McMaster-Led Network is Awarded $1.1 Million by Ontario Research Fund

The Ontario Research Fund (ORF) has awarded $1.1 million to the Canadian Research Data Centre
Network (CRDCN) which is hosted by McMaster University. The project leader for the ORF award is
Byron Spencer, Professor Emeritus, Department of Economics and Research Program Director of the
CRDCN.

The CRDCN is a network of 30 Statistics Canada Research Data Centres (RDCs) at universities across
Canada. The Executive Director is Martin Taylor, Adjunct Professor in the School of Geography and
Earth Sciences and a former VP Research at the University of Victoria. The CRDCN gives Canadian
researchers secure access to confidential data from Statistics Canada and other government sources to
advance quantitative research in the social and health sciences and to mobilize the results for
developing federal and provincial public policies.

This ORF award is an important contribution towards a $9 million project to increase the research
capacity of the network through the introduction of a national high performance computing platform.
The lead funder is the Canadian Foundation of Innovation (CFI), which has awarded $2.7 million. Other
provinces are providing significant additional funding. The CRDCN receives additional major core
funding from the CFI, the Canadian Institute of Health Research and the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.

The McMaster RDC was the first in Canada. It has recently relocated to the fifth floor of L.R. Wilson Hall
and is now part of the Centre for Research in Empirical Social Sciences. Professor Spencer was Academic
Director of the McMaster RDC from its founding until June 30, 2017 and was Principal Investigator for
most grants awarded to the CRDCN. On July 1, he was succeeded by Professor Michael Veall,
Department of Economics.