Jacques Beauvais

Biography

After graduating from the University of Ottawa with a bachelor’s degree (Physics, 1985) and a master’s degree (Physics, 1987), Jacques Beauvais obtained his Ph.D. in physics from Université Laval in 1990. He then pursued post-doctoral studies in electrical engineering at the University of Glasgow, UK. His training in optics coupled to his experience in engineering led to his appointment as professor of electrical engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke (UdeS) in 1993.

His passion and experience in nanotechnology led him to establish the first nanolithography laboratory in a Canadian university and then to lead the Centre for nanofabrication and nanocharacterization. He then he became the founding director of the Centre for excellence in information engineering of UdeS, which today is renamed the Interdisciplinary Institute for Technology Innovation (3IT). Six patents arising from the research activities of his group were the basis of a startup company, Quantiscript inc., where he was president from 1999 to 2004, then vice-president, technology, from 2004 to 2006.

Since 2007, his research activities have focused mainly on developing carbon nanotube based sensors which are at the core of a new patent (2015) and he established a close collaboration with a robotics research group to develop a tactile skin technology. He also joined an interdisciplinary research group in 2007 in order to study the social acceptability of new technologies, resulting in three collaborative books on the subject for which he co-authored three chapters with other group members.

In 2007, Jacques Beauvais was named Vice-president, Research, at the Université de Sherbrooke and then Vice-president, Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 2014. At Sherbrooke, he was responsible for the concept development, the funding and the launch of the MiQro Innovation Collaborative Centre (C2MI) in Bromont, Québec, in partnership with IBM Canada and Teledyne Dalsa, and he developed and implemented the Innovation, Partnership and Entrepreneurship strategy of the Université. He is currently a member of the research council of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CiFAR) and a board member of Mitacs. He was a member of the council of the National Research Council of Canada (2009-2012) and also a member of the board of directors of the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologies (2009-2016). He was also the chair of the board of Calcul Québec, the research consortium for high performance computing in Québec. As of July 1, 2017, he is Dean of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Ottawa.