What are you focused on these days?

My research focuses on two related questions about how evidence on “what works” gets made and used by policymakers. The first is “what works to improve health and education outcomes in low-income countries, and how do we know this?” The second is “how does evidence get used once it exists in Canada?”

On the first question, I’ve spent several years working with data from the Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC), which is the largest-ever donor-funded initiative in girls’ education around the world. All of these projects underwent large-scale evaluations to promote learning across the portfolio, and most of my work has focused on evaluating single programs within this portfolio. But more recently, I’ve been wrapping up a SSHRC-funded project that looks at all thirty-seven GEC projects at once to see how the design of the evaluations of each project affected the decisions about how projects were improved over their lifecycle.

On the second question, I recently published a new paper that examines every evaluation report published in the last ten years by the ten largest federal departments in Canada. I looked at how evaluators define “effectiveness” and found that departments have been drifting towards a focus on how programs are being implemented rather than also focusing on the outcomes these programs achieve, even though Canada’s federal Policy on Results requires programs to focus on outcomes.

Why is this work important right now?

Governments and donor agencies are facing hard choices about what to fund, and knowing what works is essential to make good decisions here. At the same time, making sure evaluations that provide this kind of evidence are done in a way that is informative to policymakers and are ready when they’re needed is really difficult, especially when evaluation systems within organizations are complex. So I’m excited that all the areas of my work have been leading me to think more deeply about not just which programs work, but also the evidence-generating systems that allow us to figure that out. This is particularly relevant in Canada right now, with the national Policy on Results under review. This means the rules governing how every federal department evaluates its programs are being reviewed for the first time since 2016, giving us a rare window where empirical work on evaluation practice can truly shape evaluation policy rather than just describe it.

What is a question you hope to answer with your research?

In the broadest sense, I want to know “Does the kind of evidence an evaluation produces change what an organization actually does afterward?” If evaluations take too long, don’t answer the right questions, don’t create evidence that people trust, or are sycophantic, then evaluations become a performative check-box exercise that uses up valuable time and resources. We have a large literature on evaluation quality and a separate literature on evaluation use, and they rarely meet. I want to bridge that gap.

What is something people would be surprised to learn?

Lots of people have no idea that the federal government publishes reports on nearly every federally funded program in Canada. There are thousands of pages of findings about what works (and doesn’t work) in Canadian public programs that almost no one reads. A lot of my work lately has been focused on using new natural language processing methods to analyze these altogether to figure out what’s working within federal programs (and the evaluations themselves!) in Canada.

Another thing that continues to surprise me is how rarely federal evaluations in Canada try to establish causality in federal programs. While this is definitely not the right approach for every project, there have been huge advancements in methods that can be used to figure out whether programs cause a change in the outcomes they’re targeting. These are widely used by economists and other scholars evaluating programs for academic work, but are barely ever used within federal evaluations even when they could be tremendously informative, and I think this is often a missed opportunity.

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?

Despite my last answer, a common misconception is that methodological complexity is always better. It’s vital to be accurate and rigorous in evaluations, but doing something more complicated like a randomized controlled trial isn’t always better if it answers a question that no one is asking, or will only be ready after answers are needed. Complexity comes with tradeoffs because more complicated evaluations cost more time and resources, so finding the right kind of evaluation design needs to consider the balance of these tradeoffs.

Any new projects you’re excited about?

Yes! I’m currently working on an exciting extension of the paper I published earlier this year on the Policy on Results, looking at what happens after the reports are written. I’m doing this by tying each evaluation report to the management response and action plan, where departments declare what they’re committing to doing in response to an evaluation’s findings. These are the closest thing we have to a record of evaluation use, so I’ve built a new dataset that tracks the relationship between the evaluation findings and the action plans. This will let me figure out what types of evaluation findings are most useful for decision makers, and what kinds of evaluation design choices helped make the findings useful.

What’s your favourite class to teach?

We have the best students at the School of Public Policy and Administration, so this is a really hard choice! I love teaching Evaluation Design for our Diploma in Program and Policy Evaluation students. This is where students get to apply all the theory they learn about evaluation design and bring it to a real-world project that they evaluate over the course of their 16 months in the program. Helping students navigate the very real challenges of doing an evaluation in practice and watching these turn into useful evaluations is such a joy. But I also really love teaching our Microeconomics for Public Policy Analysis in the School’s Master’s of Public Policy and Administration program. A lot of students come to the course feeling either worried about the math involved or very disinterested in all things related to economics. It’s an exciting challenge to get students engaged to see why using economic analysis can be so useful. Usually, by the end of the course, I can directly see the impact my class has had on how students see the world, which is incredibly rewarding.

What is a question you hope to answer with your research?  

As a visual culture scholar, I’m interested in how images shape our understanding of the political structures behind land use, resource extraction, and environmental damage—and how art might offer alternative stories that reshape how we understand climate change. Put simply, how did we arrive at the current crisis, and what new ways of seeing and imagining might help us think about where we go next? 

What are you focused on these days?  

I’m interested in how chemically managed agriculture reshaped our world. My current book project, which I’m cowriting with Jennifer Raab, turns to the nineteenth century when fertilizers made from materials like bones, guano, and rock became vital tools of agriculture. Fertilizers helped feed a rapidly growing global population, but they’ve also driven environmental damage, extractive industries, and forms of colonial control over land and people. 

The elements that make crops grow—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—also underpin the vast system of chemical fertilizers that sustain modern agriculture. We often think about fertilizers as purely technical or neutral tools, simply a matter of feeding crops more efficiently. That framing treats agriculture as a problem of inputs and outputs, rather than as something shaped by history, politics, and power. These elements have transformed not just ecosystems, but economies, labor systems, and entire landscapes.  

What interests me most is how all of this was made to seem normal. Images played a critical role. In maps, advertisements, paintings, scientific diagrams, and photographs, fertile land was portrayed as abundant, empty, and ready for improvement, helping justify agricultural expansion and resource extraction across the Americas. My research traces how these visual and scientific ways of seeing turned soil into something to be managed and optimized. At the same time, I’m exploring how art and visual culture can tell different stories—ones that make these histories visible and open up new ways of thinking about land, responsibility, and the future of food on a changing planet. 

Why is this work important right now?  

Much of the conversation around environmental change focuses on carbon, which frames climate change primarily as an atmospheric problem. But earth system scientists identify nine planetary boundaries that regulate the stability of the biosphere—the limits within which humanity can safely operate. One of these, the boundary for biogeochemical flows, tracks nutrient overload, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, and it has already been crossed due to excessive fertilizer use. When too much of these nutrients runs off into lakes and rivers, it fuels rapid algal growth. As the algae die and decompose, they consume oxygen, creating low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ where aquatic life cannot survive. This growing crisis raises a fundamental challenge: how can we feed the world without destroying the planet? 

What is something people would be surprised to learn?  

One thing that often surprises people is just how literal the phrase “feeding the soil” once was. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, farmers relied on ground-up bones as a key source of nutrients for crops. Animal remains were the primary source, but contemporary reports also suggest that bones were taken from battlefields, tombs, and catacombs, and shipped to factories to be processed into fertilizer. While not all of these accounts can be fully verified, they circulated widely at the time—and align with documented shortages and missing remains—pointing to a moment when agricultural progress was, quite literally, built on the dead. 

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?  

A common misconception is that visual culture and media studies are purely interpretive fields. In reality, they intersect with areas like political economy, science and technology studies, and even data analysis. Together, these approaches offer rigorous and wide-ranging ways to understand how images and media systems shape everything from everyday experience to large-scale political and environmental issues. 

Any new projects you’re excited about?  

I’m working on a project on critical minerals and media technologies in collaboration with Gustave Lester. Critical minerals have become central to contemporary geopolitics, shaping domains that range from energy transitions to digital infrastructures and military systems. Initially defined through the lens of national security, the category has expanded to encompass materials essential to renewable energy systems as well as media technologies such as smartphones, computers, and data centers. 

We are seeing a resurgence of policy and public discourse on critical minerals, and this project examines how the designation itself emerged, how it informs governance and policy frameworks, and what consequences it carries for the environment and media infrastructures. 

What’s your favourite class to teach? 

I teach a special topics class called Material Histories of Photography which involves object-based study at the National Gallery of Canada, Library and Archives Canada, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Canadian Museum of History. It’s a great opportunity for students to work directly with photographic materials and histories—and for all of us to get off our screens! I also really enjoy teaching Environmental Communication, where we explore how environmental issues are represented, mediated, and contested across different platforms and publics. 

Three ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University-led research initiatives have been awarded Partnership Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), bringing $7.5 million in federal funding to support collaborative research on cybersecurity, democratic governance and international trade.

When ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University was formally and unanimously admitted into membership of the University of the Arctic (UArctic) at the network’s annual assembly in Inari, Finland, last weekend, the organization gained an international leader in Arctic research and education. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ has a long history of collaborating with northern communities to help empower the next generation of leaders and address societal, environmental and economic challenges in the region.

Professor Mehdi Ammi, a faculty member in ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s School of Public Policy & Administration, will lead a team of researchers and partners from across Canada on a new project entitled, “Public Health Financing and Equity: Building Evidence and Networks for Resilient Systems in Canada.” The project will be supported for three years by a $749,700 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, through their Team Grant program supporting research on the theme of Strengthening Resilient & Equitable Public Health Systems.ĚýĚý

“Since beginning researching this topic in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become increasingly clear that a deeper understanding of the trends, determinants, and impacts of public health financing in Canada is needed,” says Professor Ammi. â€œI was excited to see the call for a Team Grant dedicated to public health systems, and thrilled and honored that our project was selected through such a highly competitive process.”  

Building on several years of collaboration and leadership in the area of public health financing research, the team will leverage its extensive network of academic, public sector, and community partners to address critical gaps in Canada’s capacity to monitor and improve public health financing through an equity lens.  

“Professor Ammi’s research promises to have profound impact on Canada’s public health system,” says Josh Greenberg, Associate Dean (Research and Graduate). “With this timely and important grant, Mehdi continues to build a strong profile within Canada and internationally as a leading health economist and health policy researcher.”  

Over the next three years, Professor Ammi and his STEPS team will analyze differences in public health spending across provinces and regions, assess how public health and social spending together influence and are influenced by population health and health inequities, and work together to design and pilot one of Canada’s first learning health systems for public health financing in QuĂŠbec, Ontario and British Columbia.  

This project is anchored by a bilingual tri-partite leadership team representing Canada’s three largest provinces. Along Professor Ammi, the tri-partite leadership team include Lara Miramontes from the British Columbia Ministry of Health, and Thomas Bastien from the Association pour la SantĂŠ Publique du QuĂŠbec (ASPQ). The team of co-investigators also includes ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s School of Public Policy and Administration Assistant Professor Ardyn Nordstrom.   

This is the second CIHR Team Grant awarded to a Faculty of Public and Global Affairs researcher in 2026. CIHR Team Grants support larger, cross-sectoral research teams conducting health-related research, contributing to the Faculty of Public and Global Affairs vision to lead, connect and transform.

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University researcher Thomas Russell has been announced as the university’s newest  (CRC). His innovative research focuses on developing advanced economic models that can be utilized with limited computing power.

Researchers in the fields of public policy, international affairs, economics, communication, law and political science have been recognized by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). 

While the majority of the awards are under embargo, three were announced publicly recently. They include a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant, which supports a short-term partnered research activity, and SSHRC Connection Grants, which support those running a knowledge mobilization event or outreach activity.  

SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant

Daniel Rosenbloom, Ivey Research Chair in Sustainability Transitions  

School of Public Policy and Administration 

Project Title: Assessing systemic outcomes of smart grid demonstrations: A transitions-informed, transdisciplinary approach 

Description: This project responds to the urgent need to accelerate sustainable energy transitions, recognizing these shifts require
not only technological innovation but also long-term changes in institutions, practices, and policy frameworks (i.e., system change). As real-world experiments for emerging technologies and approaches, demonstration projects are central to these transitions (IEA, 2024). However, their long-run contributions to system change are difficult to assess, limiting the ability of governments and other societal actors to determine when, where, and how to support such interventions to encourage transitions (Janssen et al., 2022). This challenge is heightened in Canada, where regional energy diversity, uneven decarbonization pathways, and complex jurisdictional arrangements shape heterogeneous trajectories of change (Meadowcroft, 2016).

To address this gap, the project will combine academic expertise in sustainability transitions with practitioner insight from Natural Resources Canada’s Office of Energy Research and Development (NRCan-OERD) to: design a practical,
transition-informed approach for assessing demonstration projects within processes of system change; test and apply this approach to three longitudinal case studies drawn from diverse regional contexts, using Smart Grid Program data from NRCan-OERD; and share lessons with relevant societal actors regarding the mechanisms through which demonstration projects contribute to transitions.

SSHRC Connection Grants 

Elisabeth Gilmore, Associate Professor 

Norman Paterson School of International Affairs 

Project Title: Bridging scales of action: Operationalising the Global Goal on Adaptation in Canada 

Description: â€œClimate change is already reshaping communities across Canada. Floods in British Columbia, wildfires in Alberta, permafrost thaw in the North, and coastal erosion in Atlantic Canada are no longer future projections—they are present realities requiring urgent action. While the Paris Agreement commits nations to adapting to climate change, there has been no agreed way to measure whether these efforts are actually working. That changed in 2025 when the United Nations adopted a framework of  indicators to track global adaptation progress. 

Three Canadians, the leaders of this project, were among the 78 international experts who developed these indicators. Dr.  Elisabeth Gilmore (ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University), Dr. Ousmane Seidou (University of Ottawa), and Laura Lynes (The Resilience Institute) now seek to lead Canada’s domestic engagement with this framework, ensuring it reflects Canadian priorities around reconciliation, regional diversity, and equity.” 

Peter AndrĂŠe, Associate Professor  

Department of Political Science 

Project Title: Living relations Wananga: Relational engagement for Indigenous-led sustainable food systems transitions in Aotearoa New Zealand and Turtle Island Canada 

Description: â€œLiving Relations Wananga will expand the reach and impact of existing research by refining and mobilizing outputs, incorporating new organizational partners and Indigenous researchers, broadening community engagement, and training students in decolonizing methodologies. LRW will foreground relational knowledge exchange while catalyzing a range of actors to see the growing role of Indigenous approaches and leadership in the sustainability transition.” 

Tracey P. Lauriault, Associate Professor, Critical Media and Big Data, School of Journalism and Communication, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, has been appointed as a member of the Expert Panel on the State of Citizen Science in Canada at the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA).

Field Notes 
Jane Dickson, Law and Legal Studies

Jane Dickson’s work focuses on strengthening Indigenous access to justice through the development, training, and evaluation of Gladue reports and culturally informed sentencing practices.

Can you offer a “lay” description of your research topic? 

My research area is Indigenous access to justice, most notably in the criminal justice sphere and with a focus on what are called the ‘Gladue principles’ across the criminal justice system and increasingly, into other areas of law as well. These principles require the courts to consider the unique background and circumstances of an Indigenous person and any alternatives to incarceration that are reasonable given the offence and degree of culpability of the offender.  

Ideally, this information is provided to the courts in the form of a Gladue report. I train people to write these reports and have completed several research projects on the impacts of those reports and the Gladue principles more generally; I have also evaluated some of the largest Gladue service providers in the country. 

What piqued your interest in this topic? 

 My research originally focused on the reclamation of Indigenous law and legal structures through the revitalization and implementation of that law and structures within First Nations.  

However, It quickly became apparent that outside governments were supportive of ‘restorative justice projects’ but much less so of the reinstitution of traditional law. This led to me shift my attention to addressing inequities in the colonial system and to focus on Gladue, sentencing and pushing back on the mass incarceration of Indigenous people in Canada. 

What question were you hoping to answer in your research? 

 Broadly speaking, how can we better respect and support Indigenous justice systems within Indigenous nations and maximize access to justice for Indigenous citizens who become involved with the colonial justice system?

What is something people would be surprised to learn? 

The Department of Law and Legal Studies houses the Ottawa Pro Bono Gladue Project, which I run with my former graduate student, Kerry MacDonell. We have a group of certified Gladue writers who volunteer to provide reports to Indigenous people in the Ottawa-Kingston area; we are now also supporting people across Canada, which is very exciting and keeps us very busy. 

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area? 

The biggest misconception is that Gladue considerations are a ‘get out of jail free card’ – since the advent of Gladue in 1999, rates of incarceration of Indigenous people have continued to climb. Since 2000/2001, the incarcerated Indigenous population has risen by 56.2% 

Any new projects that you’re excited about? 

I have a few very exciting projects on the horizon, but will just mention one, which is a research project to support the development of national standards for Gladue reports, Gladue writers and Gladue training. This is important to me as a Gladue writer, educator and ally of Indigenous people who understands the challenges of this work and the magnitude of task Gladue is intended to address.

What’s your favourite class to teach? 

That’s a tough question! I like teaching first year very much but am presently also enjoying teaching my fourth-year seminar, which exposes students to the research on Gladue and to those working with Gladue in the system. I am fortunate to have a number of amazing guest speakers, including the Chief of the Ottawa Police Service, Indigenous and non-Indigenous senior Judges and Justices of the Peace of the Ontario Court of Justice, Crown and defence counsel, Gladue writers, and the Director of Special Projects at the Office of the Federal Correctional Investigator. It is a great blend of theory and practice. The course has also opened up employment opportunities for some of my students and helped others to locate mentors and resources to assist them with careers in the law and legal services.  

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University researchers, Jennifer Evans, Elisabeth Gilmore, Carmen Robertson and Richard Yu have been named to the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), honouring the significant impact they have made in their respective fields.