The Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) is comprised of representatives from each of the consortium member organizations, and co-chaired by representatives from University of Toronto and Western University.

When collaborative research proposals are submitted to SOSCIP, the SAC is responsible for reviewing, evaluating and approving proposals, as well as determining and approving the allocation of SOSCIP resources. After research projects are approved, the SAC regularly checks in and reviews projects progress.

SAC members are listed below.

 

Michael Bauer, Western University, SHARCNET
Professor, Department of Computer Science
Co-Chair, SOSCIP Scientific Advisory Committee
SOSCIP Technology Lead, Cloud and Agile High Performance Computing Platforms

Dr. Michael Bauer was Chair of the Computer Science Department at Western Ontario from 1991-1996 and from 2002-2007. From 1996-2001 he was the Associate Vice-President Information Technology at Western University. He served on NSERC’s (National Science and Engineering Research Council) Computer Science grant review committee from 2005-2008 and was chair of the committee in 2008-2009. He was Principal Investigator for the CFI project that initially funded the creation of SHARCNET (www.sharcnet.ca) – a multi-university high performance computing grid. He is currently the Associate Director for SHARCNET. Professor Bauer’s primary specializations are in the fields of Distributed Systems, High Performance Computing and Applications of Parallel Computation. He is internationally recognized for his work on the use of policies in the management of distributed systems and applications and in autonomic systems. Dr. Bauer’s research in high performance computing includes the development of novel algorithms for the efficient uses of high performance computing grids, such as SHARCNET, and the development of novel parallel algorithms that can be used to analyze multiple, large multi-modal data sets. He has published over 220 refereed articles, has served on the organizing and program committee of numerous conferences and has refereed for a variety of international journals. He is a member of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and has served on various committees of both organizations. He has supervised over 70 graduate students.

 

Christopher Yip, University of Toronto
Professor, Department of Biochemistry
Co-Chair, SOSCIP Scientific Advisory Committee

Professor Yip joined the University of Toronto in 1997 after completing his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota in 1996. He spent one year as a post-doctoral fellow at Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis. He received his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1988 and worked for Dupont Canada for 3 years before starting his graduate work at Minnesota. Professor Christopher Yip is the Director of the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, a tri-Faculty Institute. Professor Yip currently serves on the Institute Advisory Board for the Institute of Genetics at CIHR, was the past Section Co-Chair of the NSERC Evaluation Group for Materials and Chemical Engineering, and is a standing member on the NIH Biophysics of Neural Systems Study Section.

 

Carlisle Adams, University of Ottawa
Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Prior to Dr. Carlisle Adams’ academic appointment in 2003, he worked for 13 years in industry (Nortel, Entrust) in the design and standardization of a variety of cryptographic and security technologies for the Internet. His research and technical contributions include the CAST family of symmetric encryption algorithms, secure protocols for authentication and management in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) environments, and a comprehensive architecture and policy language for access control in electronic networks. Dr. Adams is co-author of Understanding PKI: Concepts, Standards, and Deployment Considerations, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2003). He is a Senior Member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and is licensed as a Professional Engineer (P.Eng.).

 

Kosta Derpanis, Ryerson University
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Konstantinos G. Derpanis is an Associate Professor of Computer Science, Ryerson University, Toronto. He received the Honours Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, in 2000, and the MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science from York University, Canada, in 2003 and 2010, respectively. Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania.  His main research field of interest is computer vision with emphasis on motion analysis and human motion understanding, and related aspects in image processing and machine learning. Visit for more information: www.scs.ryerson.ca/kosta.

 

Vida Movahedi, Seneca College
School of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering Technology

Vida Movahedi is a professor at Seneca College’s School of ICT, since 2016. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from York University, Centre for Vision on “Automatic Extraction of Closed Contours Bounding Salient Objects: new Algorithms and Evaluation Methods” in 2015. She holds a M. Eng. in Computer Engineering from Amir Jabir University, Iran, on “Human Face Profile Recognition”. Some of her research interests include computer vision, machine learning and video analytics.

 

Mark Daley, Western University
Associate Professor, Departments of Computer Science, Biology, and Statistics and Actuarial Science
Associate Vice-President, (Research)

Mark Daley is an associate professor in the computer science, biology and statistics & actuarial science departments at Western University, a PI at the Brain and Mind Institute and a University of Toronto Science Leadership Fellow. He also holds an appointment as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at the University of Saskatchewan.

 

Frank Dehne, Carleton University
Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science

Dr. Dehne’s research program focuses on improving the performance of big data analytics systems through efficient parallel computing methods for multi-core processors, GPUs, processor clusters and clouds. His team specializes in high performance computing systems for business intelligence and computational biochemistry. Their work enables data scientists to perform complex data analysis operations on very large data sets. Dr. Dehne received a MCS (Dipl. Inform.) from RWTH Aachen University, Germany and a PhD from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He is serving or has served on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transaction on Computers, Information Processing Letters, Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, and Int. Journal of Data Warehousing and Mining. Dr. Dehne is a member and former vice-chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing, and member of the ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms & Architectures Steering Committee. Since 2010, Dr. Dehne is a Fellow of the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies Canada (Business Intelligence and Business Analytics section).

 

Vic DiCiccio, University of Waterloo
Research Professor, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Professor DiCiccio helped found the Institute for Computer Research (ICR), which has more than 150 faculty members from eight academic departments in four faculties at the University of Waterloo, as well as fifteen federated research groups. ICR fosters research in computer topics and specializes in industry collaboration. He is the Director for Research Partnerships of the GRAND NCE, a federal network of researchers at 20 universities collaborating with companies and user groups in the areas of graphics, animation, games, new media and social networks. He serves on GRAND’s Board of Directors. Previously, Vic DiCiccio was the director of advanced technology at SOMA Networks, and the vice-president of research for Communications and Information Technology Ontario (CITO, now OCE). He has been an applicant for Canarie grants and is a director of Rhetoritech Inc., a start up that commercializes persuasive language technology, arising from a multi-university research project, in the health domain.

 

Hendrick de Haan, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Science

Dr. de Haan is an expert in computational nanobiophysics. The cNAB.LAB at UOIT explores systems at the intersection of physics, biology, and nanotechnology via a wide range of computer simulation approaches. Dr. de Haan completed his graduate studies at the University of Guelph.

 

Farhana Zulkernine, Queen’s University
Assistant Professor, School of Computing

Farhana Zulkernine is an Assistant Professor and the Coordinator of the Cognitive Science program at the School of Computing at Queen’s University. She holds a Ph.D. degree from the School of Computing at Queen’s University and is a member of Professional Engineers of Ontario. She has more than 15 years of international work experience in three continents in software design, analysis and research. As a researcher she has worked with CA Technologies, IBM Canada,SAP Germany and Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy. Her research interests include service and cloud computing, big data analytics and management, and cognitive computing. She has ongoing research collaborations with Centre for Advanced Computing (previously known as HPCVL) and Compute Canada, Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Services Network (CPCSSN) and the School of Medicine. 

 

 OCAD University

Vacant

 

Ue-Li Pen, University of Toronto
Professor and Director, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics

Ue-Li Pen is a professor at the University of Toronto’s Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA). Born and raised in Germany, Professor Pen attended high school in Guelph, Ontario, and then completed a year at the University of Waterloo before transferring to the National Taiwan University where he received a B.Sc. in Mathematics in 1989. He completed his M.Sc. in Electrophysics at the National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan in 1991, and his Ph.D. in Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University in 1995. In his final year at Princeton, he was awarded the prestigious Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship. Before joining CITA, he was a Harvard University Junior Fellow (1995-98). Professor Pen’s primary research interest involves the cosmic distribution of ordinary and dark matter.

 

Tom Doyle, McMaster University
Professor, Faculty of Engineering

Thomas Edward Doyle holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering Science from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He also holds a Masters of Engineering Science (M.E.Sc) in Electrical and Computer Engineering, a Bachelor of Engineering Science (B.E.Sc) in Electrical and Computer Engineering, a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) in Computer Science. Dr. Doyle has taught at McMaster University, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

In recognition of his contribution to engineering education, Dr. Doyle was awarded the 2013 McMaster President’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching and Learning. The President’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching and Learning recognizes those who have significantly enhanced the quality of their students’ learning experience through innovative teaching methods. It is an award that appreciates and celebrates an educators achievements over time. The award citation may be read here. and the related McMaster University News article may be read here .

 

Graham Taylor, University of Guelph
Assistant Professor, School of Engineering

Dr. Taylor leads the Machine Learning Research Group at the University of Guelph. His interests include statistical machine learning and biologically-inspired computer vision, with an emphasis on deep learning and time series analysis. Dr. Taylor received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2009, working with Geoffrey Hinton and Sam Roweis. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, and joined the School of Engineering at the University of Guelph as an Assistant Professor in 2012.

 

Ian Hamilton, Wilfrid Laurier University
Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry

Following a PhD in theoretical/computational chemistry at the University of Toronto, Ian Hamilton was a research associate at the University of Chicago and a university research fellow at the University of Ottawa before joining the Chemistry department at Laurier where he is now professor of Chemistry. Mr. Hamilton has been a visiting scientist/professor at the Fields Institute in Toronto, the Agency for Industrial Science and Technology in Japan (where he was a STA fellow), the Centre of Theoretical Chemistry and Physics in New Zealand (with support from the Massey University International Visitor Research Fund) and the Sargent Group at the University of Toronto.

 

Ziad Kobti, University of Windsor
Professor and Director, School of Computer Science

Ziad Kobti earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2004 from Wayne State University. He is currently a full professor and Director of the School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor.

 

Sean Wagner, IBM Canada Limited
Research Scientist, IBM Canada Research and Development Centre
Acting SAC Member

Dr. Sean Wagner is an electrical and computer engineer specializing in computer hardware, microelectronics, optoelectronics, and optics. In his role with IBM Canada Limited, Dr. Wagner provides technical expertise and organizational support to SOSCIP project leaders. Dr. Wagner completed his undergraduate engineering degree at the University of Waterloo, and his graduate and postdoctoral studies at the University of Toronto. He has been with IBM Canada Limited since 2013.

 

David Tweddell, Western University
Director, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry

David Tweddell, MASc., P.Eng. is Senior Consultant (Strategic Initiatives) at Western University. In his current role, David works with stakeholders across the research value chain, including researchers, industry partners, funding agencies and other knowledge consumers to develop long-term, sustainable partnerships focused on moving research into practice. He is particularly interested in research partnerships that set the stage for local and regional economic development, and sustainable, resilient communities. Prior to coming to Western in 2007, he spent 10 years in the private sector at an engineering software company and a Canadian Tier 1 automotive supplier. David earned his degrees in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

 

Sanjeev Gill, IBM Canada Ltd.
Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry

 

 

Michael Haslam, York University
Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics