based Controlled Release Systems and Modification Strategies to Modulate Inflammation 鈥 $38,000

Randy Ellis (School of Computing; Biomedical and Molecular Sciences): Information Processing for Spectral Signal Understanding 鈥 $37,000

Wenyu Jiang (Mathematics and Statistics): Statistical Inference and Learning Methodology for Modelling Heterogeneity in Biomarker Study 鈥 $37,000

Chunfang Devon Lin (Mathematics and Statistics): Uncertainty Quantification for Complex Systems 鈥 $37,000

Yuan Tian (School of Computing): Towards Advanced Intelligent Code Transformation 鈥 $37,000

Erin Meger (School of Computing): Algorithmic and Computational Advancements in Pursuit-Evasion Games with Real-World Applications 鈥 $36,000

James Stotz (Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy): Spin Currents through Acoustic Circuits 鈥 $36,000

Environment and Sustainability
Health and Medicine
Physical Sciences and Engineering
Technology and Innovation
Arts and Science
Health Sciences
Smith Engineering
Partnerships for the Goals