KINGSTON, ON.  Queen’s University is welcoming internationally recognized slope geohazards researcher Dr. Gabriel Walton  as an inaugural recipient of the Government of Canada’s new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program.

The federal government announced the inaugural cohort of 64 Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada at the University of British Columbia, where Minister of Industry Mélanie Joly named the researchers selected through the first round of the initiative. The program is part of a $1-billion Government of Canada investment to recruit internationally recognized researchers working abroad and strengthen Canada’s research and innovation capacity, economic security and sovereignty.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Dr. Walton to Queen’s as an Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada,” says Nancy Ross, Vice-Principal (Research). “Bringing leading researchers to Canada is essential to strengthening our nation's research capacity, and this appointment will create new opportunities for research, training and collaboration in an area of growing importance.”

Dr. Walton is currently a professor and associate department head at the Colorado School of Mines, ranked first in the world for mineral and mining engineering in the 2026 QS World University Rankings by Subject. He will join the Department of Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering. His Chair will provide $8 million in federal funding over eight years to support the work.  

“Queen’s is one of the top geological engineering schools in the world,” says Dr. Walton. “The opportunity to not only have this research program, but also be embedded in a community with an outstanding group of students and faculty, collaborators, both in the department and across the university, that’s a very special opportunity as well.”

Dr. Walton and his team's work at Queen's will focus on building a more complete picture of slope hazards by looking at how slopes fail and how they respond to both sudden and longer-term environmental changes including how thawing permafrost changes the behaviour of rock, soil and ice in northern environments.  

His team will also investigate how networks of fractures within rock contribute to failures ranging from rockfalls to much larger slope movements. Those questions matter for highways and railways, open-pit mines, and other critical infrastructure projects in remote areas, where slope failures can have serious consequences for safety, access and operations.

Dr. Walton’s appointment marks a return to Queen’s, where he completed both his undergraduate degree (BASc’11) and PhD (PhD’14) in geological engineering before establishing his academic career in the United States.  

About
Queen’s University – Founded in 1841, Queen’s University, Canada, is an internationally ranked research-intensive university with more than 31,000 students and 5,000 faculty and staff. Queen’s is known for research in areas such as cancer detection and treatment, geoengineering, materials science, AI and supercomputing, and is home to the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. Queen’s welcomes researchers and students from around the world and is one of Canada’s leading universities. To learn more, please visit queensu.ca.

Media Contact:
Julie Brown, Manager, Media Relations brown.julie@queens.ca