The impact of a researcher’s work isn’t measured solely by its findings, but by how it inspires – and advances – the work of others.

Since 2019, statistician John Ioannidis at Stanford University has attempted to quantify that impact with a list that provides standardized information on how often a scientist or academic’s published research has been the basis of – and citied within – the work of others. Each year the list is updated to highlight the top two per cent most-cited researchers worldwide.

The includes the following current and emeriti faculty members from the Faculty of Science at �첥��Ƶ: Thomas Baumgartner, Peter Backx, Samuel Benchimol, Diethard Böhme, Kenneth Davey, Patrick Hall, I. Brent Heath, John Heddle, Sergey Krylov, A.B.P. Lever, Roger Lew, Clifford Leznoff, Christopher Lortie, Peter Moens, Seyed Moghadas, Laurence Packer, William Pietro, Jeffrey Schall, Bridget Stutchbury, Gary Sweeney, Nikolaus Troje, Rui Wang, Andrew White, Hugh Wilson, Jianhong Wu, and Norman Yan.

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More than 20 faculty members from �첥��Ƶ’s Faculty of Science were collectively awarded over $4 million in Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants to continue advancing scientific innovation.

Faculty from chemistry, physics, math, biology and other departments were represented among the recipients of grants with either one- or five-year terms. The funding will go towards enabling Faculty of Science researchers to independently pursue long-term research programs, innovative research activities, diverse partnerships and interdisciplinary collaborations.

This year’s NSERC Discovery Grant program – Individual recipients, and their funded research programs, are:

Jingyi Cao, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Stochastic optimal control problems in insurance risk management.”

Patrick Hall, professor and Chair in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, for “The Physics of Quasars and Quasar Winds: Spectroscopy from SDSS-V and Beyond.”

Ryan Hili, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, for “Exploring the Chemical Diversity of Nucleic Acids.”

Marko Horbatsch, professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, for “Small Molecules in External Electric Fields.”

Huaxiong Huang, professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Mass Transport in Complex Fluids and Biological Tissues: Modeling and Computation.”

Patrick Ingram, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Explicit estimates for families in arithmetic dynamics.”

Seyed Moghadas, professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Computational Methods for Complex Infectious Disease Dynamics: Model Validation with Data Assimilation.”

Kelly Ramsay, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Robust Nonparametric Methods for Complex Data.”

Emanuel Rosonina, associate professor in the Department of Biology, for “Mechanisms of transcription reinitiation.”

Thomas Salisbury, professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Actuarial finance, random walk in random environment, super Brownian motion.”

Rui Wang, dean of the Faculty of Science and professor in the Department of Biology, for “A novel mechanism for H2S-induced protein posttranslational modification.”

Woldegebriel Assefa Woldegerima, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Perturbation Methods in Analysis of Complex Multiscale Models of Ordinary, Partial, Stochastic and Neural Differential Equations Applied to Real-world Problems.”

Yuehua Wu, professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Statistical Modelling and Inference with High-Dimensional, Complex Data.”

Mike Zabrocki, professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Representation theory of diagram algebras and plethysm.”

This year’s NSERC Research Tools & Instruments recipients, and their funded research programs, are:

Mark Bayfield, professor in the Department of Biology, for “Biomolecular Infrastructure for Detection of Radioisotopes, Fluorescence, Chemiluminescence.”

Jennifer Chen, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, for “Dynamic Light Scattering Instrumentation for Materials Development.”

Sergey Krylov, professor in the Department of Chemistry, for “Advancing Instrumental Bioanalytical Methods.”

Raymond Kwong, Canada Research Chair and associate professor in the Department of Biology, for “Microelectrode array for electrical characterization of neuronal and muscular networks.”

This year’s NSERC Discovery Launch Supplements recipients, and their funded research programs, are:

Jingyi Cao, assistant professor in the the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Stochastic optimal control problems in insurance risk management.”

Kelly Ramsay, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Robust Nonparametric Methods for Complex Data.”

Woldegebriel Assefa Woldegerima, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, for “Perturbation Methods in Analysis of Complex Multiscale Models of Ordinary, Partial, Stochastic and Neural Differential Equations Applied to Real-world Problems.”

This year’s NSERC Discovery Grants program – Subatomic Physics, Project recipient, and their funded research program, is:

Deborah Harris, professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, for “Neutrino Oscillations at T2K: New Avenues to Explore.”

This year’s NSERC Discovery Grants program – Subatomic Physics, Individual recipient, and their funded research programs, is:

Junwu Huang, adjunct professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, for “Dark Matter, light particle searches in the lab, astrophysics and cosmology.”

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Five-year project aimed at ensuring vulnerable and at-risk populations are included in disease outbreak management and policies

At a time when the risk of emerging or re-emerging infectious diseases (ERIDs) is increasing, an international team led by �첥��Ƶ successfully competed to receive a CAD7.25 million grant from the (IDRC) to help tackle the issue. This grant will enable the research team to work alongside countries in the Global South to develop equitable and responsible artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and big data approaches to improve public health outcomes.

The five-year project, Global South Artificial Intelligence for Pandemic and Epidemic Preparedness and Response Network, is borne out of the promise of AI solutions across the Global South to improve the health system response to infectious disease outbreaks, and the commensurate need to examine important ethical, legal and social implications of these solutions on populations most susceptible to disease and compromised overall well-being.

Led by �첥��Ƶ Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Science, this project will support prevention, early detection, preparedness, mitigation and control of emerging or re-emerging infectious disease outbreaks in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa.

"�첥��Ƶ is honoured to have this opportunity to create positive change by fostering more equitable and responsible approaches to complex health-care needs through the ethical use of artificial intelligence,” says �첥��Ƶ President and Vice-Chancellor Rhonda Lenton. “This project will help us strengthen our impact on several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including good health and well-being, as well as gender equality and partnerships. I'd like to thank IDRC for their ongoing support of York's commitment to collaboratively addressing pressing global issues and congratulate Jude Kong on all his work in this area."

Globally, as humans continue to encroach on animal habitats and climate changes worsens, incidents of disease outbreaks are expected to increase in severity and frequency – often stemming from viruses, bacteria and parasites that jump from animals to people. These outbreaks can have calamitous consequences which cascade across socio-economic boundaries, particularly affecting vulnerable populations, magnifying social inequities, and putting pressure on weak health-care systems, which further exacerbate underlying inequities and disparities.

“As the world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside outbreaks such as Ebola and hMPXV, previously known as monkeypox, IDRC’s commitment to supporting innovative and locally championed solutions from LMICs is renewed and further deepened," says IDRC President Jean Lebel. "We are delighted to build on IDRC’s deep experience in using AI to solve pressing social and economic challenges by supporting the team at �첥��Ƶ in funding thought leaders in the LMICs to develop, use and scale responsible AI solutions to strengthen health systems. This collaborative effort will foreground AI applications that are ethical, respect privacy, and support gender equality and inclusive benefits across low-resource settings.”

The project will develop a diverse, multi-regional and interdisciplinary network of partners and teams to help address gaps in knowledge, capacities and solutions, and better understand how AI can improve public health preparedness and response. It will promote southern-led equitable and ethical use of AI and big data to improve public health preparedness and response, identify risks, conduct predictive modelling and provide evidence-based recommendations for public health policy and action.

"It is important to design, manage and govern AI and big data approaches using a health-equity and gender-equality lens to avoid amplifying existing inequalities leading to the possibility of significant harm rather than tremendous benefits," says Kong, the project’s executive director and director of the Africa-Canada Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation Consortium (ACADIC).

The goal is to ensure vulnerable and at-risk populations are included in disease outbreak management and policies, including racialized visible minorities, women, geographically isolated individuals, Indigenous communities, migrants and refugees, unhoused people and the socio-economically underserved. COVID-19 has underlined the need for timely, accurate, and reliable data to inform evidence-based public health decision-making.

"AI techniques have developed rapidly over the last decade and the ability to store large data sets has led to novel methods of analysis, allowing for modelling predictions on a scale that was previously not possible,” says Kong. "ERIDs present global challenges, and as such, international communication and shared strategies, which build on varying types of expertise, are required to successfully address them. This project is a small step in that direction."

VIDEOS:

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What does “research opportunity” mean?

As a major hub of scientific research, the Faculty of Science provides a wide variety of opportunities for our undergraduate students to become involved in research activities.

As an undergraduate student, you will hear the word research often. Sometimes you will be told to do research in order to write an essay or a lab report. This is a kind of research that you will do very frequently. That is not what we mean by “research opportunity”. More generally, research is the activity that advances knowledge – i.e. creates new knowledge. In science disciplines, it often consists of designing an experiment to test a hypothesis. That’s what many professors are doing in their research labs.

Research labs in physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics are where professors, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research associates do their work. So, for an undergraduate, “research opportunity” means the opportunity to participate in a research lab under the supervision of others in that lab.

It is an opportunity to learn advanced lab skills, use equipment that you would not typically use in an undergraduate lab, interact with graduate students, learn in-depth in a particular field, and actually contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Getting involved in research

There are many ways you can participate in research, including research practicum courses, RAY positions, NSERC Undergraduate Summer Research Awards, Capstone Project Courses, or volunteering.

Watch our students talk about their research opportunities by scrolling down.

Research Practicum Courses 

Some disciplines offer zero credit research practicum courses. These are a mechanism for recording on your transcript that you participated in a research lab. Because they are zero credit you do not pay for them; but you do get a pass or fail grade depending on whether you met expectations for the research. Those expectations will be worked out between you and the professor at the time you enrol in the course. Remember that the professor and other members of the research team are committing their time to support and train you and they expect to get results for that from you!

RAY Positions

Some professors advertise positions via the  program. As you will see from the website these are paid positions; students apply and are selected by the professor according to who best meets the skills for the position. The nature of the involvement in research can vary quite significantly, but this is a great way to help finance your studies at York.

NSERC USRAs

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) offers Undergraduate Summer Research Awards (USRAs) to undergraduate students in universities across Canada. York typically has between 30 and 40 such awards every summer. They are prestigious and highly competitive – you will need a high average to win one – and they offer a well paid summer “job” working in a research lab, fully immersed without distraction! This is perhaps the Cadillac of undergraduate research experiences.

Capstone Project Courses

Most honours programs require a final year project course. These are for-credit courses (i.e. you pay for them and they count towards meeting your required credits) and they typically involve working fairly independently on a research project that you have planned with the help of a supervising professor. The projects vary according to your interests and those of your supervisor, and sometimes they lead to publications in scientific journals or conference proceedings.

Volunteering

Get to know your professors, read about their research, and then talk to them! They will love that you are informed and interested. This approach can take you places you might not have dreamed of!

Biology Field Courses

Field biology courses are an integral part of training in ecology and conservation and an excellent way for students to experience what it is like to be a field biologist. The Department of Biology in the Faculty of Science organizes several such courses for credit, in which undergraduate students are immersed for two weeks in a setting where they learn field methods, how to collect data, how to conduct field experiments and the natural history and ecology of plants and animals. For more details,

Summer Undergraduate Research Conference

Every summer, the Faculty of Science hosts an Undergraduate Research Conference. The event is an opportunity for recipients of summer research awards, including NSERC Undergraduate Summer Research Awards (USRA) and York Science Scholars Awards (YSSA), to present their summer research projects and to meet other awardees.

Previous Conferences

• 2025
• 2024
• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020

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