BIG THINKING ACROSS DISCIPLINES BIG THINKING FOR THE NEXT GENERATION CREATIVE. URBAN. BOLD. ENGAGED. MOVING IN NEW 2 DIRECTIONS t’s with pleasure and pride that I invite you to A diverse atmosphere. Community leadership. read this year’s report on the momentum we Alumni engagement. Strong and growing pride. continue to build at Concordia. All these Concordia hallmarks continue to help Concordians make a difference in the world. As we cap off our best year ever for research funding and for university rankings in Canada and around the To share your ideas with me or learn how you can globe, like all universities, we face big questions about help Concordia and our growing network of partners the role of higher education in the 21st century. achieve our mission, I would love to hear from you at [email protected]. Are we here to provide qualifications or a broad MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT education? What’s the best way to deliver Bonne lecture! instruction? How should we engage with our 3 local community? The international community? Our planet’s biggest problems? All of those questions informed our Strategic Directions planning process. After consulting with Alan Shepard faculty, students, staff, alumni and outside experts, President we boiled their inspired input down to nine directions Concordia University succinct enough to print on a coffee cup. As you can see in this report, these Directions chart our future while honouring our past. Top research and scholars. Hands-on experiential learning. OUR NINE 4 STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS THE NINE DIRECTIONS: DOUBLE OUR RESEARCH: Pursue bold goals in research that reflect our talents and our ambition to tackle big challenges. TEACH FOR TOMORROW: Deliver a next-generation education that’s connected, transformative, and fit for the times. GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY: Use rich experiences outside the classroom to deepen learning and effect change. MIX IT UP: Build agile structures that facilitate intellectual mixing and internal collaboration. EXPERIMENT BOLDLY: Be inventive and enterprising in creating tomorrow’s university. GROW SMARTLY: Add capacity where our strengths and emerging enrolment demand intersect. EMBRACE THE CITY, EMBRACE THE WORLD: Achieve public impact through research and learning. GO BEYOND: Push past the status quo and go the extra mile for members of our community. TAKE PRIDE: Celebrate successes and be purposeful about building a legacy. hat’s next for Concordia? What kind of Faculty, staff, students and others were invited to university do we want and need to be? contribute to the strategic directions process. One venue for that input was the Ideas Cafés, headed by These questions were the launching pad for a Rosemary Reilly, associate professor in Concordia’s process that resulted in Concordia’s newly Department of Applied Human Sciences. unveiled Strategic Directions. The one quantifiable direction is the first, “Double 5 The new plan lays out nine directions for the our research.” Shepard believes that’s a realistic goal. university to travel over the next decade. It was “It isn’t all about money, either,” he says. “It’s about approved by Concordia’s Senate in May and other impact that we might have on the community.” Board of Governors in June. Strategic Directions reflects a return to the university’s roots — Shepard reports that the ninth direction, “Take while also looking forward. pride,” elicited the most positive feedback. “We heard repeatedly that people who were graduates “All universities need some kind of statement of Concordia, current students, people who work that describes where the university is going,” and teach here, all wanted to have more pride in says Concordia President Alan Shepard. the institution and to be proud of its achievements. And there’s a lot to celebrate.” The spring 2015 series, called “The future of the university and the future of learning,” brought For more, visit concordia.ca/about/ 18 experts from outside Concordia for 15 talks strategic-directions. at the university. ccording to Jennifer McGrath, associate Her funding success is an achievement in itself professor in Concordia’s Department of –– more than $12.9 million since she first arrived Psychology and director of its Pediatric at Concordia in 2004. Currently, McGrath is the Public Health Psychology (PPHP) Laboratory, when principal investigator of four grants from the it comes to certain adult health outcomes, a child’s Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) understanding of his or her social and economic worth over $5.8 million in funding, and a co- status may prove to be a more significant factor investigator of three other grants totalling over than the reality, past or present. $1.45 million –– placing her in Canada’s top five per cent of funded health researchers. McGrath, a principal member of the university’s Centre for Clinical Research in Health, is Socioeconomic inequality is a significant global health distinguished for her innovative interdisciplinary issue. According to McGrath, four million Canadians approach and statistical modelling expertise. (or more than 11 per cent of the population) report before-tax incomes that fall below a threshold used AT CONCORDIA’S PEDIATRIC by Statistics Canada called the Low Income Cut-Off. PUBLIC HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY Ultimately, the big question linking much of McGrath’s current research is “How does LABORATORY, JENNIFER MCGRATH socioeconomic status get under the skin? The work we’re doing shows that it’s likely through the stress- AND HER TEAM ARE DISCOVERING response pathways,” she reports. THAT CHILDHOOD FACTORS CAN McGrath will also be investigating how neighbourhood factors contribute to children’s LEAD TO ADULT HEALTH ISSUES lifestyle behaviours as part of her most recent grant funded by CIHR. “There’s fascinating work demonstrating that even if your McGrath is a passionate advocate socioeconomic status changes over for interdisciplinary public-health- 6 time, behaviours and phenomena get intervention research. ingrained during childhood,” she says. “Low socioeconomic status during But where does personal responsibility early childhood not only affects child Concordia University for one’s own wellbeing come into play? health, it jeopardizes future health.” JENNIFER Mc GRATH McGrath says “the silver lining” is that individual choices play a role, too. McGrath looks to untangle how self-perception may relate to health status. However, she also points out that these choices occur in the context of a larger societal Most recently, she was awarded the inaugural environment. “The society sets up access to different PERFORM Chair in Childhood Preventive Health things: services, green spaces to play in, access and Data Science. McGrath has published more than to fruits and vegetables. It’s about the safety and 40 peer-reviewed articles and with her students has cohesion of your neighbourhood, socioeconomic presented at over 100 conferences. She also won status and thinking about income and equality.” the Canadian Psychology Association’s Mentorship Award in 2009 and was recently nominated to the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. 7 DOES PERCEPTION MATTER? ‘CITIES WILL BE CRUCIAL IN THE GLOBAL Thinkstock FIGHT 8 AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE’ rban centres have long been the driving One route is through establishing sustainable forces that propel culture and the global and substantial farming capabilities within urban economy. Now, cities will have to take the centres, as Ghana has done for irrigated vegetable lead in responding to humanity’s greatest challenge: production within its cities. Here in Montreal, Lufa climate change. Farms has demonstrated the potential for high-yield rooftop farming. Montreal is already taking action, says Paul Shrivastava, a professor in the Department of PAUL SHRIVASTAVA, CONCORDIA Management at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business and executive director of Future Earth. PROFESSOR AND EXECUTIVE In 2015 Future Earth released its five-year plan to DIRECTOR OF FUTURE EARTH, HONES strengthen infrastructure and develop an emergency response to deal with catastrophic weather damage. IN ON WHAT MONTREALERS CAN DO Montreal is also looking into how to We have to rethink our urban leverage the expertise and know-how of transportation systems to reduce our the business and university communities carbon footprint, says Shrivastava. in urban centres to respond to the Designing cities around cars is an challenge of climate change. This type of outdated model from a previous big thinking was the aim of Montreal century. Cities need to plan and Summit on Innovation. implement low-emission public transportation and invest in bicycle Concordia University Led by Concordia in collaboration with PAUL SHRIVASTAVA lanes and walkability. Montreal’s Quartier de l’innovation and the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, Montreal has already announced an encouraging this gathering was an important call to action on initiative to add electric buses to the STM fleet. finding ways to not only mitigate climate change but Building on the lead of various European cities and 9 establish new pathways for collective prosperity modelled on Montreal’s own Bixi bike share system, and wellbeing. the Chinese city of Hangzhou has now established a vast bike rental system of 66,500 vehicles. Though national strategies are fundamental, shifting to low-carbon economy will require a direct and The expansion of scalable models into developing massive contribution from cities, which in turn need countries gives developed countries an opportunity to be granted regulatory powers to implement to export knowledge, while allowing the most at-risk actions that will reduce carbon emissions. population to gain access to valuable resources. Urban dwellers often depend on food products that come from thousands of miles away. A move to locally produced foods, in which small quantities of food are collectively grown and produced, can help mitigate the disruption of food supplies as a result of extreme weather. A rethinking of the rural/ urban relationship to agriculture is also needed.