Employee Spotlights

MEET SOME OF OUR EMPLOYEE ROCK STARS!

The team at the Office of Research & Innovation advance Humber’s research profile and help drive the impact of research completed at the college. We’d like to take the time to highlight some of our rock star coworkers that keep us leading, transforming and differentiating.

Barath Roy Michel

MSW, IMGB™, Senior Project Manager

BARATH ROY MICHEL HOLDS A Bachelor of Science in Physics from Periyar University, India, and a Master of Social Work, specializing in Human Resources from Mar Gregorious College, India. After being persuaded to come to Canada by family, he applied to the Graduate Certificate program in Project Management in 2018 at Humber College.

Soon after completing the one-year program, Michel was hired by Humber’s Applied Research & Innovation department and immediately played an integral part in a Hotel Implementation Plan student capstone project at the Barrett Centre for Technology Innovation. Now, Michel is responsible for enabling data transparency in the office. He has improved the process flow of grants, and trains student research assistants on basic data analysis tools, including introductions to Tableau and Microsoft Power Business Intelligence (BI).

“[I] got to do a lot of fun stuff and meet cool people. We have an amazing boss, Dr. Ginger Grant, who basically allows us to experiment with ideas. If the ideas work, good. If they don’t, we’ll try again.”

Michel is now a Project Manager with the depar tment and is working on building a predictive model to assess the success rate of grant applications. He is also developing an Online Ideation Platform to help researchers bring their ideas to life.

Michel is a Certified Innovation 360 Licensed Practitioner (IMYB™)—Innovation Management Green Belt, issued by the Innovation 360 Group AB; a certification that can only be attempted upon completing IMBA Innovation Management Basic and IMYB Innovation Management Yellow Belt Accreditation™.

Camila Perez Pena

Camila Perez Pena

IMGB™, Senior Project Manager

CAMILA’S EDUCATIONAL JOURNEY BEGAN IN her hometown of Bogota, Colombia, where she completed her undergraduate degree in Strategic Innovation Design from Universidad de los Andes in 2017. Passionate about leveraging her skills to the highest potential, she moved to Canada in 2018 and enrolled at Humber College, where she completed the Graduate Certificate program in Project Management, graduating with Honours. Camila’s experience with the Leadership Club (a team of second-semester student mentors) and an alternative capstone project at the Barrett Centre for Technology & Innovation put her on the map at Humber.

Her skill sets cover areas of service, process and product design, ethnographic research, project and change management, innovation strategy, and peer mentorship. After being a HUWIB Ambassador for Harvard University in 2016, she co-founded the first Women in Business Organization in Colombia, which reflects her desire to help the community and improve people’s lives.

At Humber Research & Innovation, Camila leads the CCSIF (College and Community Social Innovation und) por tfolio. She’s responsible for the application process and post-award accountabilities, ensuring compliance with government policies and that all contracts and agreements are adhered to by faculty members and community partners. Now, Camila manages the development of a new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, designed and mapped by her, and developed by the Data Visualization Specialists: Nandish Dave and Milan Patel. Other Humber departments have expressed interest in adopting a similar platform. This tool, in development with Barath Roy Michel, is a centralized system that will optimize the research process, serving as a customizable way to track projects, partners, events, faculty engagement, and grant approvals.

“Research is messy, chaotic, and unpredictable, but when you have a great team... [we can] take risks and discover innovative and fun ways to reimagine and improve what we do.”

Camila is a Certified Innovation360 Licensed Practitioner (IMYB™)—Innovation Management Green Belt, issued by the Innovation 360 Group AB; a certification that can only be attempted upon completing IMBA Innovation Management Basic and IMYB Innovation Management Yellow Belt Accreditation™.

Eswaran Ardhanareshwaran

Eswaran Ardhanareshwaran

LEED GA, CAPM, B.E., Project Coordinator

ESWARAN OBTAINED HIS BACHELOR’S DEGREE in 2016 from RMK Engineering College in Chennai, India, studying Electrical & Electronics Engineering. During his time there he and a group of other students won the National Innovation Award at ECOK ART 2015. This sparked an interest in electrical engineering, and persuaded Eswaran to move to Dubai in 2016, beginning as a Graduate Engineering Trainee and making his way up to Power Plant Engineer at Emirates Global Aluminium.

Eswaran moved to Canada in 2019 and graduated from Humber’s Graduate Cer tificate in Project Management with Honours in 2020. He’s also the winner of the 2020 Norm Neill Student of the Year Award hosted by the MPI (Meeting Professionals International) Toronto Chapter.

“Research is a road to explore unknowns and never has any end point. For me research is all about learning new things and goes hand in hand with innovation.”

Approximately a year ago, Eswaran—along with team members Piyusha and Zeal—began assisting Camila and her team, who are generating organizational process assets and a repository of research projects conducted by the Humber community. The project is on-going and all of the data will help populate our CRM. He also helps faculty members to compile their Canada 103CVs: mandatory documents required during the submission of grant applications.

Eswaran is LEED® Green Certification, knowledgeable on the eco-friendly future of construction. Eswaran also holds the CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management) from the Project Management Institute and holds a Six Sigma White Belt Certification.

Milan Patel

Milan Patel

BIT, Data Visualization Specialist

MIL AN OBTAINED HIS BACHELOR’S DEGREE in Information Technology from Gandhinagar Institute of Technology, Gujarat, India in 2018. Without pause, he applied to Humber’s Enterprise Software Development Graduate Cer tificate program to fur ther his career goals that year. He later completed a Graduate Cer tificate in Information Technology Project Management in 2020. Milan is a life-long learner, regularly engaging with platforms like LinkedIn Learning and Udemy, and obtaining cer tifications in Python and completing the Tableau Essential Training in preparation of Tableau Desktop Specialist cer tification.

“Research is LIMITLESS. Every research comes with different outcomes that you haven’t thought about. So, be ready to accept the change.”

He now works closely with Camila Perez Pena on the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform.

The CRM will present critical information to depar tment members and research par tners, and Milan provides critical suppor t to this project. He is also working on integrating Research & Innovation’s website with the Tableau data visualization tool.