OTTAWA — The University of Ottawa has been awarded $12.7 million in research funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s (CFI) Leading Edge Fund and New Initiatives Fund.

University of Ottawa President Allan Rock welcomed the funding. “This CFI funding will support world-class Canadian research at the University of Ottawa, allowing us to continue to contribute innovations essential to Canada’s success on the world stage.”

“The CFI’s support of cutting-edge research infrastructure has transformed Canada’s research landscape and increased the country’s international competitiveness,” said Dr. Eliot Phillipson, President and CEO of the CFI. “Investments like these have allowed the University of Ottawa to become a destination of choice for some of the world’s top research talent.”

The CFI Leading Edge and New Initiatives Funds are designed to enhance Canada’s research capacity and to strengthen development of highly competitive research and technology in priority areas.

The following projects will receive funding:

Ian Clark — Canadian Accelerator Mass Spectrometry facility - $8,409,245
Ian Clark, of the Department of Earth Sciences, conducts cutting-edge research on the use of environmental isotopes and geochemistry in groundwater and paleoclimate studies. His work explores the movement and contamination of groundwater and the biogeochemical processes that occur in the subsurface. This facility, the only one of its kind in Canada, will also support research in biopharmaceutical science and the development of safe disposal methods for radioactive waste in the earth’s crust.

Paul Corkum — Sub-wavelength science - $4,296,167
A full professor in the Department of Physics of the University of Ottawa, and attosecond science researcher at the National Research Council Canada (NRC), Dr. Corkum is one of the world’s leading specialists in lasers and nanotechnologies and is this year’s winner of the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. His research explores aspects of light-matter interaction and he is a pioneer in the development of the attosecond laser pulse, a flash of light so fast that it allowed him to capture the first ever image of an electron orbiting an atom’s nucleus.