Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

File:CIFAR logo.jpg
Established	1982
Mission	To lead the world in framing and answering complex questions at the frontiers of understanding.
Focus	Bring together international researchers to create new knowledge that will change Canada and the world.
President	Alan Bernstein
Chair	David Dodge
Staff	34 (2012)
Members	350+ researchers and advisors
Address	180 Dundas Street West, Suite 1400
Location	Toronto , Canada
Website	www.cifar.ca

CIFAR, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, was founded on the belief that Canada has an important role in finding new ways to create a better future for the world.

Today, nearly 400 researchers in 16 countries participate in our long-term, multidisciplinary, global research networks. CIFAR brings together these unique individuals to focus on important questions with the potential to improve human health and the environment, transform technology, build strong societies, understand human culture and even chart the universe.

Established in 1982, we are a private, non-profit institute of advanced study. CIFAR is supported by an exceptional community of individuals, foundations, corporations, the Government of Canada and the provincial governments of Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario.

History

1970s : Advanced study at the University of Toronto The idea for creating an institute of advanced research originated within the University of Toronto by its Dean of Graduate Studies, John Leyerle. He envisioned a centre where scholars and scientists from the humanities, and the social, natural and life sciences could collaborate internationally on advanced research. Future CIFAR President Fraser Mustard was one of several people inspired by Leyerle’s idea for multidisciplinary scholarship. As vice-president for health sciences at McMaster University at the time, Fraser saw its true potential. To him, an advanced research institute was the best strategy for creating a network of researchers from universities across Canada bound together in the pursuit of excellence and global impact.

1980s: National interdisciplinary institute In 1982, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research was born, and Mustard was appointed president. The Institute found university, government and private sector partners to support the creation of an independent research entity and began to recruit distinguished scholars and scientists from across Canada and around the world. Radical for its time, the Institute embraced interdisciplinary research and brought a fresh, creative focus to research in Canada. The Institute’s first research program, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Society, was launched in October 1983. Soon, topics like space science and evolutionary biology were explored as potential research programs which eventually evolved into new research areas such as the evolution of the earth and the biodiversity of microbes.

1987: Population Health is launched One of the most well-known examples of CIFAR’s breakthrough research is the Population Health program launched in 1987. This unique group of Canadian and international investigators from diverse fields such as economics, epidemiology, public policy, politics, anthropology, sociology, child development, endocrinology and immunology came together to better understand how social and economic status affects health. In 1994, they published the award-winning and often-cited book, “Why are Some People Healthy and Others Not?” They developed a new understanding of how health is distributed in populations and the factors that underpin these variations. This work has had a profound influence on the way policy makers around the world develop, monitor and measure public health programs to take into account underlying social and economic factors.

Following the appointment of Chaviva Hošek as President and CEO in January 2001, the research that inspired Population Health evolved into two new areas of inquiry. Today, CIFAR researchers are studying the social institutions that affect health and equality. Their recent book, Successful Societies, provided opportunities to share their insights with the World Bank and other international organizations. Another group is finding significant links between the lifetime health effects of our early experiences and environment, providing ideas that hold potential for helping children with developmental delays and adults recovering from brain injuries.

Other notable accomplishments of CIFAR researchers include accurate predictions of sea-level change due to melting of Antarctic ice sheets; microscopic switches made from single molecules that behave like silicon transistors, opening the door to more powerful, efficient chips and circuits; geophysical models for evaluating the atmosphere of planets in other parts of the galaxy; and analysis of the economic successes and failures of countries based on the types of institutions developed during their colonial periods. CIFAR researchers share this knowledge with global leaders in business, government, academia and NGOs.

Today: Influential leader in advanced research The Institute has become one of Canada’s foremost research assets. Today, nearly 400 researchers in 16 countries participate in our long-term, multidisciplinary and collaborative advanced research teams. The Institute has 12 flagship research programs and several emerging research initiatives in topics as diverse as improving health and environment, transforming technology, building strong societies, understanding human culture and charting the universe.

Since the Institute’s inception, 14 Nobel Laureates have been associated with CIFAR.

• Willard Boyle
• George A. Akerlof
• Sidney Altman
• Philip W. Anderson
• Kenneth Arrow
• Walter Gilbert
• Leland H. Hartwell
• Daniel Kahneman
• Robert B. Laughlin
• Anthony J. Leggett
• Roger B. Myerson
• John C. Polanyi
• Richard J. Roberts
• Michael Smith

Milestones

Thirty years of excellence

The following highlights provide a glimpse into the many accomplishments of CIFAR researchers over the Institute’s first 30 years.

1982

• CIFAR is founded with the ambitious goal to create a global institute that explores the scientific and social challenges important to Canada and the world. Founding president Fraser Mustard promotes a new model for interdisciplinary, inter-university research. Within a year, CIFAR launches its first research program, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics.

1986

• CIFAR’s Evolutionary Biology program begins. Over 20 years, its researchers change the way people think about evolutionary biology. They replaced the “tree of life” model of evolution with a “web of life” model, where genetic material is swapped back and forth, evolutionary paths diverge and then cross once again, and some organisms subsume the genetic material of others. Today, this model has become the foundation for much of the evolutionary biology research underway worldwide.

1987

• CIFAR’s Artificial Intelligence & Robotics program sets in motion a unique initiative to strengthen interaction between universities and industry on artificial intelligence R&D, by helping to establish the Pre-competitive Applied Research Network (Precarn) in 1987 and the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS) in 1990.

1994

• Researchers in CIFAR’s Population Health program publish the award-winning and often cited book Why are some People Healthy and Others Not? It continues to have a profound influence on the way policy makers around the world develop, monitor and measure public health programs to take into account underlying social and economic factors.
• At the annual CIFAR Cosmology & Gravity program meeting, Lev Kofman (Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics) and Andrei Linde (Stanford University) present their classic paper "Reheating After Inflation" for the first time. It remains one of the top cited works in the field today, providing a new understanding of events in the earliest moments of the Universe.

1998

• Paul Hoffman (University of Victoria) and Daniel Schrag (Harvard University) in CIFAR’s Earth System Evolution program change thinking with their ‘Snowball Earth’ Theory. They find geological evidence showing that our planet was covered in ice 600-700 million years ago, and that it emerged from its frozen shell as a result of extreme greenhouse conditions caused by a massive build-up of CO2.
• Researchers in CIFAR’s Economic Growth & Policy program produce a volume of collected essays titled “General Purpose Technologies and Economic Growth” (edited by Elhanan Helpman, Director of CIFAR’s program in Institutions, Organizations & Growth). The book becomes the standard reference on the role of technology in the economy and continues to have a significant impact on views about the nature and impacts of technological change.

2000

• Sajeev John and Geoffrey Ozin (University of Toronto) in CIFAR’s Nanoelectronics program invent the world’s first three-dimensional photonic crystal made from silicon. The new structure allows information to be processed and transmitted more efficiently and effectively by optical means, and it has the potential to create more advanced and faster computers.2003
• Using a method borrowed from string theory, Ian Affleck (University of British Columbia) in CIFAR’s Quantum Materials program advances scientists' ability to measure and affect the behaviour of quantum dots. Quantum dots are artificial atoms whose properties can be controlled by adding or removing a single electron. These dots could be components in a new generation of electronic tools that are smaller than the human eye can see.

2005

• Avner Greif (Stanford University) in CIFAR’s Institutions, Organizations & Growth program introduces game theory into the study of economic history, and shows how to explain the emergence of institutions and their decline as a result of strategic interactions between economic and political actors. His book Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade becomes required reading in the field.2007
• Stephen Scherer (Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto) in CIFAR’s Genetic Networks program makes headlines by collaborating with Craig Venter to publish a sequenced genome, the first entire DNA makeup of an individual.
• Walter Hardy and Ruixing Liang (UBC), Louis Taillefer (Université de Sherbrooke), and Cyril Proust (Toulouse) in CIFAR’s Quantum Materials program make a major breakthrough by observing “quantum oscillations” in a copper-oxide superconductor. The discovery provides direct insight into the nature of electron behaviour in these materials and causes a paradigm shift in the field, bringing researchers closer to solving the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity.

2008

• CIFAR launches the Junior Fellow Academy – an elite fellowship program that builds research and leadership capacity in gifted young scholars. Today, there are 24 junior fellows participating in CIFAR’s research programs.
• Researchers in CIFAR’s Earth System Evolution program help discover life in a lake that has been trapped under a glacier in Antarctica's Dry Valleys for nearly two million years. This discovery hints at the possibility of life in other inhospitable environments, such a Mars or Jupiter's icy moon Europa.
• Siwan Anderson (UBC) in CIFAR’s Institutions, Organizations & Growth program uses data from the UN and WHO to discover that a large number of missing women in India and China died as adults. While gender bias at birth only accounts for a fraction of the colossal number of missing women, an overwhelming proportion of all female deaths are the results of inequality.

2009

• Researchers in CIFAR’s Successful Societies program launch their landmark book Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health at the World Bank. The book helps to create a unified theory of the characteristics of successful societies and the social mechanisms that produce them.

2010

• Brendan Frey (University of Toronto) in CIFAR’s Genetic Networks and Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception programs deciphers a splicing code in DNA. By combining the power of computing with biological analysis, his team is able to decipher the biological instructions, or “splicing code”, that cells use to rearrange gene parts, providing greater potential to identify the root causes of genetically-based diseases.

2011

• CIFAR and the National Academy of Sciences co-host a prestigious Sackler Colloquium titled Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversity. Researchers in CIFAR’s Experience-Based Brain & Biological Development program lead the conference, sharing their leading-edge insights into how early experiences set trajectories for the remainder of life.
• Previously believed to be impossible, Aephraim Steinberg (University of Toronto) in CIFAR’s Quantum Information Processing program was the first to track the average paths of photons passing through a double-slit experiment set-up. This experiment offers insights into the dynamics that may drive quantum computers one day.2011 – 2012
• Patrick Keeling (UBC) and Claudio Slamovits (Dalhousie University) in CIFAR’s Integrated Microbial Biodiversity program discover new life in the form of a new protein in a marine microbial predator that uses light to harvest energy, perhaps to help digest its prey, or perhaps to generate some energy when prey is rare.

2012

• John Helliwell (UBC) in CIFAR’s Social Interactions, Identity & Well-Being program co-edits The World Happiness Report, commissioned for the United Nations Conference on Happiness in April 2012. The report provides the world’s first, comprehensive review of the growing body of research that uses subjective wellbeing as a measurement for the quality of life.

Research Areas

Transforming Technology

The desire to understand the nature of our physical world has driven human progress since the dawn of civilization. Today, CIFAR scientists are. searching to understand the mysteries of our physical world at a scale much too small to be seen.

How do electrons change the properties of materials? How does the nature of information change at the quantum level? What will replace silicon as the next generation of circuits in nanoelectronics? What can we learn from the human brain to devise machines that learn?

The new scientific understanding that CIFAR researchers are building today has untold implications for the future of technology.

Charting the Universe

Although scientists have made significant advances in piecing together the signatures of deep history, much still remains unknown about our origins and place in the Universe.

How has the Universe evolved from the moment of the Big Bang? How do galaxy clusters form? What can other planets tell us about early life here on Earth? What can we learn about the history of the Earth’s evolution to predict future change?

At a time when our planet is changing in unprecedented ways, CIFAR scientists are providing urgent new thinking on the evolution of our planet and the universe.

Improving Health and the Environment

Advances in technology and bioinformatics now enable scientist to analyze the enormous complexity of life at the genetic level. From charting the enormous diversity of the smallest organisms on Earth to understanding the development of the human brain, CIFAR scientists are shifting our understanding of how genes are expressed and interact with the environment.

What are the critical periods for learning in our brain development? Why do our genes fail us? How are experiences embedded into our biology? Why are microbes such a successful life form, even in extremely harsh environments?

This research is leading to a better understanding of early life on Earth and the root cause of many complex diseases.

Building Strong Societies

Throughout modern time, humanity has witnessed extraordinary improvements in living standards around the world. Yet, disparity between communities and nations continues to grow. CIFAR researchers are creating new frameworks to understand how our economies, institutions and communities are best structured to serve their citizens.

What are the ‘ingredients’ of a successful society? What makes some countries rich and others poor? How could new definitions of economic behavior better inform policy makers? How does culture contribute to belonging? How do we measure happiness? Why are some societies more resilient than others?

The work of CIFAR researchers is guiding political and economic leaders around the world in setting new policies to improve quality of human life.

Early Career Training

CIFAR fosters the development of the next generation of researchers in Canada and abroad through the direct support of summer and winter schools of advanced study for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and through the Junior Fellow Academy. In addition, CIFAR provides significant financial support to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows through the funding provided to program members.

Summer schools Recent annual summer schools have covered areas related to Quantum Materials, Nanoelectronics, and Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception. The Institute has also co-sponsored additional advanced schools in Quantum Information Processing and Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception; the latter look place in India in 2010.

The Junior Fellow Academy The Junior Fellow Academy of CIFAR is an elite fellowship program designed to build research and leadership capacity in gifted young scholars at a critical early stage of career development. The program is targeted to individuals who have completed their PhD within the three years prior to advertised Junior Fellowship starting dates and have demonstrated outstanding scholarship and research potential. The Academy provides unique opportunities for personal and professional growth through close collaboration with and mentorship from some of the best researchers in Canada and around the world. Through the Junior Fellow Academy, CIFAR aims to build a closely connected and long-lasting community of outstanding young leaders, representing a wide-ranging spectrum of expertise, who will help lay a strong foundation for the future of advanced research both within and beyond Canada’s borders.

CIFAR’s Junior Fellow Academy offers rare opportunities that distinguish it from other prestigious fellowship programs for recent PhD graduates:

• Junior Fellows are embedded in a CIFAR interdisciplinary research program throughout their appointment. Junior Fellows are treated as full program members, meaning that they have the opportunity to meet regularly and work closely with some of the most internationally renowned investigators in their fields on some of the biggest questions of importance to Canada and the world.
• Junior Fellows also benefit from career-building opportunities provided through the Junior Fellow Academy. One or two meetings per year enable Junior Fellows to network with their peers across CIFAR’s programs. The meetings are designed as much as possible by the Junior Fellows themselves, according to prevailing group interests. Typically, some sessions are devoted to exchanging research ideas, methodologies and approaches that might help others perceive new ways of problem solving. Meetings also feature distinguished guest speakers representing different realms of advanced research, policy and communications. Ample time for free discussion is always provided.

CIFAR Junior Fellowships are always held in conjunction with a formal university or research institute appointment. The typical form of university appointment for a Junior Fellow is a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, in which he or she works under the supervision of one or more CIFAR program members. An exception is made for candidates in the social sciences, where postdoctoral appointments are less common. Individuals in those disciplines may hold a Junior Fellowship as junior faculty members.

See also

• Canadian government scientific research organizations
• Canadian university scientific research organizations
• Canadian industrial research and development organizations

External links

• Canadian Institute for Advanced Research