Lazaridis Economics Department Celebrates Faculty Award Winners

As the 2024-25 academic year draws to a close, it’s worth reflecting on the great contributions made by Lazaridis Economics Department (LED) faculty members. This year has seen a large number of faculty members in the department recognized for their contributions to each of research, teaching and service. Congratulations to all the prize winners – your hard work and commitment to our department, our students, our university, and our profession at large, are greatly appreciated.

Nikolai Cook, 2024 Polanyi Prize in Economics

The Polanyi Prizes are awarded annually to early-career researchers in Ontario who are either continuing postdoctoral work or have recently gained a faculty appointment, in each of the Nobel prize categories. They honour John C. Polanyi, an Ontario researcher who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in chemical kinetics. This award recognizes Nikolai’s research in understanding the reliability of research findings in economics and other social sciences, as well as his work on the effects of environmental conditions on economic activity. This is the first time that the Polanyi Prize has gone to a member of the LED, and only the fourth award to a Laurier professor in any category. Look out for a summertime edition of the Coffee with Kyle podcast in which Kyle Murray, Dean of the Lazaridis School, will talk with Nikolai about his work and how it is making a difference in research in the social sciences.

Azim Essaji, 2025 Faculty Award for Service Excellence and Community Engagement

This award recognizes Azim’s extensive service to Wilfrid Laurier University, particularly in his multiple roles in the Faculty Association. He has been a member of the Executive Committee and Acting President of the Association, a Grievance Officer, and as Chief Negotiator for three rounds of collective bargaining. In that role, he worked to ensure that non-traditional scholarship, including Indigenous forms of learning and community-based scholarship, would be recognized in tenure and promotion decisions, and strengthened language in the collective agreement regarding student-faculty ratios and the minimum faculty complement. Faculty and alumni of the department benefited greatly from his contributions as Master of Arts in Business Economics (MABE) Director from 2015 to 2019. All the while, he has kept up his reputation as a great teacher in the department’s undergraduate and graduate programs (in which he has supervised over 20 MABE research projects), as well as in the Master of International Public Policy program at the Balsillie School, and he also received the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics Award for Outstanding Teaching, 2016.

Christos Shiamptanis, Donald F. Morgenson Award for Teaching Excellence, Innovation

Christos’s contributions to teaching in macroeconomics including his role in shepherding the LED’s very successful teams of students in the Bank of Canada Governor’s Challenge led Jaskaran Dhaliwal, who just completed his studies at Laurier, to nominate him for this award. Dhaliwal said that Christos’s ability to link the theory that students learn with real-world policy being implemented by the Bank of Canada, and to teach tools that are used by economic analysts, helped him to further his passion for economics as a discipline that makes a difference to everyone’s lives. The award in particular recognized Christos’s leadership in helping the LED students to successfully particular in the Bank of Canada Governor’s Challenge, a national competition in which students demonstrate knowledge of monetary policy by making interest rate recommendations. Students describe the experience as life-changing and credit it with inspiring their later career success. He brings the lessons he has learned from that process into the classroom to the benefit of a wider group of students, including through holding mini forecasting exercises in class that keep students up to date with current economic debates. He also hosts presentation competitions that encourage students to develop their communication skills and ability to reason on the fly. Christos is currently the Director of the Master of Arts in Business Economics program.

Tammy Schirle, 2025 Sylvia Ostry Award for Service

The Sylvia Ostry award is given by the Canadian Women Economists Committee to an economist judged by the selection committee to have furthered the status of women in the economics profession, through example, achievements, increasing our understanding of how women can advance in the economics profession, or mentoring others. Tammy received the award in recognition of her use of her platform to raise awareness of gender disparities in the labour market and to advocate for policy changes that promote gender equality. Her research enhances our understanding of the challenges women face in the economy and informs policymakers on effective mitigation strategies, and has been drawn on by the Ontario Pay Equity Commission, the Pay Equity Division of the Canadian Human Rights Committee, the Parliamentary Committee on the Status of Women, and in Laurier’s pay equity processes. Tammy has also dedicated time to mentoring younger women – a number of Laurier students she has mentored have gone on to complete PhDs in economics, including Kourtney Koebel, Yalian Xu, and Moyo Sogaolu.

Monica Jain, 2025 Doug Purvis Memorial Prize Winner

Monica is joining the Lazaridis Economics Department in July 2025. With her current colleagues at the Bank of Canada, she undertook the research project, now published in the Journal of Monetary Economics, that received the 2025 Doug Purvis Prize of the Canadian Economics Association. This prize is awarded to the authors of a highly significant, written contribution to Canadian economic policy, in any format (including books, single articles in scholarly journals, government studies including monographs done for royal commissions, think tank reports and a series of articles in newspapers or magazines). The award recognizes the work done to understand how people form expectations on future wage growth and how these expectations relate to those on future inflation. The results in the paper are important for monetary policy not just in Canada but also for other central banks, particularly inflation-targeting central banks. The paper is especially pertinent in an environment of resurging inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic and potential future rises in inflation due to ongoing trade wars. Consumer inflation expectations seem to be rising again in Canada while consumer inflation expectations in the U.S. are the highest they have been since the early 1980s.

Juan Morales, Lazaridis Research Excellence Award 2025

Juan was awarded the 2025 Lazaridis Research Excellence Award in Economics, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to research and scholarship over the past two years. Juan’s research, which explores how digital technologies affect political outcomes, with ongoing projects studying social media and elections, online dissent, and patterns of media consumption, has been published in leading journals such as The Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Social Media + Society. He has also featured in media outlets including The New York Times and NPR, and on Laurier’s Inspiring Conversations webinar series.