L-R: Valérie Laflamme, associate vice-president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); Zahra Shakeri, assistant professor in U of T's Dalla Lana School of Public Health; Leah Cowen, U of T's vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives; and Karim Bardeesy, parliamentary secretary to Canada's minister of industry (photo by Ania Potyrala)
7 U of T researchers receive support from New Frontiers in Research Fund
Published: May 14, 2026
Seven University of Toronto faculty members have received support from the Exploration stream of the Government of Canada's New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF).
The Exploration stream aims to support high-risk, high-reward and interdisciplinary research projects.
"I am grateful to the Government of Canada for its generous support of fundamental research at the University of Toronto," said Leah Cowen, U of T's vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives. "From health misinformation to climate justice, these faculty members are advancing scholarship in important areas."
The recipients of the New Frontiers in Research Fund's Exploration stream at U of T are:
- Kiriakos Kutulakos of the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science – Computational Photon-Stream Processing for Adaptive Optics in Silico and 3D Scanning Fiber Endoscopy
- Freeman Lan of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering – Harnessing Microdroplets to Revolutionize Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing
- Kuan Liu of the Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health – Urban Environmental Exposures and Cognitive Aging: Machine Learning Exposure Mapping and Causal Modelling of Air Pollution and Heat
- Carmen Logie of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work – Sauti za Vijana: Youth-led Giant Puppets for Animating Climate Justice in Kenya
- Zahra Shakeri Hossein Abad of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health – PROOF-Health: Provenance-first, retrieval-only agents for detecting high-harm health misinformation
- Linbo Wang of the department of computer and mathematical Sciences at U of T Scarborough – Transforming Building Energy Solutions with Causal Modeling
- Earl Woodruff of the department of applied psychology and human development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) – Decoding Learning in the Moment: Passive Physiological Signal Fusion for GenAI Tutoring
