Lakehead honours two professors with Distinguished Researcher awards
An English professor and Civil Engineering professor are the two newest recipients of Lakehead University’s Distinguished Researcher award.
Dr. Anna Guttman has worked with Lakehead for over 20 years. She specializes in postcolonial literature, especially within the South Asian diaspora.
She is the author of Writing Indians and Jews: Metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian Literature and The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature.
“I’m honoured to be named Lakehead’s 2026 Distinguished Researcher,” Guttman said. “It’s been a privilege to work with colleagues in the Department of English, and with students in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities.”
Guttman is currently researching housing and collective living in contemporary South Asian culture.
“I’m interested in the ways housing can be a site of hope, but also a site of fear,” she said. “The aspiration of having a home to be proud of is something that a lot of people can really relate to. But if you look at genre fiction, there’s also a lot of stories about home as a site of nightmares. So I’m really interested in that tension.”
Dr. Sam Salem’s research focuses on sustainable fire engineering, particularly using wooden infrastructure.
“I’m deeply honoured to receive this award,” Salem said. “It’s a reflection of the incredible real-world impact of the research we conduct, and the success of the highly qualified people I have had the privilege to mentor, whose enhanced research skills and hands-on experiences are shaping the future of our discipline.”
Salem has two patents in Canada and the USA on beam-end connecting mechanism for mass timber buildings. He has also authored/co-authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications in international journals.
One of his latest innovations features fastened metal rods inside timber connections.
“Metal connectors in a fire can absorb heat and accelerate charring around them, and that will lead to failure,” Salem said. “So we created a totally new connection that is basically based on mechanically fastened threaded rods, where the rods are totally embedded inside the glue lump sections. In a fire, the mass timber section would start to burn and char, but at the end these connectors will be hidden inside the lump glue section.”
“So without any additional fire protections, we achieved a one-hour fire resistance rating using the smallest cross-section available in the market.”
