Grant: Canada Research Chairs

The Canada Research Chair in Global Change Ecotoxicology seeks a second mandate. In its first mandate, it has published 54 articles and trained 70 HQPs and collaborated with more than 150 researchers here and abroad. The Chair is proposing a cutting-edge research program on the fate of contaminants in a changing environment, with a strong commitment to the co-production of knowledge with First Peoples of Canada, namely Atikamekw, Innu, Naskapi and Inuit communities, with the help of colleagues from natural and social sciences. The Chair will explicitly include research questions from the Indigenous communities in its research, will hire community members (guides, students), and will organize science camps where traditional and scientific knowledge will be transferred to youth. The proposed projects will principally focus on environmental issues linked to the mining of technology-critical elements such as rare earth and platinum group elements, for which there is insufficient data to derive robust environmental regulation, and on the environmental impacts of hydroelectricity, which is predicted to expand worldwide following the Paris Agreement. The Chair will also develop knowledge on how we can control exposure of humans to contaminants in food by choosing specific food preparation techniques. Key questions for the second mandate will be: 1) How is the mobility of contaminants affected by climate-related environmental changes? 2) How do priority contaminants bioaccumulate and move alone and in combination along food webs of changing aquatic systems? 3) How do changes in the diet of Indigenous communities affect their gastro-intestinal exposure to contaminants? 4) Which ecological remediation methods can be developed to attenuate the impact of contaminants in fragile northern systems and in southern agroecosystems? The Chairholder is well recognized nationally and internationally and has participated in UN and Arctic Council reports. He will ensure a swift transfer of knowledge to end users in Indigenous communities, industry, governments and academia. The Chair will extensively use EDI principles to create a welcoming, diverse and inclusive environment. Université de Montréal is providing an exceptional environment for the Chair, with its new Science complex, its state-of-the-art platform on emerging contaminants, its strong commitment to environment, sustainable development and Indigenous studies.