Home > Research

IRMACS - THE RESEARCH ENABLER

Research CollageIRMACS is about the science that it drives, facilitates, and nurtures. It provides an environment that advances existing research programs, while at the same time incubating nascent and emerging new interdisciplinary research. The IRMACS Centre houses research projects for varying periods, providing physical workspace, state-of-the-art computational and communications resources, and expert technical support. Utilizing the carefully designed lab space and meeting room facilities and its extensive technological infrastructure (networking, computation, collaboration, and visualization), IRMACS removes the traditional boundaries between scientific disciplines and physical boundaries due to distance, creating a synergistic, collaborative environment that supports interdisciplinary research between colleagues locally, nationally and around the world.

IRMACS provides to its projects:

  • Support, promotion and housing of high-quality interdisciplinary research groups
  • Promotion of new scientific projects and collaborations
  • Provision of state-of-the-art communications resources for scientific collaboration
  • Provision and co-ordination of significant computational and visualization resources
  • Housing of visiting researchers for both short term (days or weeks) and long-term sabbaticals
  • Co-ordination and provision of space for lecture series and visiting scholar talks
  • Provision of facilities for moderate-sized meetings, workshops and related activities

IRMACS Researchers

The breadth, depth, and quality of the research carried out within the Centre draws a diverse community of researchers to IRMACS.

Faculty, graduate students, post doctoral fellows, research assistants and research innovators are attracted to IRMACS as members and visiting scholars because of its exciting and dynamic collaborative research environment. As of 2009, almost 300 researchers and over 50 research project groups are benefiting from the IRMACS Centre's facilities. These groups span 17 disciplines across all SFU Faculties.

Researchers come to IRMACS for a range of reasons:

  • New Research Groups: As one of the few facilities in Canada that can physically support project groups that span many disciplines, researchers find the IRMACS Centre an ideal place to incubate new interdisciplinary research projects.
  • Established Research Groups: Many established interdisciplinary research groups make use of the IRMACS lab space to bring researchers from multiple departments and institutes together in a single location.
  • Distributed Research Groups: Distributed research groups, often from around the world, utilize the IRMACS advanced collaboration infrastructure to accelerate their research by supporting a wide range of distant, collaborative research meetings.
  • Visiting Researchers: Researchers from other institutions regularly come to the Centre to collaborate with the diverse set of projects hosted at the IRMACS Centre. National and international researchers utilize the IRMACS computational infrastructure to perform modelling, simulation and analysis as part of their collaborations with IRMACS projects.

How to join the IRMACS Centre

    Contact the IRMACS Centre with any questions you have about research at the Centre, and about joining.