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Grace Parraga named WAFAR Director
Western Research
Please join us in welcoming and congratulating Grace Parraga, who has been appointed to a five-year term as director of the Western Academy for Advanced Research and awarded a Western Research Chair (Leadership), effective October 1, 2025. We are delighted to have Grace lead the next phase of WAFAR’s development.
Grace holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Lung Imaging to Transform Outcomes (2018-2032) and is recognized as an international pioneer in asthma and COPD research. At Western, she serves as professor in the departments of medical biophysics and medicine (respirology) at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and in the School of Biomedical Engineering.
Her lab's groundbreaking research and her service to Canada was recognized this year with the King Charles III Coronation medal and the Canadian Thoracic Society Distinguished Lecturer in Respiratory Sciences.
We look forward to working with Grace to bring her vision for WAFAR to reality. Her long-term ambition is to accelerate and intensify Western's goals of nurturing innovative, interdisciplinary and international teams of researchers who solve the world's most high-impact challenges. We offer our deepest thanks to Fred Longstaffe, who creatively inspired and served as WAFAR’s founding director until December 2024.