Research Excellence in Canada

When researchers and policymakers in the UK contact the Science and Innovation Network, they often want a concise summary of all the world-class research going on here. We use several sources to compile this information, one of which is the Canada Research Chairs programme. This government initiative invests $300 million per year in 2000 professorships for “the world’s most accomplished and promising minds”, and so is a good measure of where Canadian research is going. I spent a spare hour the other day mapping the institutions to their disciplines for the Tier 1 (world-leading) research chairs, the results of which you can see below. Unfortunately, this image is only a low-resolution snapshot of the entire network – if you want to explore the diagram (and perhaps find your alma mater or research area), you can download a gigantic PDF (2.6 MB) of it and start zooming in.