Dr. Suzanne Fortier is currently President of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Before her appointment as President of NSERC, Dr. Fortier held a number of senior research and administrative positions in the Department of Chemistry at Queen’s University.

Dr. Fortier is a crystallographer by training, specializing in the development of mathematical and artificial intelligence methodologies for protein structure determination. She is recognized for her leadership in devising novel techniques that allow researchers to gain new insights from the large and growing databases that correlate the structure of crystals to their properties (crystallographic data mining).

She has received the Clara Benson Award for a distinguished contribution to chemistry by a woman (1997), the Entrepreneurship Award from Communications and Information Technology Ontario (1997), and the Queen’s University Distinguished Service Award (2005). In June 2006, she received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.