BIOGRAPHY

Barbara Neis (Ph.D., F.R.S.C., C.M.) is the President of the RSC Academy of Social Sciences. Professor Neis is currently John Lewis Paton Distinguished University Professor and Honorary Research Professor in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University.  A member of the Order of Canada, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Toronto in 1988, is a former Trudeau Fellow, and has an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Tromsø in Norway. Over the past forty years, her research has focused broadly on interactions between work, environment, health, mobility and communities in marine and coastal contexts. Specializing in multidisciplinary, community-engaged research, Professor Neis has led substantial programs of research in the areas of fishermen’s ecological knowledge, marine science and management, gender and fisheries, rebuilding collapsed fisheries, marine and coastal occupational health, and work-related mobility.

She co-founded and co-directed the SafetyNet Centre for Occupational Health and Safety Research at Memorial University for more than a decade and is a former President of the Canadian Association for Work and Health. Professor Neis is currently the Project Director of the SSHRC-funded On the Move Partnership, a pan-Canadian program of research on extended/complex mobility for work in the Canadian context. As a result, she was awarded the Vanier Institute of the Family’s Mirabelli-Glossop Award for Distinguished Contribution. Professor Neis has served on the RSC Academy of Social Sciences Fellow selection committee and on multiple SSHRC adjudication committees. She is a former member of SSHRC Council and of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Council of Canadian Academies.