2024 list of inductees includes Joel Corbin, Christian Marois and Jennifer Veitch
To recognize their outstanding scientific impact and achievement, the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) has welcomed 3 National Research Council of Canada (NRC) researchers as members:
- Dr. Joel Corbin, Associate Research Officer, Metrology Research Centre
- Dr. Christian Marois, Astronomer and Research Officer in the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre
- Dr. Jennifer Veitch, Principal Research Officer, Construction Research Centre
The NRC is proud to feature them among the cadre of NRC researchers, scientists and professionals who have been recognized nationally and internationally for their research excellence and achievements in their respective fields.
Dr. Joel Corbin, Associate Research Officer, Metrology Research Centre
Dr. Joel Corbin has been elected to the RSC College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists as an emerging leader in aerosol and climate science.
"I was surprised and honoured when I learned that my application was successful," he says. "I look forward to using my role within the RSC to discover new research opportunities for my team to contribute to the needs of Canada and Canadians when it comes to mitigating the impacts of climate change on the environment and human health."
Dr. Corbin joined the NRC's Metrology Research Centre in 2017 and now leads its aerosol and gas metrology team. The team tackles the challenge of measuring climate pollutants and other airborne nanoparticles that negatively impact air quality and human health.
"I've always had an interest in climate science for its global impact, but I realized the importance of its impact on human health only later," he says. "Globally, air pollution is one of the 5 greatest health risks."
Combining his passion for analytical chemistry and mass spectrometry with his interest in climate science, Dr. Corbin's early career success started with an award-winning 2015 PhD thesis. He applied mass spectrometry, an analytical technique used to identify and measure the amounts of different elements or molecules in a sample, to study soot and other black carbon particles.
Black carbon is produced by incomplete combustion, such as vehicle emissions or forest fires, and it is a significant contributor to climate warming because of its ability to absorb sunlight, heating the atmosphere and accelerating the melting of ice and snow. The reduction of black carbon is an important strategy for mitigating climate change due to black carbon's short atmospheric lifetime of about one week.
In 2019, Dr. Corbin used the technique he developed in his thesis, among others, when he led an international multidisciplinary study that transformed the understanding of marine shipping emissions. Existing research had concluded that these emissions were dominated by soot, but Dr. Corbin and his colleagues demonstrated that they were at times actually dominated by tar black carbon.
"This study was a good example of the importance of participating in fundamental, or 'bread-and-butter' work, such as measuring the emissions of a ship engine," he explains. "It was this bread-and-butter research that initiated a long effort to unravel a story that proved to be quite significant."
The results of this study highlighted the importance of improved air quality monitoring because traditional monitoring stations could not detect tar black carbon. This meant that the overall emissions were being significantly underestimated.
Dr. Corbin is now researching tar black carbon in forest fire smoke to improve wildfire weather predictions. Aerosols, such as tar black carbon, are made up of nanoparticles that are less than one-hundredth of the width of a human hair. Being able to detect and measure the absolute light absorption by these tiny particles in a real-world context is challenging.
To address this challenge, Dr. Corbin co-invented a patent-pending technology that will allow the first in-field measurements of light absorption by aerosols without laboratory calibration. He and his team are now building a prototype for commercialization through an NRC Small Teams project.
"The goal for the future is to develop this technology to compete with commercial black carbon monitoring devices and make it economical enough to deploy at monitoring stations so that all instruments could be self-calibrating and therefore far more accurate," he explains. "This would significantly improve our ability to understand air quality as it changes as a result of phenomena like climate change and wildfires."
Besides providing foundational evidence to support climate change policy, Dr. Corbin has also used his novel ideas to address more immediate health and safety concerns for Canadians. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Corbin was a key member of the NRC team that developed Canada's capability to test the aerosol filtration efficiency of protective masks. The team's findings informed the Public Health Agency of Canada for the purchase of N95 respirators, protecting millions of Canadians.
In less than a decade as an independent researcher, Dr. Corbin's work continues to push the boundaries of what is understood and what is possible when it comes to aerosol measurement. If the beginnings of his career are a glimpse into the future, it is clear that his research will be fundamental to the future health of the planet and everyone living on it.
Dr. Christian Marois, Astronomer and Research Officer in the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre
Dr. Christian Marois was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for his international leadership in the field of direct imagining of exoplanets that has revolutionized our view of the universe.
"I'm honoured to have my research recognized by the Royal Society of Canada," says Dr. Marois. "This fellowship facilitates networking with experts in various fields of research, which fosters interdisciplinary research and exchange both nationally and internationally to address the challenges Canada faces now and in the future."
The first exoplanet, a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun, was detected in 995. This was only 2 years before Dr. Marois took a chance and launched his pioneering astronomy career.
"When I started my master's degree in 1997 at the Université de Montréal, exoplanet imaging was in its infancy with only a handful of astronomers working in the field," he explains. "I was motivated at the prospect of essentially pioneering a new branch of astronomy where there was so much left to discover."
Dr. Marois did not take long to innovate. As part of his PhD research, he took the lead of the world's first dedicated camera to image exoplanets, and he invented new breakthrough observing techniques that are now widely used by the entire exoplanet imaging community.
But not everyone thought that pursuing an emerging field was the best idea for a sustained research career. "I did get comments while doing my PhD that going into the exoplanet field was a mistake that could possibly end my research career very early," he says. "In the beginning, my team had a hard time getting access to telescopes to test our technology because of the belief that it was nearly impossible to image exoplanets."
In 2008, Dr. Marois and his team disproved this commonly held assumption when his team succeeded in taking the first pictures of an exoplanet. They captured infrared images of 3 gas giant exoplanets orbiting a star called HR8799, planets similar to Jupiter.
"Some have likened the significance of the discovery to Galileo's observations of Jupiter's moons in the 1600s," says Luc Simard, Director General of the NRC's Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre. "Dr. Marois's invention of the high-contrast imaging techniques that allowed for the landmark discovery has fundamentally changed the field of astronomy."
Since the 2008 discovery, Dr. Marois has been able to observe a total of 5 exoplanets in the HR8799 exosolar system and has been part of extensive surveys making other breakthrough exoplanet discoveries. His goal is to further develop technology to make it possible to detect smaller and lower-mass, Earth-like exoplanets and search for life signatures.
Moving towards this lofty pursuit, in 2016, he founded NEW EARTH Laboratory, Canada's first high-contrast imaging laboratory. The 10-person team has created a technique to allow for real-time image correction that will lead to observations of unprecedented accuracy and detail. Now, Dr. Marois is involved in Canada's participation in NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory, a space-based mission to replace the Hubble Telescope. He looks forward to exciting science discoveries with his team and new frontier instruments, which will be operational in the next few years.
"I grew up with the first high-resolution pictures of the planets in our solar system that were taken by the Voyager spacecraft missions. Once the first exoplanets were discovered, I wanted to be able to see them," Dr. Marois says. "The HR8799 discovery was a childhood dream come true, but it is just the beginning."
Dr. Jennifer Veitch, Principal Research Officer, Construction Research Centre
Dr. Jennifer Veitch was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for her more than 3 decades of ground-breaking lighting research.
"I am humbled and delighted to be invited to join a society whose members I have looked up to for so many years," says Dr. Veitch. "To be recognized as one of these leaders is a great honour, but it also carries a great responsibility to contribute to creating a better future, in Canada and around the world."
When she joined the lighting group of the NRC's Construction Research Centre (formerly the Institute for Research in Construction) in 1992, there was no accepted framework for studying lighting quality and its psychological impact. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Veitch was part of the team that built the NRC's indoor environment research facility. The facility was created to support research that studies how people interact with different environmental conditions and technologies, also known as human factors. The first research conducted in the facility was the lighting experiments that started the sequence of research that Dr. Veitch is now being recognized for by the Royal Society of Canada.
The research allowed her and her team to assess the physical impact that lighting had on an employee, as if they were sitting in a cubicle in a real office setting. This pioneering research demonstrated, for the first time, that better indoor lighting could increase employee well-being and productivity while being more energy efficient.
"The NRC has unique facilities and people without which our work could not have been conducted," she says. "We probably would not have been able to do the field work first without the credibility we built by refining our ideas within the laboratory."
This study changed the field of lighting research and created the foundation for a globally accepted framework that was adopted by international lighting associations, including the International Commission on Lighting (CIE), where she is currently president.
"We aspired to have a significant impact on the field," Dr. Veitch says. "It took the combined effort, over years, of many people to have that influence. My former colleague Dr. Guy Newsham and I worked together on many of the key publications, and we both served on the committees where this work was taken up."
Now, Dr. Veitch is part of the human–building interaction team at the building performance and quality research unit within the NRC's Construction Research Centre. As part of this team, she researches the full psychological impact of indoor environments, including acoustics and air quality. She has provided some of the first evidence that low-energy green buildings have psychological benefits for their occupants.
"As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, my long-term goal is to contribute to the better use of psychological science in decision-making and policy, particularly with respect to climate change," she says. "Our choices about what, how and when to light influence not only human well-being and functioning but also the natural world, the visibility of the night sky and the energy we consume to produce that light."
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