A University of Saskatchewan professor has been appointed to a five-year term as the new Chief Science Officer for the Canadian Light Source (CLS) on the USask campus.

Dr. Ingrid Pickering is also a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Molecular Environmental Science at USask. Dr. Pickering has more than 225 peer-reviewed publications and 21,500 citations from her work in leading a cross-disciplinary research team that uses and develops synchrotron techniques to investigate the roles and impact of essential and toxic elements in the environment and human health.

Dr. Pickering holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Imperial College London. She came to USask last year after finishing an industrial postdoctoral fellowship in New Jersey and an appointment at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.

She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and former Chair of the Board of the Canada Foundation for Innovation.