The Advisory Committee

Dr. Chitra Anand is an award-winning communications & marketing executive. With over 20 years in the technology industry, she has spent time as the head of Communications for Microsoft Canada, Director of Marketing at TELUS Corporation and Director of Operations at Open Text. Projects she guided at Microsoft and TELUS have been awarded IABC Gold Quill Awards, Canadian Public Relations Society Awards of Excellence, the Corporate IT Hero award by the Information Technology Association of Canada and the Business for the Arts Awards. Projects she guided at Microsoft and TELUS have been awarded IABC Gold Quill Awards, Canadian Public Relations Society Awards of Excellence, the Corporate IT Hero award by the Information Technology Association of Canada and the Business for the Arts Awards. Anand is at the forefront of an important new movement in the workplace: intrapreneurship. Intrapreneurs are the people within your organization who possess an entrepreneurial spirit, driving innovation, creative thinking, and new ideas. She is a doctoral researcher, innovation & culture change keynote speaker, professor, author and advisor to high-growth companies. She has keynoted several events, AGM’s and conferences where her talks reveal how to foster the spirit of entrepreneurship within organizations, how to stay on the cutting edge of market trends, technology, and consumer behaviour. Her writing has been featured in the Globe and Mail and the Huffington Post and teaches several courses at Humber and Sheridan College.  Chitra has authored a book; The Green House Approach, How to Cultivate Deliberate Innovation in Organizations which is now available on Amazon.  This book is now a main source of reading for the Forbes School of Business MBA program. Chitra Anand has been named as a “bridge builder” for women in tech by the A-list; a yearly publication that features 50 prominent Indo-Canadians who through various careers and community efforts have helped foster relations between Canada and India. Anand has an MBA from The Kellogg School of Management and completed her PhD at Bradford University in the UK. Please visit - http://chitraanand.com/

Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences

Dr. Victoria Barham is the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and a Faculty member of the Department of Economics at the University of Ottawa, Canada, where she has taught since 1993. She earned her MA at the University of Toronto (1986), and received her doctorate from CORE at the Université Catholique de Louvain (1992) and was a Visiting Professor at Queen’s University (1992–1993).

Her research interests include the theory of club goods, the economics of philanthropy, and economics of the family, physician payment, and health inequality. She is also interested in the economics of federalism, and more particularly in financial arrangements between national and aboriginal governments. Her research has been published in journals such as the European Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Legal Studies, and Canadian Public Policy. She also contributed to the work of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.

Dean, Faculty of Engineering

After graduating from the University of Ottawa with a bachelor’s degree (Physics, 1985) and a master’s degree (Physics, 1987), Jacques Beauvais obtained his Ph.D. from Université Laval (Physics, 1990). He was then appointed as professor in electrical engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke in 1993. Co-author of seven patents on micro/nanofabrication of electronic devices, his research activities formed the basis of a startup company, Quantiscript inc., where he was president from 1999 to 2004. Since 2007, his research activities have focused mainly on developing carbon nanotube based sensors for tactile interfaces, and with an interdisciplinary research group he has also studied the social acceptability of new technologies. From 2007 to 2017, he was Vice-President, Research and then Vice-President, Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Université de Sherbrooke. During this period, he was responsible for the development of the concept, the funding and the launch of the MiQro Innovation Collaborative Centre (C2MI) in Bromont, Québec, in partnership with IBM Canada and Teledyne Dalsa Semiconductors. On July 1st, 2017, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ottawa.

Dr. Jerome Bickenbach is Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University, Canada and Visiting Professor at the University of Lucerne. He is a coordinator at the WHO Collaboration Centre for Rehabilitation in Global Health Systems of the Department of Health Sciences & Health Policy at the University of Lucerne. He is the author of Physical Disability and Social Policy (1993) and the co-editor of Introduction to Disability (1998), Disability and Culture: Universalism and Diversity (2000), A Seat at the Table: Persons with Disabilities and Policy Making (2001), Quality of Life and Human Difference (2003) and numerous articles and chapters in disability studies, focusing on the nature of disability and disability law and policy. He was a content editor of Sage Publications’ five 5 volume Encyclopaedia of Disability. His most recent book is Ethics, Law and Policy in the Sage Disability Resource Library. From Disability to Practice (2018) is a collection of essays on his work. Since 1995 he has been a consultant with the World Health Organization (WHO) working on drafting, testing and implementation of the ICF, and continues to consult with WHO on international disability social policy. He is a member of the steering committee of the ICF Research Branch of WHO Collaborating Centre for the Family of International Classifications in German. Most recently, his research includes disability quality of life and the disability critique, disability epidemiology, universal design and inclusion, modelling disability statistics for population health surveys, the relationship between disability and well-being, disability and aging issues and the application of ICF to monitoring the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. As a lawyer, Prof. Bickenbach was a human rights litigator, specializing in anti-discrimination for persons with intellectual impairments and mental illness. Since 2007, he has headed the Disability Policy Unit at Swiss Paraplegic Research in Nottwil, Switzerland and is Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Lucerne and director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Rehabilitation in Global Health Systems.

Dr. Nafissa Ismail is the director of the LIFE Research Institute and NISE Laboratory. She is a professor at the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests relate to neuroimmunology, neuroendocrinology, and critical periods of development. Dr. Ismail completed her Bachelor of Science in Psychology with a specialization in Neuroscience at Concordia University in 2002 and received her Ph.D. from Concordia University in 2009. She then completed her post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Massachusetts.

Dr Yves Joanette is a Professor at the École d’orthophonie et d’audiologie  of the Faculté de médecine of the Université de Montréal. He is currently Deputy Vice-Principal Research following his contribution as the first Director of the Consortium en santé numérique of the University . Previously (2011-2019), he was the scientific director of the Institute of Aging of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). He has also been President and CEO of the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec and President of its Board, after having been for 10 years Director of research at the Institut de gériatrie de Montréal. Dr Yves Joanette is a member of the World Dementia Council since 2014, and has been Chair from 2016 to 2018. Internationally renowned researcher, his team focuses on the understanding of aging processes and cognitive / communicational disorders in the normal aging as well as in neurodegenerative and focal diseases. Dr Joanette and his team actively contribute to the dissemination of research results and to the introduction of best clinical practices. CIHR Fellow and Scientist from 1982 to 1992, and member of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, Dr Yves Joanette received several honours, including Honorary Doctorates from Université Lumière Lyon (France) and from the University of Ottawa.

Prof. Dr. Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, a computer graphics scientist and robotician, is the founder and head of MIRALab at the University of Geneva. She holds an MS in Psychology, an MS in Biology, a Master in Biochemistry, and a Ph.D. in Quantum Physics from the University of Geneva. She started her career as an assistant professor at Université Laval and then became a professor at HEC, Université de Montreal, until 1988. In 1989, she moved to the University of Geneva, where she founded the MIRALab laboratory. She chaired the Institute for Media Innovation at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, from 2009 to 2021.

She has authored and co-authored over 600 papers in the area of Virtual Humans, social robots, VR, and 3D simulation of human articulations. She has participated in more than 45 European research projects. She has served the Computer Graphics community by creating the Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA) in Geneva in 1988, as well as managing Computer Graphics International (CGI). She is the editor-in-chief of the journal The Visual Computer published by Springer, Germany, and co-editor-in-chief of the Computer Animation Journal, published by Wiley. She has received several Awards, among them the Eurographics Achievement Award, the Humbolt Research Award, and two honorary doctorates from the University of Ottawa and from the Leibniz University of Hannover. She is a life member of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences.

Madeleine Meilleur is a registered nurse and a lawyer specialized in labour law. She spent 25 years in politics at the municipal and provincial levels. During her tenure as a member of Provincial government, she held several portfolios including those of Attorney General, Community Safety and Correctional Services, Community and Social Services and Culture, as well as Minister responsible for Francophone Affairs throughout her 12 years in Cabinet. Retired from public life since 2016, she is now a Senior Associate with the Institute on Governance. She provides advisory services on public sector governance, leadership training for executives and elected officials, on the delivery of provincial services, on municipal and provincial political life as well as the empowerment of women in public life.

Dean, Faculty of Health Sciences

Lucie Thibault, PhD, is professor and dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada since July 2018. She has previously worked at Brock University, at The University of British Columbia, and as a visiting scholar at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and at the RheinAhr Campus of Koblenz University of Applied Sciences. In 30 years of teaching, Lucie has taught organizational theory, ethics in sport, globalization of sport, governance and policy, and social issues in sport. Lucie serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics. She has been editor of the Journal of Sport Management. She is a member of the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) and was named a NASSM research fellow in 2001. In 2008, Lucie was awarded the Earle F. Zeigler Award from NASSM for her scholarly and leadership contributions to the field. Her research interests lie in the formation, management, and evaluation of cross-sectoral partnerships in sport organizations. She also investigates the role of the Canadian government in sport excellence and sport participation and government involvement in developing sport policy. Her research has appeared in numerous scholarly journals such as the Journal of Sport Management, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Human Relations, Leisure Studies, European Sport Management Quarterly, International Journal for Sport Policy and Politics, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. She is co-editor of Contemporary Sport Management (2018, Human Kinetics) and Sport Policy in Canada (2013, University of Ottawa Press).