Early Research Career Excellence Award Recipients

2022 recipients

Eliza Chandler

School of Disability Studies, Faculty of Community Services

Eliza Chandler’s scholarship represents a new sphere of influence within disability studies and the arts. She was the founder and artistic director of Tangled Art + Disability, Canada’s first disability art gallery dedicated to showcasing disability art and advancing accessible curatorial practices. Building on this success, her program of research brings together scholars and artists to develop new ways of representing disability and experiencing art. She leads academic, artistic and community partners in mobilizing arts-based research and research creation projects that animate the imbricated relationship between cultivating disability arts and disability social justice.

April Khademi

Department of Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science

April Khademi’s research focus, as principal investigator of the Image Analysis in Medicine Lab (IAMLAB), is on designing and translating image analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence software tools to extract insights from medical images in order to model disease in a new and unique way. For this work, and in addition to her research funding successes, she has been awarded the Ontario Early Researcher Award and the Canadian Cancer Society Emerging Scholar Award. Her work is patented and published in leading journals for applied machine learning as well as the clinical application of tools for radiology and pathology imaging.

Atefeh Mashatan

School of Information Technology Management, Ted Rogers School of Management

Atty Mashatan is a Canada Research Chair and founder and director of the Cybersecurity Research Lab. Her research is focused on the development of novel cybersecurity designs based on emerging technologies such as Internet-of-Things, blockchain and quantum computing. Her expertise at the frontlines of the cybersecurity field has been recognized by several external awards, such as Top Five Women of Influence in Security globally, Canada’s Top 19 of 2019 Tech Titans and Top 20 Women in Cybersecurity in Canada. She has consistently demonstrated excellence in her cybersecurity research and development in collaboration with academic and industry partners.

Past recipients