Bio: Jennifer Freeman
Over the last 25 years Jennifer Freeman has established an extensive career in research administration and transformational leadership in higher education. Jennifer currently has a dual role at Ontario Tech University, located in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada as the Executive Director, Office of Research Services and Executive Director, ACE Core Research Facility. During Jennifer’s extensive career she has developed significant expertise in strategic and operational leadership, driving the creation and operations of a central research administration office at Ontario Tech that supports research grant and contract administration, technology transfer and commercialization, research safety, security and compliance, data driven decision making, research equity diversity and inclusion, and undergraduate student research. Since joining Ontario Tech in 2005 Jennifer has created structures to help drive an increase in research funding from 250k of research funding in 2005 to over 25 Millon in 2025. As a result, Ontario Tech was named as Canada’s Research University of the year for the last two consecutive years (Research Infosource, 2023, 2024).
As of April 2025, Jennifer was appointed as the Interim Executive Director, ACE Core Research Facility. ACE is a university owned one of kind commercial, research and training facility that provides a robust testing environment for industry, academia and government to drive innovation and solutions in any economic sector. The ACE testing environment is approximately 16,300 sq. meters with 5 specialized testing chambers. ACE can replicate any weather conditions, from the blistering heat of Death Valley to the frigid conditions in the Artic. It can produce crosswinds, and wind speeds up to 280km/hour, vibrational environments for product and component testing and simulate various environments to provide controlled testing to enable the development of products and validate prototypes. The facility boosts over 25 engineering, technical and administrative experts who support fully integrated testing solutions.
Jennifer has given back to the broader research community taking on active leadership roles in several external organizations, such as, SRAI (Past-President of the Canadian Section), CARA, CARA-SSHRC Working Group, OCUR Working Group and most importantly, ORCA, AUTM and REACH. In addition, Jennifer has been an advocate for EDI and championed the creation of the Women in Research Council at Ontario Tech.