Professor Christopher Yip began his term as Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering on July 2, 2019, after serving two years as Associate Vice-President in the University’s International Partnerships Office.
Dean Yip is a leading scholar in the field of single-molecule biophysics and a faculty member with the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, the Department of Biochemistry and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering. He is a Principal Investigator with the Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research at the University of Toronto.
As a former director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (BME), he provided leadership to more than 100 research engineers and scientists engaged in discovery and product development in the areas of neuroscience and sensory stimulation, biomaterials and tissue engineering, molecular systems biology and nanotechnology, as well as medical device and drug delivery system design.
He has been a strong advocate and creator of international research opportunities for students and scholars. Through the Wildcat Voyager Scholarships, BME encourages its PhD students by providing funds for international research partnerships. Professor Yip and BME have also played important roles in the development and implementation of the Lyon Sachs Collaborative Research Fund. This fund rapidly scales up research collaborations by enabling joint symposia and workshops, funding student and faculty travel between Haifa and Toronto, and enabling sabbatical visits and short-term graduate student exchanges. The fund has sparked cutting-edge research and enabled two-way flow of immense talent between the Technion Institute of Technology and the University of Toronto.
Dean Yip is the Vice Chair of the CIHR Institute of Genetics Advisory Board and has served on grant panels at NSERC, CIHR and NIH. He was the first recipient of the Molecular Imaging’s Outstanding Young Biological Scanning Probe Microscopy Investigator of the Year award, and since that time has been honoured with a Premier’s Research Excellence Award (1999), Faculty Teaching Award, (2000) and Graduate Faculty Teaching Award for Sustained Contribution to Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2008). He was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009), a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (2014) and held a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Molecular Imaging (2000-2010).
Dean Yip received his B.A.Sc. in Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry from the University of Toronto in 1988 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1996. He joined the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry in 1997 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2002 and to Full Professor in 2007.