‘Concordia is on a roll and people are noticing’

Message from Graham Carr, Concordia’s interim president

September 3, 2019

By Graham Carr

Dear Concordians,

The start of the academic year is always an exciting time. Our two campuses are once again buzzing with life after a summer of terrific accomplishments for Concordia.

Our students continue to stand out:

Space Concordia students wowed judges at Caltech to claim second prize in a continent-wide competition as they pursue their bid to put the first civilian-built rocket into space.
PhD candidate and Concordia Public Scholar alumna Nura Jabagi won the Paul-Gerin-Lajoie Prix Relève étoile from the FRQ for her paper on motivating gig workers.
Master’s student Clayton Ma won the Canadian Political Science Association Three-Minute Thesis competition.

And we’re shining on the research front, too:

SSHRC awarded $6.3 million to 88 Concordia projects.
Four of our research projects, ranging from synthetic biology to digital gambling, received more than $1.2 million in funding from CFI and the Government of Quebec.
Members of Concordia’s engAGE: Centre for Research on Aging will be able to advance their work examining loneliness in the elderly thanks to more than $1 million from the FRQ.
NSERC awarded Liangzhu Wang $540,000 to pursue his research into mitigating the effects of climate change-caused heat waves on at-risk populations.
Mourrad Debbabi and his team of cybersecurity researchers received $560,000 in provincial funding to operate a new Open-Source Cyber Fusion Centre.
And in June, Ursula Eicker began her position as Canada Excellence Research Chair in Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Communities and Cities, a position that comes with $10 million in Government of Canada funding over seven years.

This is all reflected in our strong rankings:

Both Times Higher Education and QS ranked Concordia the top university in Canada under 50 years old. This is the fourth year running that we have held QS’s top position in Canada (and the top spot in North America for two years), while THE has ranked Concordia first in Canada for two consecutive years.

In the Center for World University Rankings we jumped 144 places to 575th — the biggest improvement of any Canadian university.
And QS ranked Montreal the sixth best student city in the world and top in North America.

Concordia is on a roll and people are noticing. Let’s keep our momentum going.