New Professors Lecture: Pioneering Ideas, Fresh Perspectives
Dec 3, 2025 — 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Join us for an engaging lecture where new voices in science share their groundbreaking research. From developing next-generation materials to exploring how life began, and uncovering how changes in our environment affect everything from mountaintops to our dinner tables—these talks offer a fascinating glimpse into the discoveries that are shaping our future.
Whether you're curious about the building blocks of life, the future of technology, or the health of our planet, there's something here to spark your interest. All are welcome!
Event details
Celebrate three distinguished new professors' most recent research pursuits. Presenting our esteemed speakers for this occasion:
- François-Michel Boire, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
- Yaseen Mottiar, Assistant Professor, Department of Biology
- Brian O’Driscoll, Newmont Chair in Economic Geology and Full Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
François-Michel Boire
Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Dependence Modelling and Financial Risk Management: An Application to the U.S. Real Estate Market
Summary
Understanding and managing financial risk requires models that capture complex dependence structures and dynamics over time. My research develops statistical and numerical methods that address these challenges by solving optimization problems in finance, helping firms, investors, and regulators make better decisions under uncertainty.
In this talk, I address a risk management problem in the U.S. housing market, where accurately predicting house price declines is essential for financial stability and a resilient banking sector. I propose a semiparametric framework combining dependence modelling and quantile regression to characterize the joint distribution of state-level house price changes. The method is model-free, computationally efficient, and yields an aggregate risk measure based on a weighted composition of state-level tail risks.
The same framework can be applied to manage risk in portfolios of risky assets with nonlinear dependence structures. It moves beyond traditional mean–variance approaches, offering a flexible way to measure the likelihood of widespread losses and to identify sources of fragility within complex financial systems.
Biography
François-Michel Boire is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Ottawa. His research sits at the intersection of quantitative finance, computational economics, and applied probability, with a focus on dynamic programming, capital structure modelling, and Monte Carlo methods for option pricing. Dr. Boire’s current research program develops new stochastic dynamic models for corporate financing and systemic risk, integrating methods from simulation, control theory, and statistical learning. He has also contributed to Bank of Canada working papers examining the interplay between fiscal and monetary policy and their effects on economic growth.
Before joining the University of Ottawa, Dr. Boire was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal and a Doctoral Trainee in the Financial Stability Department at the Bank of Canada. He earned his Ph.D. in Financial Modelling from Western University, as well as an M.Sc. in Financial Engineering from HEC Montréal and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Economics from the Université de Montréal. He teaches courses in financial mathematics, risk management, and time-series analysis.
Yaseen Mottiar
Assistant Professor, Department of Biology
Exploring the biology and biotechnology of lignin
Summary
In this short presentation, I will provide a brief overview of my research programme which focuses on lignin, a phenolic polymer found in the cell walls of plants. We explore lignin from a discovery-driven perspective, aiming to elucidate fundamental aspects of lignin biosynthesis and translate these findings to develop engineering strategies for the genetic improvement of biomass feedstock plants and food crops alike.
Biography
Professor Yaseen Mottiar’s arrival in the Department of Biology in 2024 was a homecoming as he completed his undergraduate studies at uOttawa in the Biotech programme back in 2008. Between then and now, he completed a Master’s at the University of Toronto in Cell & Systems Biology and a PhD at the University of British Columbia in Forestry. Prior to moving back to Ottawa, Prof. Mottiar worked at the University of Helsinki in Finland as a University Researcher. His fascinations, in work and life, have always revolved around the incredible diversity that abounds in the world around us and how we can harness it for the better.
Brian O’Driscoll
Newmont Chair in Economic Geology and Full Professor, Department of Earth and Environmenta
From mantle to mineralization: magmas, metals and the Earth’s deep interior
Summary
A wide range of base- and precious metals are designated ‘critical’ by governmental and international agencies, based on their uses in various industrial applications and their being vital to the future decarbonization of our planet and the success of the energy transition. Metalliferous ore deposits are mainly found in rocks, which can be examined in the field, under the microscope, and using a variety of geochemical and geophysical tools that collectively encompass length-scales of observation spanning many orders of magnitude. Rocks represent the complicated, time-integrated products of all processes that have operated on them, so to understand exactly where metals are sited, and how they got there, it is important to unravel the whole mineralogical and microstructural picture. In this talk, I will showcase some of the tools my group and I are using to elucidate mineralization processes in high temperature magmatic rocks, focusing on several case studies as examples, and highlight relevance to resource exploration programs and industrial partners.
Biography
Professor Brian O’Driscoll received his BSc at University College Cork (2003) and his PhD at Trinity College Dublin (2006), both in Ireland. He is a petrologist and ore geologist with expertise in linking novel geochemical tools to field-based and petrographic observations. His research interests are wide ranging, spanning the emplacement and crystallization of magma in the Earth’s crust, as well as melt generation and migration in the upper mantle. He has contributed to understanding base and precious metal mineralization processes in the context of these broad areas of magmatic petrology. In particular, much of his work has focused on chromitite petrogenesis and platinum-group element geochemistry in layered mafic intrusions and ophiolitic rocks. Prof. O’Driscoll joined the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at uOttawa in 2022, as Newmont Chair in Economic Geology. His research program at uOttawa is centred on using the mineralogy and microstructure of high temperature (magmatic) ore deposits, from platinum-group metals and rare earth elements to base metals such as Ni, Cr and Cu, to better understand mineralization processes.