Lori G. Beaman is currently the Principal Investigator of the Nonreligion in a Complex Future (NCF) Project, a $2.5 million, 7-year Partnership Grant funded by SSHRC and housed at the University of Ottawa. With a team of 21 researchers, this international, comparative, interdisciplinary research project identifies the social impact of the rapid and dramatic increase of nonreligion in Canada, Australia, the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland), the United States, the United Kingdom, and Latin America (Brazil and Argentina). The primary focus is to study the relationship between increasingly complex diversities created by growing nonreligion populations and institutions, and to build an evidence base from which to identify models for living well together in complex, diverse, and inclusive societies. The project looks specifically at social institutions where nonreligion is increasingly visible such as health, law, education, and in the environment and migration. In each of these areas, the NCF project asks how the approaches and interests of the nonreligious challenge existing and taken-for-granted practices and cultures.

Dr. Stefanie Carsley is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, Common Law Section where she researches and teaches in the areas of family law, health law and tort law. Her research focuses on Canadian law and policy responses to assisted reproduction (surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and sperm, egg and embryo donation).

Jennifer A. Chandler studies the legal and ethical aspects of biomedical science and technology, with a focus on (1) the intersection of the brain sciences, law and ethics, and (2) legal policy related to organ donation and transplantation. She holds the University of Ottawa’s Bertram Loeb Research Chair. She leads the “Neuroethics Law and Society” Research Pillar for the Brain Mind Research Institute and sits on its Scientific Advisory Council. In her research, she collaborates with a diverse international group of academics and clinicians and she led the recent publication of the first international comparative study of the laws of “psychosurgery” with the contributions of leading functional neurosurgeons from Europe, Asia and the Americas. She coordinates a new tri-national project – Hybrid Minds – bringing together researchers from Switzerland, Germany and Canada to examine the implications of embedding artificial intelligence within neuroprosthetics. For the past several years, she has run a discussion group called Mind-Brain-Law which went online during the pandemic and includes nearly 100 members from North and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. She is active in Canadian neuroscience research funding policy, and currently sits as a member of the Advisory Board for the Institute for Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction. Jennifer Chandler also regularly contributes to Canadian governmental policy on contentious matters of biomedicine. She is a member of the Government’s independent panel advising on safeguards related to medical assistance in dying in the context of mental illness, and was a member of the 2018 government-commissioned National Expert Panel on Medical Assistance in Dying. She is currently co-chairing the law and ethics working group of a CBS-sponsored clinical guideline development process looking at the definition of brain death and criteria for the determination of brain death, and she also chairs the Ethics Committee of the Canadian Society for Transplantation.

The pace of societal change is accelerating. Pandemics, artificial intelligence, space exploration, climate change, political upheavals, anomalous sightings, and even the new ways in which we communicate with each other are all contributing to an ever more confusing and frantic world. As a global health epidemiologist and science communicator, Professor Deonandan sees his role as bringing measurement and critical appraisal to whatever evidence exists to help us navigate this thickening soup of competing influences. Much of his scholastic output involves the epidemiology of reproductive technologies and the ethics of global health interventions, as well digital technologies in health care and the creative use of administrative data to answer questions surrounding population health. A significant portion of Professor Deonandan’s global health work has been conducted in the interior of Guyana, where he has worked to both measure and mitigate the health challenges experienced by remote Indigenous peoples. During the COVID pandemic, Professor Deonandan focused solely on communicating infection risk and vaccine science to the general public, assessing the potency of mitigation strategies, charting the trajectory of the epidemic, and weighing the changing evidence to advise on pandemic response policies. Professor Deonandan is also examining how artificial intelligence can improve pedagogy, with specific focus on using large language models to improve writing skills among health science students. His larger vision is to reimagine the wider role of the university in society in the face of rapid technological change.

Michelle Giroux's research focuses on end-of-life care as well as filiation and the definition of the family. She works on topics related to assisted reproduction, including the fundamental right to know one’s origins and motherhood for others. She is interested in multidisciplinary approaches to analyzing law.

Jason Millar is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Design and Teaching Innovation at the University of Ottawa, with a cross-appointment in the Department of Philosophy. He holds the Canada Research Chair in the Ethical Engineering of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and is Director of the Canadian Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Ethical Design Lab (CRAiEDL.ca). He researches the ethical engineering of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), with a focus on empowering engineers to integrate ethical thinking into their daily engineering workflow. Jason’s work focuses primarily on the ethics, policy and the ethical engineering of automated vehicles, artificial intelligence, healthcare robotics, social and military robotics. Jason has a degree in engineering physics, and worked for several years as an engineer before turning his full-time attention to issues in philosophy and applied ethics.