Brock University is home to over 19,000 students and 600 faculty across six academic faculties, with 12 Canada Research Chairs. While we have grown from our roots in the Niagara region, Brock welcomes students and scholars from across the world, fostering global partnerships and initiatives. We continue to define areas of research excellence and emergent opportunities, guided by principles of equity, diversity, inclusion (EDI), and reconciliation with Indigenous communities.
Brock is committed to nurturing a culture of research and creative excellence by investing in infrastructure and enhancing high-impact, transdisciplinary research. The Canada Research Chairs program serves as a catalyst for collaboration and amplifies research impact across diverse fields. To explore the breadth of research happening across Brock, please visit our Faculties and Institutes and Centres pages.
Key Areas of Research Distinction
As part of our Strategic Research Plan, Brock University has identified four key research themes that showcase our strengths and institutional focus. Each theme builds on our existing capacity through established research centres, institutes, and transdisciplinary hubs, along with collaborations with community and industry partners and state-of-the-art research facilities. Explore these key research themes below.
Brock fosters a research culture that integrates the pursuit of fundamental inquiry and discovery with the delivery of insights, advanced solutions and timely interventions to industry, not-for-profit, public partners, and society. Problem-based research leverages Brock’s longstanding strength in transdisciplinarity, and emphasizes the complexity and multiple sources of expertise that contribute to partnership-driven inquiry.
Brock is characterized by strong interdisciplinary research on the agricultural, technological, economic, social and political impacts of changing environments and climates, including in grape growing and wine making. The challenges and opportunities for sustainability and resiliency that are raised by environmental changes cross the boundaries between academic disciplines. Transdisciplinary Brock research follows the problems and solutions where they lead.
Brock has remarkable transdisciplinary expertise on how and why societies and organizations change, including the connections between inclusive and just practices and outcomes in health, culture, the economy, social and political resiliency, labour, technology, citizenship, and international affairs.
Brock research emphasizes the continuity between stages of development and life from infancy to older adulthood. This organizing principle enables discoveries, practical interventions and community mobilization, including at the intersection of technology, sport, and human performance. This research strength is informed by connections between biological, emotional, cognitive and social outcomes across early and later courses of life.