Holland Bloorview Scientist Receives Prestigious Early Researcher Award from Ministry of Research and Innovation: $140,000 granted to Dr. Sally Lindsay to support research into employment opportunities for people with disabilities
TORONTO (April 22, 2014) – Holland Bloorview is thrilled to announce that Dr. Sally Lindsay, a scientist in the Bloorview Research Institute, has been awarded a prestigious Early Researcher Award by the Ministry of Research & Innovation. This afternoon, the Ministry announced $14 million in funding through Early Researcher Awards.
The Early Researcher Award program provides financial support to new researchers working at publicly funded Ontario research centres. The goal of the award is provide promising young researchers with the funding they need to build their labs and train students.
Dr. Sally Lindsay received the Early Researcher Award for her project “Enhancing the inclusion of people with disabilities in the workforce,” a research endeavor that seeks to address the under-utilization of people with disabilities in the labour market by exploring employment readiness skills and sharing inclusionary best practices with employers.
Dr. Lindsay is grateful for this generous support from the provincial government, whose investment in Early Researcher Awards helps to push research in Ontario forward.
“With this $140,000 gesture of confidence, I’ll be able to build my lab, recruit more graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from across Canada, and build greater awareness around the topic of employment opportunities for people with disabilities,” says Dr. Lindsay.
Dr. Lindsay’s research is also funded by the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Council (SSHRC) and Ontario Human Capital Research and Innovation Fund (OHCRIF). Her work focuses on the nearly 800,000 working-age Canadians with a disability who are unemployed but want to work, and whose disabilities do not prevent them from doing so. Despite this, says Dr. Lindsay, their employment rates sit at about half the rate of those without disabilities.
“We are very proud that Dr. Lindsay, a faculty member in the Department of Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy, received the Early Researcher Award. It is a validation of the important work she is doing to further inclusion of people with disabilities in the workforce, and very exciting for her to receive significant provincial support at this point in her career,” says Dr. Alex Mihailidis, Acting Chair of the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at the University of Toronto.
For more information about Dr. Sally Lindsay, see her Scientist Profile page on the Bloorview Research Institute website.
