The New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) is providing almost C$60 million to support 32 research teams leveraging international expertise to tackle global challenges caused by climate change, through the 2023 International Joint Initiative for Research in Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation competition. International partners are contributing more than C$30 million in additional funding. Projects funded focus on designing and implementing co-produced adaptation and mitigation strategies for groups most vulnerable to climate change impacts. As well, the NFRF 2023 Exploration competition awarded 133 research teams a total of $33 million over two years to support high-risk, high-reward, interdisciplinary research.

SSHRC Impact Award winners Kang Lee (Insight) and Andrew Martindale (Connection) have both received 2024 Governor General’s Innovation Awards. Martindale won as part of the Canadian Archeological Association Working Group on Unmarked Graves, which developed resources for those affected by the search for missing children and unmarked burials. Lee’s award recognized his groundbreaking research on childhood dishonesty, which led to unexpected legal, clinical and health-care practice innovations.

SSHRC and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation have renewed and expanded their joint Housing Research Scholarship Program supporting social sciences and humanities research training and capacity building in priority housing areas. The revised model will offer funding options through existing upcoming funding opportunities for postdoctoral researchers—and now also master’s and doctoral students—studying areas related to the National Housing Strategy.

The Action Plan for Black Researchers (2024–29) is live on SSHRC’s website. Based on findings and recommendations from SSHRC’s Advisory Committee to Address Anti-Black Racism in Research and Research Training, and dozens of engagement sessions, it provides strategies within and beyond SSHRC to achieve fair access, equitable participation and intersectional approaches to research and research assessment; and to advance Black Studies and social sciences and humanities research on anti-Black racism.

The previously pilot Tri-agency Interdisciplinary Peer Review Committee has officially been made permanent. It has also announced the results of its second year of review. The committee assesses interdisciplinary applications to several funding opportunities at the three federal research funding agencies.

Recipients have been announced for SSHRC’s Ideas Lab: Global Health and Wellness for the 21st Century, and Evolving Narratives of Cultures and Histories Knowledge Synthesis Grants competitions. Both funding opportunities stem from SSHRC’s Imagining Canada’s Future initiative.

On May 29, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, announced this year’s funded research partnerships. More than $37 million in Partnership Grants goes to 15 project teams over seven years, while 75 project teams will receive a total of over $14 million in Partnership Development Grants funding over three years.