President and Vice-Chancellor

Dr. Jean-Paul Boudreau is a proud Acadian with strong Maritime roots.

He began his post-secondary education at the University of New Brunswick, graduating with an honours in psychology. He received his Master’s in Child Development from Laurentian University and earned his PhD in experimental psychology from Tufts University in Boston.

Dr. Boudreau began his career at the University of Prince Edward Island, where he was the founder and director of the UPEI Infant Cognition Lab. In 2003 he accepted the position of chair of the Department of Psychology at Ryerson University. Boudreau worked collaboratively to build the department from the ground up, launching BA (2006), MA (2007), and PhD (2009) programs; hiring 23 tenured and tenure-track faculty; and developing a leading department with a research-intensive focus and clinical and experimental streams. He also established Canada’s first interprofessional Psychology Training Clinic within a hospital, a partnership between Ryerson University and St. Michael’s Hospital.

Dr. Boudreau served as dean of arts at Ryerson from 2011 to 2016 and as special advisor and executive lead, social innovation from 2016 to 2018. A champion of innovation and entrepreneurial education, in 2014, Dr. Boudreau and his team envisioned and launched Ryerson’s first social innovation incubator, the Social Ventures Zone. In partnership with the office of Community Engagement, he also launched the ShapeLab, an experiential learning opportunity for students to co-create innovative solutions to Toronto’s pressing urban issues.

A developmental scientist, Dr. Boudreau’s research focuses on the dynamic interaction between mind and action during infancy. He has published and presented his findings internationally and held visiting professorships at the University of Maryland and Uppsala University in Sweden. He was the founder and director of Ryerson’s Children, Health, Infancy, Learning, and Development (CHILD) Lab and is a fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association.

Dr. Boudreau has served as chair of the developmental section of the Canadian Psychological Association, as a member of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s (NSERC’s) national adjudication committee, as an elected member to the board of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS), and as a representative at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). In May 2018, Dr. Boudreau was appointed to the national Mitacs Research Council (MRC) for a three-year term. The MRC is a committee of the Mitacs Board that maintains the research integrity of Mitacs programs.

In recent years, a number of universities across the country have announced changes to their endowment investment policies and practices, under the broad topic of divestment. As each university is unique, so too are the approaches that have been announced, both on how divestment has been defined, and the implementation timeline and approach.

Last fall, I shared with the Board that I believe it is time for a review of our investment policy, including an assessment of options and timeline for a Mount Allison divestment strategy.

The review has begun and will initially focus on an assessment of divestment announcements in the Canadian PSE sector, to understand what strategies have been devised and planned for implementation.

We must also continue to focus on climate change and sustainability in its broadest sense. That means focusing on University operations, writ large, and towards a goal of minimizing our own climate impact as much as possible. Such an approach includes every aspect of our operation — investment policy being part of that.

And we have made progress on that goal:

• In the past decade the University’s carbon footprint has been reduced by 20 per cent;
• We are working to ensure campus infrastructure and operations keep environmental standards at the fore, through new construction and renovation projects, as well as the maintenance and operation of our buildings, grounds, and fleet.
• The Board’s most recent assessment of investment policy recommended a responsible investing approach, making investment decisions that take environmental, sustainability, and corporate governance (ESG) factors into consideration.

A review of divestment as it relates to University endowment investments is timely, and I think a natural extension of a responsible investment philosophy. In my role as University President and working with the Board of Regents and Cabinet members, I have committed to leading institutional efforts for our University to combat the climate emergency.

I thank all members of the Mount Allison community for their actions and continuing dialogue around this important issue.