The Canada Research Chairs (CRC) Program invests as much as $311 million a year to attract and keep some of the world's most talented and promising researchers. These researchers, known as chairholders, strive for excellence in four main areas: engineering and natural sciences, health sciences, humanities and social sciences.
Dr. Felix Nwaishi, PhD
Dr. Felix Nwaishi, PhD
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Since arriving at MRU seven years ago, Dr. Felix Nwaishi, PhD, has set his sights on becoming a Canada Research Chair. This year, he was appointed the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Ecosystem Science.
Ecosystem science revolves around three fundamental resources that support life: air, land and water. They are the three core elements of the ecosystem that all lives rely on.
Nwaishi's research projects involve the boreal, subarctic and arctic ecosystems found in Northern Canada, with the boreal forests of special interest. It is one of the largest and busiest Canadian eco-regions, with a vast wealth of natural resources, making it an attractive region for development and resource exploration.
This intersection of nearly limitless wilderness combined with human expansion and the numerous resulting disturbances makes these ecosystems vital for research.
Nwaishi points to forest fires as an example. Fire is part of the natural cycle of the boreal forest ecosystems and allows for renewal. However, the anthropogenic pressures of the climate crisis are causing fires to last longer and occur with greater frequency and severity.
Industrial and commercial development also affect the boreal forest landscape by fragmenting it with roads and development infrastructure. These disturbances impact aspects of the environment such as hydrology, which has cascading effects on how fires behave.
While human development and climate crisis pressures create and further exacerbate ecological disasters, the human cost is becoming more visible. This is especially true for Indigenous communities, which are often the hardest hit.
Nwaishi strives to centre Indigenous communities in his research, not just as participants but as co-creators. In one of his latest projects in the Arctic he took a different research approach.
"As a scientist, rather than doing a literature review and reading papers to inform our research questions,, we listened to the stories of the people who live on the land and interact with the environment, hearing what their perspective is."
Nwaishi intertwines oral histories with his own scientific background to quantify what effect human disturbances have on the land and water of Indigenous communities.
"We collect consistent data and can leverage that data to connect the dots. We can determine what communities mean when they say, Our water has gone bad.' Does it mean high heavy metal content? We find the environmental indicators and quantify them, so when we hear community concerns based on their traditional knowledge, we can connect it to data."
A recent Canada Foundation for Innovation grant to Nwaishi will aid in that data quantification, funding the development of an ultra-modern ecosystem science lab focusing on analyzing soil and water samples taken from impacted communities.
Dr. Ranjan Datta, PhD
Dr. Ranjan Datta, PhD
Department of Humanities
Dr. Ranjan Datta, PhD, has been conducting community-based disaster research with Indigenous, land-based local and racialized immigrant communities for 17 years. Since his appointment as Canada Research Chair in Community Disaster Research, his work has risen to new heights.
After having received his first CRC appointment in 2020, Datta is now entering his second CRC term. He works with Indigenous communities across the globe, performing community-based research to create community-led disaster and climate crisis adaptivity solutions that utilize the land-based knowledge of the Peoples he works with.
Over the past five years, Datta's primary fieldwork has been conducted in northern communities across Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, plus Bangladesh and beyond. He has also worked with Indigenous communities in Nepal, India, Ghana and Scandinavia.
Since receiving his CRC position, Datta says he has led his most impactful research projects yet. He has been part of several large federal research agency grants as both co-applicant and principal investigator, collaborating with universities across Canada and contributing to projects that secured funding totalling upwards of $12 million.
"The CRC position has provided me with the time, resources and recognition necessary to grow my research in ways that would not have been possible otherwise," Datta says.
Datta's community-based research methods centre the land-based knowledge that has sustained Indigenous communities for thousands of years. It prioritizes community science and community needs, focusing on how Indigenous communities co-exist with the land to produce climate adaptability solutions.
In summer 2024, Datta travelled to Inuvik, NT, with fellow MRU CRC appointee, Dr. Felix Nwaishi, PhD to work with the Inuit community as a co-researcher. Activities with the community involved land-based cultural camps and Elder-led science stories to connect researchers and community members. In the midst of the positive interactions and learnings, the alarming consequences of a deteriorating climate were made apparent.
Temperatures in Inuvik reached plus-35 degrees Celsius for four days that summer. These extreme temperatures hasten the melting of permafrost and contribute to food scarcity as native animals that the community relies on disappear. This leads to a reliance on store-bought food, which is prohibitively expensive and deteriorates traditional food sovereignty. Altogether, this is contributing to a mental-health crisis in the community.
"Through my research, the communities repeat again and again, The disasters we are facing are not natural disasters, they are human-caused disasters.' Indigenous and racialized communities are the victims of human-caused disasters," Datta says.
In the next five years, Datta hopes to continue expanding his research, aiming to bring together international communities of Indigenous Peoples, land-based minorities, and Black, racialized, immigrant and refugee groups to co-create community-led strategies for disaster response and climate adaptation.
