Marianne Armstrong is proud to be Shad alumni from UBC 1997.  Thanks to the sponsorship arrangement through Shad at the time, she got her foot in the door at the National Research Council (NRC) – where she worked her first summer student job with NRC Aerospace. Since then, Ms. Armstrong has moved to the Construction Research Centre, where she has built her career at NRC over the past 20 years – from student, to Technical Officer, to Research Council Officer, to Initiative Lead. In her current role as Initiative Lead for the NRC’s Climate Resilient Built Environment Initiative, Marianne Armstrong is the key driving force behind establishing and executing the national research program to increase the resilience of Canada’s infrastructure and buildings to climate change and extreme events such as flooding, extreme heat and wildfire. Since 2016, she has led the R&D vision in this area, directing and inspiring multi-disciplinary resources at the NRC and collaborators from over 170 different organizations to achieve critical progress and impacts in support of national policy on climate change adaptation.

Marianne is a member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario, holds a MSc in Industrial Design from University of New South Wales, Sydney, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Queen’s University.