Six UCalgary researchers named Canada Research Chairs

On Oct. 22, 2025, the Government of Canada announced six new Canada Research Chair appointments for the University of Calgary, along with the renewal of five CRCs. 

In a media release, Minister of Industry Mélanie Joly said: “Canada’s research community continues to push boundaries and deliver discoveries that strengthen our economy and improve lives across the country. By investing in outstanding talent and the infrastructure that fuels their work, our government is helping ensure that Canadian innovation remains a force on the world stage — now and for generations to come.” 

“Continued funding from our Tri-Council agencies demonstrates UCalgary’s research excellence across a variety of disciplines and topics,” says Dr. William Ghali, vice-president (research). “I’m excited to see the outcomes and impact these research programs will have.” 

To explore the breadth and depth of the research being done on our campuses, we asked the chairholders the following question: “What are you most excited about with your research program?” 

Dr. Marius Zoican, PhD, Haskayne School of Business
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Financial Technology 

“What excites me most about my research program is the opportunity to use new technologies, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, to better understand why people make financial decisions, and how to help them make better ones. Many everyday investors fall into well-known traps: holding onto losing stocks, selling winning stocks too early, or following risky trading trends online. These behaviours have real negative consequences for financial well-being. My research brings these challenges into the lab, where we can study how people react to modern digital markets or gamified investment platforms. By combining behavioural experiments on realistic market with advanced technologies such as eye tracking, biometric sensors, and AI-driven trading assistants, I aim to uncover the emotional and cognitive forces behind financial mistakes in the context of digital finance. The ultimate goal is to use these insights to design smarter, fairer financial technologies that empower individuals to invest more confidently for the long term.” 

Dr. Carly McMorris, PhD, Werklund School of Education
Canadian Institutes of Health Research Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Neurodiversity and Mental Health 

“I’m passionate about improving mental health care for neurodivergent (ND) youth and young adults. The transition from adolescence to adulthood (ages 16–24) is a time of significant change and a stage when many mental health challenges can emerge or intensify. This risk is even greater for ND individuals, who face unique neurological, behavioural, and social changes coupled with significant life transitions (e.g., pediatric to adult health care, high school to post-secondary or employment). Indeed, each year, about 50,000 ND youth in Canada enter this stage and often struggle to find the right support.”

“Although ND-focused mental health programs can be very effective, most young people still face long wait times, a shortage of trained clinicians, and a lack of neuro-affirming care. My research focuses on changing that. As a CRC, I am most excited about the opportunity to develop the first psychological intervention designed specifically for ND emerging adults who also experience mental health challenges. Working with ND individuals and clinicians and using implementation science frameworks, we will co-create or adapt, test, and evaluate the intervention to make sure it’s practical, effective, and scalable. Ultimately, my goal is to create evidence-based guidelines and train clinicians to better support ND young adults so they can thrive into adulthood.” 

Dr. Morris is an associate professor in the Werklund School of Education with a specialization in School and Applied Child Psychology, as well as an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts. She is a member of the Cumming School of Medicine’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute, the Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute and its Owerko Centre. 

Dr. Martyn Clark, PhD, Schulich School of Engineering
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Environmental Predictions for Water Security 

“I’m excited about the opportunity to rethink how we build hydrological models (a system that that simulates the movement, distribution, and quality of water in a watershed) for large geographical domains. Our goal is to develop a unified hydrological prediction system for North America that combines process understanding with new computational methods. This work enables us to test alternative process representations, quantify model uncertainty, and improve the accuracy of continental-domain water predictions.” 

“Our work is now possible because of recent progress in modelling and computation. Together with partners across the hydrological modeling community, we’ve recently completed a synthesis of hydrological processes across North America that provides new knowledge of the dominant processes across diverse landscapes. We’ve also advanced model design in a way that makes it possible to combine algorithms from different research groups in a consistent way. Most notably, our progress in the use of AI for large-domain parameter estimation enables us to estimate parameters across thousands of river basins simultaneously.” 

“Together, these capabilities improve the scientific foundation to support decisions on North American water security. They strengthen the evidence base for cooperative water management across Canada and the United States, helping to ensure that decisions are informed by reliable, transparent predictions of water availability and risk.” 

Dr. Steven Prescott, MD, PhD, Cumming School of Medicine
Canadian Institutes of Health Research Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Neural Coding 

“Having just arrived from Toronto, I’m excited to get my lab unpacked and running again. My lab studies neural coding, focusing on the somatosensory system. We seek to understand how touch and pain signals are normally processed, and how that processing goes awry in chronic pain conditions. To this end, we are planning several imaging and electrophysiology experiments in mice and are excited to capitalize on the facilities and expertise available through the Cumming School of Medicine's Optogenetics Platform. These experiments will be synchronized with precise somatosensory stimulation and withdrawal measurements made possible using a robot we developed in the lab over the past several years. I am also excited about using machine learning to better analyze behavioural data, enabling efficient quantitative analysis of large data sets to recognize subtle changes. Machine learning techniques will also be applied to physiological data, with the goal of decoding sensation and predicting behaviour from the activity recorded simultaneously from dozens or even hundreds of neurons. Overall, we are excited to synergistically combine improvements in experimental and computational techniques to study the neural basis for touch and pain.” 

Dr. Prescott is a professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the Cumming School of Medicine, and a member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and the Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute.

Dr. Tara-Leigh McHugh, PhD, Faculty of Kinesiology
Canadian Institutes of Health Research Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Gender Equity in Sport and Physical Activity 

“I am most excited to have dedicated research time to focus on addressing the equitable participation of women and girls in all roles and across all levels of sport. Women and girls are often excluded from experiencing the psychosocial, physical, and mental health benefits of sport participation, due to the gender inequities that persist in sport in Canada and around the world. Women and girls are also overlooked and underrepresented as participants in sport research, highlighting the inexcusable reality that relatively little research is being conducted to identify how to enhance women's and girls’ participation in sport to achieve health outcomes. As the CRC in Gender Equity in Sport and Physical Activity, I will advance research on the psychosocial factors related to women’s and girls’ experiences of their bodies in sport. I will also work with local, national, and international sport partners to develop evidence-informed policy and best practice recommendations to support the equitable participation of women and girls in sport. Finally, and most exciting, I will establish an internationally recognized, Canadian-based, transdisciplinary network of sport research for women and girls.” 

Dr. McHugh is a professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and a member of the Cumming School of Medicine’s Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute. 

Dr. Karolina Skibicka, PhD, Cumming School of Medicine
Canadian Institutes of Health Research Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Brain Circuits of Interoception 

“Our research will focus on enteroception or gut-brain communication. Up until relatively recently its influence on behaviour and mental health has not received much attention. This is maybe surprising since intuitively we are aware of “gut feelings” or are told to “listen to our gut”, but the science behind these observations was lagging. That’s why we are very excited to see emerging data, including from our team, indicating that such a wide and perhaps surprising array of behaviours, for example reward processing, emotionality, sociability or even memory formation, can be heavily influenced by the gastro-intestinal tract, reflecting a “bottom-up” or enteroceptive control. For the gut to affect all these behaviours, it must be able to communicate with or reach brain regions controlling these behaviours. But how? The neurocircuitry affected by the gut extends far and wide throughout the brain, however we have only unraveled a tiny fraction.” 

“With my new University of Calgary team and colleagues and the CRC, we are in a perfect position to decode how hormonal and neural gut-brain communication affects behaviour and decipher the underlying brain circuits, in health and disease. The signals we are most excited about include GLP-1 – an intestinal hormone, or amylin – a pancreatic hormone, and their clinically utilized analogues, all capable of reaching the brain. Given our experience in this this space and the clinical burden of obesity and mental health disorders, we hope that this pursuit will lead to significant advancement in knowledge with a fast route to translation of the results, including generation of new enteroception-guided therapeutics.” 

Dr. Skibicka is a professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology in the Cumming School of Medicine. She is a member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and its Mathison Centre for Mental Health Research & Education.