Learn from professors who are both dedicated teachers and leading researchers.

University of Toronto students work with some of the most respected professors and instructors in their fields. Listed below are a few of our many great professors. Please visit the website of the Faculty in which you are interested to learn more about our wide range of stellar teachers and researchers.

Professor Christopher A. Kennedy
Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering
Dr. Christopher Kennedy specializes in the economic and environmental aspects of sustainable urban infrastructure, including transportation, buildings and water systems. In 2009, he led a group of international scientists studying greenhouse gas emissions from ten global cities. Their work was published in the Environmental Science and Technology journal and featured in The Economist, which caught the attention of the World Bank. As a result, on behalf of the World Bank, UN-Habitat and UN-Environment, Professor Kennedy joined the research group that drafted and published the international standard for quantifying the greenhouse gas emissions from cities. He was a 2010 winner of the Excellence in Education Award for Promotion of Sustainable Practices.

Professor Shana Kelley
Faculty of Pharmacy and Faculty of Medicine, Biochemistry
Dr. Shana Kelley invented the first electronic chip able to detect disease markers for cancer at the molecular level. Entrepreneurial by nature, Professor Kelley focuses her research around developing new tools to benefit the medical field, such as products that help to prevent hospital-acquired infections. As director of the Division of Biomolecular Sciences, she is actively engaged in teaching while also running a lab with 20 researchers. Recognized in 2008 on the Top 40 Under 40 list announced in the Globe and Mail, Professor Kelly has earned a great deal of attention for her work.

Professor Christos Hatzis
Faculty of Music
With two recent Juno awards, a SOCAN Award and a host of new commissions to his credit, Dr. Christos Hatzis is widely recognized as “one of the most important composers writing today” (CBC), “a contemporary Canadian Master” ( The New Yorker ) and “a Canadian icon and an international cultural institution” ( See Magazine ). Professor Hatzis’ music is influenced by early Christian spirituality, Pythagorean and Hermetic ideas, his own Byzantine music heritage, world cultures and religions and various classical, jazz and pop music idioms from the past and present. His research and compositions examine borderless culture and the uninhibited flow of cultural information through music.

Associate Professor Pankaj Aggarwal
U of T Scarborough, Department of Management
Dr. Aggarwal researches how people respond to actions taken by marketers depending upon how they perceive their relationship with the brands. He argues that consumers may evaluate actions that produce the same economic costs or benefits differently depending on the relationship norms that are salient at the time of the evaluation. These results have much deeper implications because they suggest that consumers do not so much evaluate products with an eye to maximizing the results of their decision so much as they are trying very hard to do the “right” thing — with “rightness” suggested by social norms of behaviour more so than economic payoff. Dr. Aggarwal holds two MBA degrees and is a former VP, J. Walter Thompson Advertising.

Associate Professor Sabine Stanley
Faculty of Arts and Science, Department of Physics
Dr. Sabine Stanley was named one of Ontario’s most promising early-career researchers and was recognized with the Ranjini Ghosh Teaching Award by the Arts and Science Students’ Union for introducing students to the discipline of physics. Cross-appointed to the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, her research includes computer modelling Mars’s magnetic fields and examining the impact of an ancient asteroid in rendering that planet lifeless.

Professor Guy Faulkner
Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education
Dr. Guy Faulkner’s “BEAT” research (Built Environment and Active Transport) investigates the issue of children’s health as it works to evaluate patterns of physical activity. BEAT looks at how many Ontario children walk, bike, blade or board to and from school, and the role this active transportation plays in their overall health. Faulkner’s research has received good media attention, which in turn has helped to raise the public’s awareness of the interactions of physical activity and health.

Associate Professor Esteban Parra
U of T Mississauga, Department of Anthropology
A molecular anthropologist, Dr. Parra’s research involves the application of genetic markers to answer questions about the evolution of human populations and to identify the genetic risk factors involved in complex diseases. He is also interested in understanding how humans have adapted to different environments. Work in this area includes research on skin pigmentation, a trait showing extensive geographic variation in humans, and adaptation to high altitude in the Andean region. For more than a decade, a major focus of Parra’s research has been the study of admixture, the process of mixing of human populations, especially in the Americas since the XVth century.

Assistant Professor Emma R. Master
Faculty of Arts and Science, Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, and Department of Cell & Systems Biology
Biomass expert Dr. Emma Master is leading the fight to alleviate the world’s reliance on fossil fuels while revitalizing forest and agricultural industries. She and her team are currently conducting research at U of T’s BioZone, a multidisciplinary centre for bioengineering research focused on energy, environmental and economic sustainability. Professor Master’s research interests are in wood biotechnology, genome mining, biocatalyst production and design, biomaterial development, biocommodity engineering and biofuels. She was recently recognized by Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation with an Early Researcher Award.

Associate Professor Ron Deibert
Faculty of Arts and Science, Department of Political Science
In addition to his outstanding teaching, Dr. Ron Deibert is the Director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies as well as the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs. He was one of the authors of the Tracking Ghostnet report which documented an alleged cyber-espionage network affecting over 1,200 computers in 103 countries, and the Shadows in the Cloud report, which analyzed a cloud-based espionage network. He was awarded the University of Toronto Outstanding Teaching Award and the Northrop Frye Distinguished Teaching and Research Award, and was also a Ford Foundation research scholar of information and communication technologies.

Associate Professor George Elliott Clarke
Faculty of Arts and Science, Department of English
Undergraduate Teaching Award winner, Dr. George Elliott Clarke is an active and influential author and public intellectual. His writings, both verse and nonfiction, challenge the myth that the African presence in Canada is both recent and urban. Clarke has been instrumental in promoting the work of writers of African descent, especially those of Nova Scotia. In 2002 he published, Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature.