Concordia at 50

With its 27 academic units and research centres across the humanities, sciences and social sciences, the Faculty of Arts and Science is the very definition of diversity. And it’s always been that way, says Dean Pascale Sicotte.

“We’ve always been interdisciplinary, we’ve always been diverse — it’s in our DNA,” she says. “The opportunity is to build on the work that’s come before and bring together this range of disciplines in a way that’s meaningful, to push us forward, to examine new boundaries, to meet today’s challenges.”

Sicotte highlights several impactful examples of faculty research: groundbreaking work on aging, advances in synthetic biology and biomanufacturing aimed at enhancing food security and sustainability, efforts to foster immigrant inclusion, and the promotion of multilingualism to bridge Quebec’s French and English communities.

As for the future, Sicotte says the faculty needs to keep coming together to build on this kind of interdisciplinary work and to keep advancing knowledge.

“But to also keep assessing critically the knowledge that’s being produced,” she adds.

“This is important. We don’t only produce knowledge. We instill in all our students the critical thinking and capacity to reflect on what’s happening around them so that they can be in a position to keep learning throughout their lives.”

This is needed now more than ever, remarks Sicotte. “As the past few years have proven, we can’t know what’s going to happen in the future.”

In short, she says, if there is a student-centred mission that guides the Faculty of Arts and Science, it is to prepare students to be citizens of the world.

“We want to create spaces where everyone has a voice, where important discussions take place and where we can rethink the world of tomorrow, so it becomes a better one,” says Sicotte. “This is what we’ll continue to foster here.”

Faculty of Fine Arts

If you want to know how much has changed at the Faculty of Fine Arts over the past 50 years, talk to alumni who were there just before or after the merger, says Dean Annie Gérin.

“They always remind me of one thing — that courses were given in offices above the YMCA in downtown Montreal,” she says.

“That is really telling because we’re now known in Canada as having some of the best fine-arts facilities. It’s a big reason why people come here.”

Those facilities — and the work of the professors and students using them — are also a big reason why the faculty is now consistently ranked among the top 100 art and design schools in the world by QS World University Rankings.

“It’s incredible how far we’ve come,” Gérin observes. “We’ve had alumni and professors nominated for and winning Oscars, we’re constantly shortlisted or winning Sobey Awards, Scotiabank Awards, Governor General’s Awards — you name it. There’s a lot to be proud of.”

That pride extends to the faculty’s ability to not only diversify its student and teaching body in recent years, but the curriculum as well, adds Gérin.

A prime example is Curriculab, she says. It’s a platform launched by the Faculty of Fine Arts for supporting professors and departments across the faculty wanting to bring decolonization, anti-racism and sustainability perspectives into curricula.

Gérin is also immensely proud of the breadth and impact of the research and professional work that has been happening at her faculty.

This includes more community-based programs like creative arts therapies — “an absolute jewel that’s giving all kinds of new opportunities for creatives to make a great living and have a big impact in the health sector.”

The future of the faculty will be about building on this progress while also responding to the changing demands of the art world and the world in general, says Gérin.

This is why the faculty released its first strategic plan in 2022. The initiative includes a sustainability action plan which will launch this fall.

It’s also the reason the faculty is establishing new, leading-edge programs in film production, screenwriting and curatorial practice, adds Gérin.

“My hope is that we’ll continue being agile and to keep innovating in our programs and research in response to the way the art world is constantly changing.”

Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science

Remarkable growth.

Those are the two words that Dean Mourad Debbabi uses when describing the evolution of the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science over the past five decades.

“Not just in terms of the number of students and faculty members we have now — more than 11,000 and 260, respectively — but also in terms of our creation of new academic program offerings and our significant expansion of research,” he says.

Specifically, Debbabi points to the faculty’s growth in five strategic areas: aerospace, electrification, smart cities and buildings, cybersecurity and software engineering.

“We’ve built a very solid reputation in these areas,” he says. “In software engineering, for example, our researchers rank number one in Canada, second in North America and fifth in the world in the current Computer Science Rankings.”

There have also been major strides on the equity, diversity and inclusion front.

This has been especially true since 2018, Debbabi notes, when the school became the first engineering faculty in Canada to be named after a woman — the engineer and business leader Gina Cody, MEng 81, PhD 89. Cody, a prominent advocate for equity, diversity and inclusion in STEM fields, made a historic donation of $15 million to her alma mater that same year.

Over the past three years alone, Debbabi says the number of students from underrepresented groups enrolled in his faculty rose from 22 per cent to 27 per cent.

There are already clear signs of success. Debbabi points to new programs in the pipeline in the areas of chemical engineering, cybersecurity, applied artificial intelligence, and cyber physical systems and critical-infrastructure protection.

There was also the 2023 announcement of the historic $123 million research grant that the Government of Canada awarded to Concordia to help electrify society and decarbonize communities.

Additionally, through its Security Research Centre, Concordia is a founding member of the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC), notes Debbabi. The NCC has been appointed by the Government of Canada to lead the new Cyber Security Innovation Network (CSIN), which will receive up to $80 million over four years.

And then there are the faculty’s plans to invest in new areas of strategic importance, such as quantum computing, and to bring research to market through commercialization, intellectual property, startups and more.

“Without question, the future looks like more growth, innovation, and societal and economic impact,” says Debbabi.

“More training, more education, more academic programs in cutting-edge areas, and also strengthening what we have in research capacity and bringing emerging research to a level where we continue to compete nationally and globally.”

John Molson School of Business

So much has happened at the John Molson School of Business over the past 50 years that it’s tough to narrow down just a few notable milestones, says the first woman to lead the faculty.

There is no doubt that the renaming of the Faculty of Commerce and Administration to the John Molson School of Business in 2000 marked a significant shift, says Dean Anne-Marie Croteau.

“That was huge for our reputation, our positioning in the landscape of business schools in the world. It gave us a different stature, a very impressive one, and we’ve grown so much since then.”

Today, with its 9,000-plus students, 250-plus faculty and 18 programs across five departments, John Molson is one of the largest business schools in the world.

But size isn’t everything, says the alumna. “I’m also very proud of the quality of our research — both from renowned, well-established faculty, but also emergent researchers.

“We’re not afraid to mix up research with practice. And that is something that students and employers really appreciate — that there is this combination of learning from established researchers and others from industry, including alumni and professional mentors, with major business knowledge.”

Earlier this year, this school’s MBA program was ranked second overall in Canada by Bloomberg Businessweek. The John Molson MBA and Executive MBA are consistently ranked in the top 10 in Canada and among the top 100 in the world by QS and The Princeton Review.

“These competitive rankings attest to the quality of our programs and our commitment to continuous improvement,” says Croteau.

Another noteworthy accomplishment is the school’s position as a Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) Champion for 2024-25, the first Canadian school to participate. The PRME Champion program’s mission is to contribute to thought and action leadership on responsible-management education that aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The current cohort includes 47 schools from 25 countries.

In 2019, John Molson became the first business school in Canada to receive gender-parity certification by Women in Governance (La Gouvernance au féminin). This certification has been renewed every year since. The Canadian not-for-profit organization supports women in their leadership development, career advancement and access to board seats across the country.

In addition, the John Molson School was the first in Montreal and the fourth in Canada to receive accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). AACSB International accreditation represents the highest standard of achievement for business schools worldwide.

The goal is to achieve what’s called the “triple crown accreditation,” which includes accreditation from the three main international accreditation agencies: AACSB, European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), and Association for MBAs (AMBA).

The vision guiding the future of the school is all about three words, says Croteau: relevant, responsible and respected.

“Relevant is about the importance of being practical overall and being impactful in our research,” she says. “Responsible is the way we manage ourselves, but also the way we teach our students to be responsible business people. And respected is about continuing to build on this incredible reputation we’ve worked so hard to achieve.”

School of Health

Back in 2015, when the idea for a School of Health started percolating at Concordia, more than 150 faculty members were identified who work in health-related areas.

And yet, not many people outside of Concordia realized the university had this health focus, says the school’s first dean, Véronique Pepin.

“And why didn’t they? Because we didn’t have an official home for health at Concordia,” she says. “Now we do. And now we’re working on bringing all of our health experts scattered across our campuses together to leverage that expertise and build on it.”

Pepin’s appointment as interim dean in August 2023 was the unofficial launch of the School of Health. Since then, she and her colleagues have hosted the school’s first conference and student poster competition and secured the school’s first major gift — $5-million bequest from long-time Concordia donor and volunteer Christine Lengvari, BSc 72.

Pepin has also appointed two associate deans — Alisa Piekny (Research and Infrastructure) and Alexandre Champagne (Academic Programs and Student Services).

Together, they and the entire School of Health team have been hard at work on refining what the school is all about while getting the word out.

“The first thing to understand is that the School of Health isn’t just a rebranding of Loyola Campus’s PERFORM Centre,” notes Pepin.

“This is a completely new project that integrates the PERFORM infrastructure and activities. It’s much broader, and it’s organized around three academic themes — biomedical sciences and engineering, clinical research and prevention, and community health.”

Pepin says it is also important to understand that although the School of Health will have its own curriculum, it is a department-free school. Faculty members stay in their home faculty but can choose to become a member of the School of Health if they see a benefit to their research or teaching and wish to contribute to the school’s mission.

A very first call for membership will soon be launched.

“I’m really excited about that because when we have our members, things will become even more concrete,” says Pepin.

The mission for the years ahead is to support these new members, support the three core academic themes, as well as any others that emerge, and focus on inclusivity and sustainability.

“At the end of the day, we want to foster a truly cross-sectoral environment, and we want to be agile,” says Pepin. “We want to be a leading school of health that’s known for its innovation.”