One marker of our success as a research-intensive university is our capacity to attract and support the highest quality doctoral students. Doctoral students bring with them their imagination, a freshness of perspective, superior analytical skills, and a motivation to produce high-level work. As a result, they are a benefit to any scholarly endeavour or research laboratory.
To recruit such doctoral students, and enable them to perform at their best, there is a need to provide funding that allows them to focus on their research. With the President’s 2010 Doctoral Fellowship, Carleton has the opportunity to satisfy these requirements, providing significant funding for up to 4 years to doctoral students associated with a specific research project.
Funded by a one-time contribution from the university, the President’s 2010 Doctoral Fellowship Program invited applications from Carleton researchers rather than have the students seek the fellowships. The winning senior researchers could then add their own funding to create a package that would attract the best candidates from around the world; to enable some or our excellent junior faculty to maximize their competitive ability to attract the best students, OVPRI also provided additional funding to support the research project.
The 15 faculty members and doctoral students represented in this edition of Research Works not only demonstrate the strength of Carleton’s research profile, but also show the benefits of pairing the research mandate of the university with the recruitment of excellent doctoral students. With these fellowships, Carleton recognizes that the needs of research and the needs of doctoral students are interwoven.
Kim Matheson,
Vice-President (Research and International)
John Shepherd,
Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs
