2026 – 2032

CREATE—IMPACT

Training the next generation of engineers, architects, and health researchers to design climate-resilient, equitable infrastructure — alongside the communities who live in it.

Most engineering and science programs teach students to solve problems for communities. We're training a generation who knows how to do it with them.

CREATE-IMPACT is a national, interdisciplinary training program preparing researchers to work across engineering, architecture, public health, and the social sciences, in partnership with Indigenous Nations, housing authorities, municipalities, and industry partners. Over six years, it will train seventy graduate researchers and postdoctoral fellows alongside thirty-eight community researchers.

We work from a simple premise: technical expertise and community knowledge both belong at the centre of the work. Training flows both ways: researchers learn from communities, and communities build their own technical capacity. This is what it looks like when research is done in genuine partnership: in real places, with real people, on questions that actually matter.

01

Co-designing research with communities

Trainees work alongside community members to shape research questions, methods, and outcomes — bringing skills to a shared table, not answers from the outside.

02

Building technical capacity in communities

Community researchers and practitioners train alongside graduate students; gaining hands-on skills in diagnostics, monitoring, and assessment that stay in the community long after the project ends.

03

Rigorous science, grounded in place

Building science, indoor air quality, energy systems, health outcomes — technical work tested in real environments and shared back in forms communities can actually use.

70.
Graduate researchers & postdoctoral fellows trained over six years.
38.
Community researchers trained alongside graduate students.
6.
Partner universities collaborating nationally.
40+
Community, government, and industry partners.
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The team

Toronto Metropolitan University

  • Dr. Helen Stopps

    Program Director, Assistant Professor · Department of Architectural Science

  • Dr. Russell Richman

    Professor · Department of Architectural Science

University of Toronto

  • Dr. Élyse Caron-Beaudoin

    Assistant Professor · Department of Health and Society

  • Dr. Sarah Haines

    Assistant Professor · Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering

  • Dr. Marianne Touchie

    Associate Professor, Tier 2 CRC in Sustainable Urban Housing · Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)

  • Dr. Sean Kidd

    Co-Director & Senior Scientist · Institute for Mental Health Policy Research

Queen's University

  • Dr. Mark Green

    Professor, NSERC Scholar-in-Residence · Department of Civil Engineering

Université Laval

  • Dr. Louis Gosselin

    Professor, Tier 1 CRC in Energy Efficiency · Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

Carleton University

  • Dr. Liam O'Brien

    Professor · Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering

University of Manitoba

  • Dr. Linda Larcombe

    Professor · Department of Internal Medicine, Max Rady College of Medicine