My affiliations and funding
Last updated June 19th, 2024
Particularly as I now have a tiny public profile, I find it important ti disclose anything that may give rise to a perceived, potential, or actual conflict of interest... so here goes.
My employer of record is Toronto Metropolitan University. Since I'm not on a tenure-protected position, they can theoretically terminate my employment, but I'm a permanent employee there (which means if they are to terminate me there will be severance involved). But I do have protection from being fired for speaking about result of any independent research that I conduct.
As being part of the Dais at TMU, we receive funding from a variety of sources - if you click through to each of the papers that I have on my research page, you'll see funders for each individual project, but recently, the Dais (and therefore work that I've done) has been funded by various departments of the federal government (including ESDC, ISED, Heritage Canada, SSHRC, PCO, and ACOA), as well as the provincial government (Ontario mostly, though some in Newfoundland & Labrador). All government fundings we receive comes from the bureaucratic side of the government, as opposed to the political side.
We also receive sponsorship from private companies (recently Amazon AWS, Telus, RBC, PWC, CSA Group), as well as some non-profits (including foundations, government agencies, crown corporations, industry associations, and internal university grants). Sometimes we also hold joint research grants with other organizations and institutions. Recently, these have included Newfoundland and Labrador Workforce Innovation Centre, Institute of Work & Health, and Imagine Canada.
In all of these cases, we take care to ensure that any funding agreement is such that the funders do not control the outcome of the research. We also take care to ensure we are cognizant of perceived conflict of interest.
I also sometimes serve on research advisory boards for various different research projects - most recently I served on the research advisory committee over at the Conference Board of Canada for the research they have done. I've also advised (in one-off capacity), giving feedback to some of the work done by Century Initiative. None of these arrangements are paid, and is done on a voluntary basis.
I've also given briefings and advice to elected leaders (federally and provincially), and have briefed provincial political parties (once, in the 2022 Ontario provincial election) - given the current federal government composition, they have tended to be Liberal but my door is open to everyone! I am not a registered member of any political party in Canada, municipal, provincial, or federal. I have two citizenships, Canadian (naturalized) and Vietnamese (by birth) - I also spent a significant chunk of my childhood in Japan (where I was born) but I do not hold Japanese citizenship.
I give lots of public talks, in many instances these aren't paid, but some of them are paid. Paid speaking engagements are exclusively non-government in nature, and such engagement is restricted strictly to individual speaking engagements and I still own all the background intellectual property. None of these have ever exceeded $5,000 and I do not have an agent. I also sometimes write various different op-eds for news publications (including the Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, and others) - none of these are paid. None of my other media engagements (print, radio, tv) are paid.
A few of my other unpaid affiliations, in no particular order:
- A volunteer tutor at Pathway to Educations (I teach high school students in Regent Park in Toronto math and sometimes ENglish)
- Chair of the Canadian Queer Economics Network (part of the Canadian Economic Association) - also as a result member of the Canadian Economics Diversity Committee.
- on the Toronto Leadership Board of alumniUBC
- Advisor at the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resiliency (a bit mouthful I know)
- A "deemed employee" at Statistics Canada (not an actual employee, just a designation that bounds me to protect data secrecy on sensitive data I have access to during the course of my research. You can read more about this classification here).
Like most young people in Toronto, I do not own a home, and my access to sensitive business data means that I have to use a non-self-managed fund (aka something like Wealthsimple) - so I while I own some assets like ETFs, I don't make decisions on what, and how many (apart from putting money into or taking it off from the online account)
Particularly as I now have a tiny public profile, I find it important ti disclose anything that may give rise to a perceived, potential, or actual conflict of interest... so here goes.
My employer of record is Toronto Metropolitan University. Since I'm not on a tenure-protected position, they can theoretically terminate my employment, but I'm a permanent employee there (which means if they are to terminate me there will be severance involved). But I do have protection from being fired for speaking about result of any independent research that I conduct.
As being part of the Dais at TMU, we receive funding from a variety of sources - if you click through to each of the papers that I have on my research page, you'll see funders for each individual project, but recently, the Dais (and therefore work that I've done) has been funded by various departments of the federal government (including ESDC, ISED, Heritage Canada, SSHRC, PCO, and ACOA), as well as the provincial government (Ontario mostly, though some in Newfoundland & Labrador). All government fundings we receive comes from the bureaucratic side of the government, as opposed to the political side.
We also receive sponsorship from private companies (recently Amazon AWS, Telus, RBC, PWC, CSA Group), as well as some non-profits (including foundations, government agencies, crown corporations, industry associations, and internal university grants). Sometimes we also hold joint research grants with other organizations and institutions. Recently, these have included Newfoundland and Labrador Workforce Innovation Centre, Institute of Work & Health, and Imagine Canada.
In all of these cases, we take care to ensure that any funding agreement is such that the funders do not control the outcome of the research. We also take care to ensure we are cognizant of perceived conflict of interest.
I also sometimes serve on research advisory boards for various different research projects - most recently I served on the research advisory committee over at the Conference Board of Canada for the research they have done. I've also advised (in one-off capacity), giving feedback to some of the work done by Century Initiative. None of these arrangements are paid, and is done on a voluntary basis.
I've also given briefings and advice to elected leaders (federally and provincially), and have briefed provincial political parties (once, in the 2022 Ontario provincial election) - given the current federal government composition, they have tended to be Liberal but my door is open to everyone! I am not a registered member of any political party in Canada, municipal, provincial, or federal. I have two citizenships, Canadian (naturalized) and Vietnamese (by birth) - I also spent a significant chunk of my childhood in Japan (where I was born) but I do not hold Japanese citizenship.
I give lots of public talks, in many instances these aren't paid, but some of them are paid. Paid speaking engagements are exclusively non-government in nature, and such engagement is restricted strictly to individual speaking engagements and I still own all the background intellectual property. None of these have ever exceeded $5,000 and I do not have an agent. I also sometimes write various different op-eds for news publications (including the Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, and others) - none of these are paid. None of my other media engagements (print, radio, tv) are paid.
A few of my other unpaid affiliations, in no particular order:
- A volunteer tutor at Pathway to Educations (I teach high school students in Regent Park in Toronto math and sometimes ENglish)
- Chair of the Canadian Queer Economics Network (part of the Canadian Economic Association) - also as a result member of the Canadian Economics Diversity Committee.
- on the Toronto Leadership Board of alumniUBC
- Advisor at the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resiliency (a bit mouthful I know)
- A "deemed employee" at Statistics Canada (not an actual employee, just a designation that bounds me to protect data secrecy on sensitive data I have access to during the course of my research. You can read more about this classification here).
Like most young people in Toronto, I do not own a home, and my access to sensitive business data means that I have to use a non-self-managed fund (aka something like Wealthsimple) - so I while I own some assets like ETFs, I don't make decisions on what, and how many (apart from putting money into or taking it off from the online account)