Chad Gaffield is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Ottawa in Canada where he is researching and writing about the past, present and future of digital scholarship.

Previously, Dr. Gaffield served as President and CEO of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) during 2006-2014 and as President of the Royal Society of Canada from 2017-2019. From 2022 to 2025, he served as CEO for U15 Canada, the association of leading research universities dedicated to enhancing Canada’s research and innovation ecosystem.

An expert on the sociocultural history of 19th- and 20th-century Canada, Gaffield has been at the forefront of efforts to develop digital technologies that expand, deepen, and facilitate research, teaching and public engagement. His scholarship has focused on Canada’s official languages in their changing socio-cultural, economic and demographic contexts since the early nineteenth century. He has also studied socio-demographic change in the Ottawa Valley as well as childhood and family history during the nineteenth-century establishment of mass schooling. From 2001 to 2008, Gaffield led the interdisciplinary, multi-institutional and cross-sectoral Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI) initiative, one of Canada’s largest and most innovative research projects in the social sciences and humanities. By developing digital technology to mine historical census enumerations and documentary evidence, CCRI is now enabling unprecedented temporal and spatial analyses of the forces that shaped the twentieth century. Gaffield’s own research using this research infrastructure has studied the making of Canada’s official language dualism. Gaffield’s current project examines the conceptual and technological underpinnings of the Digital Age beginning with the 1930s and reaching to today’s AI (with an emphasis on Canada and the role of researchers, especially historians).

A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he received the RSC’s 2004 J.B. Tyrrell Historical Medal given every two years for outstanding contributions to the study of Canada. In 2011, Gaffield was awarded the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations’ Antonio Zampolli Prize which, every three years, recognizes a major research contribution. In 2015, he received a Doctor of Laws honoris causa from Carleton University. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2017. Gaffield received his BA (Hons) and MA from McGill University and his PhD from the University of Toronto.