The president of the Common Law Student Society (AÉCLSS) has been named as a finalist for the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation’s 2022–2025 scholarship and engaged leadership program.
Michelle Liu (she/her/Ms.) is one of 30 finalists for the award, which will be announced in May.
Ms. Liu is pursuing her law degree (JD) and PhD in civil engineering simultaneously – her engineering PhD work focuses on evaluating the National Building Code through an equity lens and is jointly supervised by Dr. Beatriz Martin-Perez at the Faculty of Engineering and Prof. Jena McGill at the Faculty of Law. Ms. Liu received her Honours BASc and MASc in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo. After working in construction and design for various national and multi-national consulting engineering firms, she decided to pursue law.
Ms. Liu was the 2021 winner of the University of Ottawa Rovinescu Award of Excellence for Community Service, and she is well-known as an advocate for greater inclusion in the engineering community. Engineers Canada named Ms. Liu one of thirteen EDI Leaders in Engineering Workplaces in 2021-2022. Other ways Ms. Liu is advancing EDI in both the engineering and legal professions include serving as an ONWiE mentor and as a member of the Equity Advisory Group of the Law Society of Ontario. She is also Co-President of the OUTLaw 2SLGBTTQ+ Law Students Association.
Nearly 500 PhD students from Canada and around the world applied for the Trudeau program, which not only offers generous scholarships, but also provides “an extraordinary journey towards transformative leadership.
At the conclusion of the selection process, the Foundation Board of Directors will select 12 candidates based on their academic excellence as well as their “openness to a plurality of perspectives, their commitment to democratize their research and knowledge, and their willingness to exercise influential and engaged leadership. These candidates will have successfully demonstrated their perseverance, their curiosity, their agility and their ability to adapt.”
Ms. Liu said she was delighted that the Foundation sees value in her research that aims to make Canadian building standards more inclusive of diversely identified users. She noted that there are few doctoral students from science and engineering on the list of past scholars and finalists.
“Making it this far reminds me that only 13% of over 170,000 engineers in Canada identify as women, less than 1% of woman-identifying engineers become academics, and the statistics do not exist for other gender identities and expressions nor 2SLGBTQ+, disabled, neuro-divergent, and racialized groups in engineering.
“I hope to move the needle slightly by being visible in important spaces, by mentoring and empowering equity-seeking youths considering engineering, and by going to law school to gain the tools I need to speak up in the engineering profession.”
Those applicants who are named Scholars will embark on a three-year journey during which they will be coached by eminent Fellows and Mentors. They will take part in the Foundation’s engaged leadership curriculum while seeking to address major social challenges related to the scientific theme, Global Economies.
The 18 finalists who are not selected as Scholars will each be awarded $5,000.
To view the list of the 30 finalists for 2022, click here.
The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation is an independent, non-partisan charitable organization established in 2001 to honour the former Prime Minister.