Saint Mary's University Faculty of Graduate Studies & Research - Dean's Message

Welcome to the web pages of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research (FGSR). It is a pleasure and an honour to serve as the first full-time Dean of the Faculty. It is an exciting time to be serving in this role as Saint Mary's University finds itself in an unprecedented rate of expansion of its graduate studies programs and research activities.

Saint Mary’s University is a great place to pursue graduate studies. Since my arrival here in January 2005, I have been particularly impressed with the commitment of all levels of the University in the pursuit of graduate studies and programs, from individual Faculty members right up to the President’s Office. We offer 19 different programs (15 Masters, three PhDs, and one graduate diploma) across the Faculties of Arts, Science and Commerce. The University and the campus are compact enough to still have a strong sense of community, but the resources are here to pursue advanced studies at state-of-the-art/science level.

In terms of research activities at Saint Mary’s, the great expertise resident in our outstanding Faculty members has been more effectively mobilized over the last decade. As a result, research funding, graduate student numbers, and number of research projects have been increasing at unprecedented rates at the University. The recent awarding of a $1.5M dollar institutional grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to build Research Capacity Development is evidence of this increased activity. Saint Mary’s is one of only seven Universities across Canada to receive one of these grants from NSERC. Likewise the $10M investment in our high performance computing facility as part of the Atlantic Computational Excellence Network (ACEnet) and the $3.5M investment from the Atlantic Innovation Fund of ACOA in a research project investigating human "behavioural" data for use in urban modeling and simulation is evidence of this increase activity. Although these projects are some of our “big ticket” projects underway at present, more millions of dollars are being invested in a plethora of research projects across the University. The establishment of our Industry Liaison Office in late 2004 is also evidence of our efforts to bridge our research activities with individuals and organizations external to the campus community.

We hope you find our web pages useful and interesting. Follow the links within this page and in the side bars for information on graduate studies programs and research activities within the University.

J. Kevin Vessey
Dean