Dr. Huhua Cao is a cross-appointed professor at the University of Ottawa, specializing in urban studies with a focus on city, population, mobility, and environment from an international perspective. He has directed various national and international research projects, securing nearly three million dollars in external funding. As the founding co-president of the International Conference on Canadian, Chinese and African Sustainable Urbanization (ICCCASU), he leads a joint initiative with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme to promote sustainable urbanization. 

Dr. Umar Ruhi is an Associate Professor at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, with expertise in Information Systems and Knowledge Management. His research explores contemporary ICT applications in various contexts, including enterprise gamification, blockchain, agile knowledge management, and end-user development. He has a track record of industry application and recognition in academia, having received best paper awards and accolades for his work.

Dr. Dargél is a curious and tenacious German-Brazilian man willing to make a difference in the lives of people suffering from bipolar and other mood disorders through innovative research, teaching, and clinical practice. He is an Associate professor of the Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry at uOttawa; Associate scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI); Affiliate Scientist, at the Perception-Memory Laboratory at Pasteur Institute, Paris, France. He works as a psychiatrist at The Ottawa Hospital, Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Dargél’s research drawn on a translational perspective, merging clinical practice with digital technologies and artificial intelligence approaches to deeply understand the multi-systemic impairments (eg, cognitive decline, emotional dysregulation, inflammation, cardiometabolic disturbances) that frequently affects individuals with mood disorders; and how those approaches can be implemented in clinic towards a patient-centred and personalized mental health care. A believer in the power of technology to accelerate progress in mental healthcare, Dr. Dargél has been co-leading multidisciplinary digital initiatives to harness data science and intelligent automation for insight generation on mood/behavior in mental health/illness to develop/deliver innovative solutions in mental healthcare.

Prior to joining TOH and uOttawa, Dr. Dargél was a clinician-researcher fellow at the at Pasteur Institute as well as the director of a Day Hospital specialized in mood/bipolar disorders, in Paris, France. He is an adventurer and altruistic person who believes in turning ideas into reality. When he’s not seeing patients, Dr. Dargél is an avid reader and musicophile. He plays drums and guitar, loves cooking and spending time in the great outdoors.

Professsor David Bruce is an expert in sustainability and clean energy systems. He obtained his BASc at the University of Waterloo in Environmental Chemical Engineering, MASc in Materials Science & Engineering at McMaster University, and Ph.D in Chemical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. For the past 25 years Dr. Bruce has been examining the transition to a clean energy future and has worked for Canadian hydrogen fuel cell and metal-air battery companies before rejoining academia with a focus on innovation in STEM education. Dr. Bruce helped to design a liberal arts engineering program at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City before joining the University of Ottawa in 2021. He is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering Design and Teaching Innovation in the Faculty of Engineering. Dr. Bruce continues his scientific pursuits examining the manufacturing and deployment of clean energy systems alongside investigating the interface of technology and society for advancing widespread STEM education.

His new research focuses on classroom innovation, in particular exploring aspects of VR/AR/XR engagement and telepresence to examine how we can enhance learning by affording new ways our learning communities can interact. As an advocate for Students as Partners methods of teaching, his active learning classrooms promote independent, critical thinking to re-examine how we can solve the wicked problems the world is facing. Prof. Bruce has produced more than 18 journal and conference papers and has commercialized 5 full patents in industry. David serves on the Faculty Research Advisory Committee for the engineering department at uOttawa and promotes interdisciplinary and international collaboration to help share perspectives through co-taught engineering courseware.

Isabelle Giroux, Ph.D., is a Registered Dietitian (R.D.) Fellow of Dietitians of Canada (FDC), and a Professional Home Economist (P.H.Ec.). She is a Full Professor of nutrition and the Director of the School of Nutrition Sciences at the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Ottawa. She was previously Vice-Dean Academic (student and professional affairs) at the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Ottawa (2019-2021). She has also been Assistant Director – Undergraduate Studies of the School of Nutrition Sciences (2015-2019). She is actively involved in professional affairs as a dietetic educator (since 2000), national dietetic program evaluator (since 2008), member of the Partnership for Dietetic Education and Practice (PDEP) of Canada Accreditation Standards Development Working Group (2012-2014), Chair of the French Network of Dietitians of Ontario and Canada (2007-2015), and member of the PDEP Steering Committee as a dietetic educators’ representative 2015-2021 (and co-chair 2016-2018, 2020-2021).  As researcher of the Institut du Savoir Montfort she does interdisciplinary research in the prevention and management of obesity and diabetes to support at risk populations. In addition, being a researcher of the GReFoPS (Groupe de recherche sur la formation et les pratiques en santé et en service social en contexte francophone minoritaire) of the University of Ottawa she also does research to evaluate the impact of experiential learning on the development of professional competencies, including interprofessional collaboration competencies and active offer of health services in French.

Sophie Nunnelley is currently the Acting Director of the University of Ottawa Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics, and a 2023-2024 AMS Fellow in Compassion and Artificial Intelligence. Her scholarship takes up issues of health law and human rights, with a particular focus on mental health law, legal capacity and decision-making, and the regulation of health-related artificial intelligence. She has held numerous awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship, Vanier Canada Scholarship, CIHR Fellowship in Health Law, Ethics and Policy, and a Lupina Fellowship in Comparative Health & Society. She also practiced law, including as a constitutional and human rights lawyer with the Ministry of the Attorney General for Ontario, and as counsel on a major national public inquiry (the Gomery Inquiry). She was also clerk to the Hon. Mr. Justice Charles Gonthier of the Supreme Court of Canada. Sophie holds laws degrees from Yale University (LLM) and the University of Toronto (SJD). 

Pascale Fournier, who is a full professor at the Faculty of Law, Civil Law Section of the University of Ottawa, was awarded the Advocatus Emeritus distinction by the Barreau du Québec in 2009. She is a committed and visionary university leader whose Canadian and international academic leadership pursues the democratization of knowledge, inclusive excellence and the emergence of a strong and diverse international Francophonie.

Pascale Fournier holds an undergraduate degree in law from Laval University (1997), a master’s degree in law from the University of Toronto, where she was a Fellow of Massey College (2000), and a PhD in law from Harvard University (2007). She has been both a Fulbright scholar (2001) and a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation scholar (2003), and also served as law clerk to the Honourable Claire L’Heureux-Dubé at the Supreme Court of Canada (2000-2001). Professor Fournier directed the University of Ottawa’s Research Chair in Legal Pluralism and Comparative Law from 2012 to 2018 until her appointment as president and CEO of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, a position she held from 2018 until 2023.

Professor Fournier has been awarded several prizes and distinctions, including: Laval University’s Raymond-Blais medal (2008); the Barreau du Québec’s Advocatus Emeritus distinction (2009); a best legal article award from the Barreau du Québec Foundation (2009); nomination as a Fellow of the International Women’s Forum (2014); the Canada Arab Chamber of Commerce Excellence Award (2014); nomination as a Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada (Canadian Lawyer Magazine 2015); a position on the “Wall of Distinguished Graduates” of Garneau CEGEP (2016); and Laval University’s Gloire de l’Escolle Medal (2016).

Dr. Isabelle L. Salle is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics where she holds the Canadian Research Chair in Macroeconomics. She works in the innovative and rapidly growing field of behavioral macroeconomic. Dr. Salle combines theoretical models with the empirical evidence from laboratory experiments and large-scale population surveys. She aims to shed light on how people form their expectations regarding their own personal situation and future economic outlooks, how they make their economic and financial decisions and how their behaviors influence the effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policies. She has published in top-field international peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Economic Theory, the Journal of Monetary Economics or the American Economic Journal:Microeconomics, and highly-ranked general-interest journals like the European Economic Review. She is an elected member of the Society of Computational Economics Advisory Council and serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.  Before joining the University of Ottawa in 2022, she was a Principal Researcher in the Financial Markets Department of the Bank of Canada and a research fellow at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Amsterdam and at the Tinbergen Institute in the Netherlands. She received her PhD from the University of Bordeaux (France) in 2012 and has visited Simon Fraser University, the University of Oregon, the University of New South Wales, the University of Technology Sydney and Paris Dauphine University.  

Dr. Luis Abanto Rojas, currently Chair of the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, has played a pivotal role in the academic landscape. Since 2009, he has overseen the Spanish Undergraduate Program and simultaneously served as the Spanish Language Coordinator since 2007. He has been instrumental in the development of innovative curricula and the use of cutting-edge language e-learning technologies, rooted in his expertise in Didactics of Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL), Curriculum design, and E-learning education.

Beyond personal research, he serves as the General Editor of Ottawa Hispanic Studies, an academic journal that fosters scholars' and graduate students’ research. Currently, he spearheads a research group exploring "Textbooks and Digital Humanities: Towards the Decolonization of Spanish as a Second Language Teaching/Learning Process." This ambitious project scrutinizes the evolving landscape of SFL education, challenging reliance on traditional textbooks as authoritative sources. It also explores the transformative potential of digital humanities in reshaping language education by embracing decolonial perspectives and practices.

The implementation of the Virtual Spanish Language LAB will annually empower hundreds of students to engage in asynchronic language learning on their personal devices. This Open Access innovation will eliminate the need for a physical language laboratory and traditional paper-based language textbooks. Instead, students will have seamless access to a comprehensive array of online learning resources through a cloud-based digital learning platform provided by the Morisset Library. This transformative approach not only offers greater flexibility in terms of when and where students can study but also enhances their learning experience by utilizing classroom time for more in-person interactions, fostering synchronous and meaningful human engagement in the pursuit of mastering a second language."

Professor Yongyi Mao received a B. Eng. degree in Biomedical Engineering at the Southeast University (Nanjing, China) in 1992 and a B. Medicine degree at Nanjing Medical University (Nanjing, China) in 1995. In 1998, he obtained a Master of Science degree at the University of Toronto in the Department of Medical Biophysics. In 2003, he completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of Toronto and joined the faculty of School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa where he is now a Full Professor. Professor Mao's research spans communication, information theory and machine learning. His present interest primarily lies in understanding and improving the modern paradigm of deep learning and its applications in computer vision, natural language processing, knowledge bases, communications and biology and medicine, etc. He is also interested in the fundamental aspects and theoretical properties of non-conventional machine learning problems. He served as an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He is the current President of the Canadian Society of Information Theory.

Andrew Sowinski received his Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa in 2012. Afterwards he worked in industry at Plasco Energy while teaching part-time for the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at uOttawa. His passion for teaching and helping students brought him back to the university as the Faculty of Engineering’s Student Experience Officer. In 2018 he joined the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering before becoming a founding member in 2021 in the School of Engineering Design and Teaching Innovation. His research interests include experiential learning and learning analytics, the latter of which was awarded a TLSS Chair in University Teaching. He teaches a variety of courses including a new first year course on Data visualization and analytics. He has recently accepted the role of Vice-Dean Programs, leading the Faculty’s continual improvement process for all of its programs.

Dr. Benjamin Rotstein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Immunology at the University of Ottawa and a Scientist at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of synthetic organic chemistry with medical imaging, particularly in utilizing carbon dioxide fixation methods for synthesizing complex radiopharmaceuticals. Dr. Rotstein obtained his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Toronto and conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. His research is supported by NSERC, CIHR, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, and an Early Researcher Award from the Province of Ontario. In addition to his research, he teaches courses for undergraduates and graduate students in the Faculties of Science and Medicine at the University of Ottawa and instructs nuclear medicine residents and fellows across Canada.

Dr. Céline Fresne received her medical degree from the University of Paris (France) with a specialization in hepato-gastroenterology and a complementary specialty in oncology. She also earned a master’s degree in genetic genomic biotechnologies from the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (France). Since her graduation in 2007, she has worked in university hospital settings and supervised many medical residents and students in France. Dr. Fresne joined the University of Ottawa’s Faculty  of Medicine in 2018, first as a lecturer and, since 2022, as an assistant professor teaching gastroenterology and genetics at the pre-residency level. She is also a clinician at the Montfort Hospital, where she focuses on treating patients suffering from liver diseases and supervises students and residents during their gastroenterology rotations.

Dr. Fresne hopes to help students become more independent in their study of medicine by developing relevant and easily accessed educational resources that make use of new technologies, helping students to think critically about current resources, and encouraging them in their acquisition of clinical skills.

Murat Simsek (Senior Member, IEEE since 2019) received the MSc and PhD degrees from the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 2003 and 2012, respectively. During the PhD study, he studied as a visiting scholar with Prof. Q. J. Zhang at the Department of Electronics Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, between August 2009 and April 2010. He worked as a researcher and lecturer with the Department of Astronautical Engineering, Istanbul Technical University (ITU), from 2012 to 2019.

He is currently lab coordinator of the Smart Connected Vehicles Innovation Centre at the University of Ottawa in Kanata North and a senior research associate with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, since 2019. He conducted research projects, collaborating with industry partners as a senior researcher. He serves as a Technical Committee Member and Organizing Committee Member for several IEEE conferences and as an ad hoc reviewer for peer-reviewed journals. He has been working as a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa since 2020. Dr. Simsek's areas of expertise lie in surrogate-based modelling and optimization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT networks and security, ad hoc networks, smart and connected autonomous vehicles, tabular data recognition and extraction, mobile crowdsensing-based attack and defence strategies, intrusion detection systems, intelligent attack design and mitigation, 5G mobile edge computing, resource allocation, and task offloading.

Dr. Simsek has three patents, the best paper award in IEEE Globecom 2021, and the 2022-2023 Teaching Excellence Award for Part-Time Professor.

Craig Forcese is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Law (Common Law Section), University of Ottawa, where he teaches armed conflict and international law, national security law and various other public law topics. He also teaches at Carleton University as part of the joint uOttawa/Carleton JD/MA program in international law and relations. His scholarly work focuses on these same subject areas.

Craig has been experimenting with “flipped”, active and experiential teaching since 2011. He is a past recipient of a APUO University of Ottawa Award for Excellence in Teaching (2014) and University of Ottawa Excellence in Education Award (2014). He co-led the Common Law Section’s distance/online education initiative during the pandemic. Craig is a member in good standing of the bars of Ontario, New York, and the District of Columbia and is actively involved in Canada’s national security accountability system.