Drawn home by the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program, two social scientists make a splash in Canada

Two Canadian social scientists building impressive careers in Europe and the United States were drawn home by the Canada 150 Research Chairs (C150) Program, which marked the country’s 150th anniversary in 2017 and comes to a close in 2025. The one-time Government of Canada initiative invested $117.6 million to enhance Canada’s research capacity, attracting global interest: applications came in from expatriates, from scholars with ties to Canada, and even from experts who had never been to the country.

The timing was right for international affairs expert Jennifer Welsh, who joined McGill University as the C150 in Global Governance and Society. Originally from Regina, Welsh had been in Europe for nearly 20 years, first at Oxford University and then with the European University Institute in Italy. For three years, she was the special adviser to the now former secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, on the responsibility to protect.

After Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, Welsh started to question whether she wanted to return to Oxford. McGill was getting ready to launch a new public policy school in Montréal, which Welsh would be able to help shape.

“The chance to be part of building up something new at McGill was really interesting to me,” she says.

Azim Shariff, a social psychologist originally from Vancouver, had won a rising star award in his field and secured a dream position at the University of California, Irvine. He had been in the United States for eight years, but 2016 was a tumultuous time in the US. Shariff was thrilled to return to Vancouver when offered the C150 in Moral Psychology at The University of British Columbia (UBC).

“I'm very happy that the C150 program was able to bring this diverse group of researchers to Canada and display a renewed commitment in the country to basic research,” Shariff says.

Welsh and Shariff agree that Canada has been a great place to pursue the work they are each passionate about.

Welsh has been impressed by the quality of McGill’s undergraduate students, highlighting “the ease with which you can involve students in research activities.”

She has had the opportunity to advise the Government of Canada, in nearby Ottawa, where she finds policy-makers are engaged and open to her advice. As well, Montréal’s proximity to UN Headquarters in New York is helpful as Welsh continues her advisory work with the global body. She currently sits as a member of the internally displaced people (IDP) Protection Expert Group, co-led by the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of IDPs and UNHCR.

Shariff, meanwhile, praises UBC’s psychology department as one of the best in the world.

“Having all these great collaborators there, having such smart people to bounce ideas off, has been amazing,” he says.

Shariff explains the C150 program allowed him to pursue a broad range of research projects and pursue new avenues to communicate his research. He turned one paper on the moralization of effort—which he worked on over his time as a C150 Chair, with then-graduate student Jared Celniker—into a TED Talk he delivered in New York City in February 2023. In the talk, he asks why we attach a moral worth to the expenditure of effort, regardless of the outcome, and imagines building a better workplace culture.

“It seems to have hit a nerve. It’s been seen nearly two  million times now,” he says.

Shariff also designed and conducted a multicountry study with then-graduate student Nava Caluori on the decline of religiosity and the rise of atheism. While traditional research methods have struggled to pinpoint the change of something so personal, Shariff’s work was able to show that, especially in countries where the cultural pressure to appear religious is significant, many more individuals are privately identifying as atheists than previous measures would indicate.

As the C150 program draws to a close in 2025, C150s like Welsh and Shariff are proud of what they’ve accomplished on their home turf—and looking forward to doing even more.

For Welsh, at the top of her impact list is the new Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill. Its first students were admitted in fall 2019, and Welsh is set to take over as the school’s next director.

“There’s a great foundation, and now it’s about taking it to the next level,” she says. “I want to make it much more global in its orientation, both in terms of teaching and policy impact.”

This is an important time for Canada to have a convening space for important policy discussions, Welsh says, because the global context is changing so quickly, and existing institutions are struggling to adapt. The rise of conflict, mass migration, climate change and populism are creating a new and more complex world. Welsh herself is passionate about evidence-based policy, and about teaching students how policy development interacts with partisan politics.

At UBC, Shariff has established the Centre for Applied Moral Psychology (CAMP). CAMP works to be a bridge between the basic research insights of moral psychology and applying it to real world topics like religiosity, work effort and emerging technologies.

The new projects Shariff is currently ramping up with his more junior graduate students centre on pressing questions of political politicization and declining trust in institutions.

“I think it’s the area we can contribute to most novelly now,” he says. “We’re looking to break new ground.”

With some of the world’s top research talent having been attracted to Canadian universities, the next generation of business, civic and academic leaders can learn from the best.

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Keywords

• Evidence-based policy
• Climate change
• Global governance
• Religiosity
• Emerging technologies
• Moral psychology
• Mass migration
• Institutions
• Atheism
• Populism
• Research capacity