Panel 2: Building Global Scientific Leadership: Youth Engagement through Horizon Europe

Dr Maria Pawlowska is an expert in research management and science policy with a focus on EU – Canada collaboration and open science. She brings to her work over a decade of direct experience with EU funding, including work in Brussels committees. She is also involved in supporting the international move towards open science.

Since 2012, Maria has been assisting with EU projects at all levels, including developing guidelines in Brussels, evaluation, and assistance with submissions (including multiple ERC Advanced grants and large consortia grants). She has collaborated with European governments and non-governmental organizations, as well as Fortune200 companies. Working with EU and national funders Maria has helped establish over a dozen new centers of excellence (in collaboration with institutions such as Oxford University and CNRS), and was also a member of the Science Europe working group that authored the “Practical Guide to the International Alignment of Research Data Management”. Maria has shared her expertise at meetings organized by the United Nations, the European Commission and  the EU Delegation to Canada, among others and is a member of a number of international advisory committees.

Since 2021 Maria has been living in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Claudia Gordijo is Director of Research Partnerships at the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a global public–private partnership that pioneers open science in drug discovery, and Associate Director of Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. She is a research strategist with over a decade of experience leading global collaborations that bridge academia, industry, government, and foundations.

At SGC, Claudia has played a leadership role in Target 2035, an international partnership that brings together scientists, governments, and industry to open new frontiers in drug discovery by creating shared tools and data for every human protein. She has also supported the development of a major international consortium under Horizon Europe’s Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) as part of Target 2035’s efforts, and is currently building a new training umbrella under Target 2035 in partnership with Mitacs Canada to expand opportunities for students and trainees through cross-sector, international collaboration. In addition, she has contributed to the creation of major open-science initiatives including CACHE Challenges and Conscience, funded by Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund.

Claudia holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of São Paulo and completed postdoctoral training in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Toronto. She has published more than 20 scientific articles, including recent roadmaps for Target 2035 and CACHE in Nature Reviews Chemistry.

Paul Kushner is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto, where he serves as Department Chair. He is one of Canada’s leading climate and atmospheric scientists, whose research focuses on simulation and analysis of the globgal climate system. He has made important contributions to our understanding of the physics of the atmosphere’s circulation, Earth-System models for simulation of climate, analysis of cold-climate processes, and the impacts of climate change, including climate extremes. He has recently returned from leading a 10-week program in 2025 at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institue for Theoretical Physics, entitled the Physics of Changing Polar Climates. He also directs a national project called The Collaborative Platform for CanESM, which brings together university investigators to study climate using Environment and Climate Change Canada’s flagship climate model, CanESM. For today’s event he is representing Canda’s contribution to the European Horizon Project EXPECT, which deals with the causes and consequences of heat and precipitation extremes resulting from climate change.