Institute for Science, Society and Policy

Inaugural Director and Core Member, ISSP
​​​​Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of Ottawa

I had the privilege to be the rapporteur at the Workshop on Principles & Guidelines for Government Scientific Advice held on September 28, 2016 and to report the results to the plenary of the 2nd INGSA Conference two days later. The workshop was facilitated by James Wilsdon and Dan Sarewitz and included approximately 40 experts from 20 nations, with additional input from the Global Young Academy. I offer here observations from the rapporteur’s vantage point.

Postdoctoral Fellow, ISSP
Global Governance PhD candidate (ABD) at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo

The Canadian government has expressed a strong commitment to grounding its action on climate change in fact-based decision-making and robust science. Computer-based climate-economy models have become standard tools for aiding decisions on climate policy. As such, these models offer an important and revealing example of the science- policy interface that the ISSP works in.

Canada Research Chair in Information Law,
Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

Municipal police services in North America now commonly make digital crime maps available to the public online. These interactive maps allow individuals to choose a particular part of their city, as well as a window of time (crimes in the last 7, 14 or 21 days, for example). They can search for all mapped crimes in this time frame or can limit their search to particular types of crime. The results are returned in the form of icons on a map of the selected area. The icons represent different categories of criminal activity, and clicking on each icon will reveal basic information about the incident.

Core member, ISSP
Professor, School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa

Some of my colleagues and I take the old bingo-game approach to conferences: a point awarded for every mention of ‘paradigm shift,’ ‘disruptive,’ or ‘game changer.’ We can be rather smug about perceived naivety on the part of colleagues working in discovery-oriented research. We are also chronically irritated by the ongoing hype about genomics research, which is almost never lived up to. But I may have to shake off this jaded view of the world; it really does look like we have something genuinely exciting in the newest gene-editing techniques. CRISPR-Cas9 is not the first, but it is easy; so much so that the Nuffield Council on Bioethics warns about ‘garage scientists’ paying less than $200 to add it to their DIY toolkit. So, we have a technology which seems to work, is easy to use, and may be very affordable. No problems?