Amit Chakma

Early life and education

Chakma was born in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of the then East Pakistan now Bangladesh to Prabhat Chakma and Alo Chakma. He was the eldest among four siblings. The Chakma people are an ethnic minority from the south-east region of Bangladesh. He studied in Ispahani School in Comilla and completed his secondary education from Rangamati Government High School. He passed his HSC examination from Dhaka College in 1976. He received a scholarship from the Algerian government, along with nine other Bangladeshi students, to study natural gas processing engineering at Algerian Petroleum Institute in Algeria. In 1982, he graduated at the top of his class. He then moved to Canada and earned a Master of Applied Science and PhD in chemical engineering from the University of British Columbia in 1984 and 1987 respectively.

Career

From 1988 until 1996, Chakma taught chemical engineering at the University of Calgary. In 1996, he moved to the University of Regina as dean of engineering. He then served as Regina's vice president research from 1999 to 2001. During his time at the University of Regina, Chakma was named to Canada's Top 40 Under 40 list. He became vice president academic and provost at the University of Waterloo in 2001. His research interests are natural gas engineering and petroleum waste management.

On July 1, 2009, Chakma succeeded Paul Davenport as the University of Western Ontario's president. Having left the University of Waterloo, he has been noted for his service to both the university and the academic and business community of Kitchener-Waterloo. At Western, Chakma led a rebranding exercise in 2012 that resulted in rebranding the university as Western He was reappointed to serve a second five-year term the same year. In 2014 Western's Senate and Board of Governors approved the University's ambitious strategic plan titled "Achieving Excellence on the World Stage.

Higher Education Leadership

Chakma served as the Chair of U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities from 2012-2014. Successful advocacy during this period led to the creation of the $1.2 billion "The Canada First Research Excellence Program" by the Government of Canada to support competitively selected Canadian post secondary institutions to turn their key strengths into world-leading capabilities.

He has been serving as a Trustee and a member of the executive committee of the Association of Commonwealth Universities , the world's first and oldest network of universities since 2014.

Awards and recognition

On June 19, 2010 Chakma received an honorary doctor of engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. Chakma was recognized for playing a leading role in the establishment of a new health sciences campus in Kitchener and the relocation of the school of architecture to Cambridge during his tenure as vice-president at Waterloo.

In 2012, Chakma received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in recognition of his contributions to Canadian post-secondary education.

In 2014 Chakma was awarded a Top 25 Canadian Immigrants Award. The award citation described how Chakma used education as the basis for his remarkable journey as a young boy from a tribe in the hills of southeastern Bangladesh to becoming a university president in Canada.

In 2014 Chakma was the recipient of the Michael P. Malone International Leadership Award. The award is meant to provide national recognition for a career of outstanding contributions to further international education at state and land-grant institutions. The award is named after Michael P. Malone, an American historian and 10th president of Montana State University.

In 2015 Chakma received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Engineering Alumni group at the University of British Columbia.

On March 4, 2017, He was the convocation speaker at the 50th convocation of the University of Dhaka, the pre-eminent university locally known as the Oxford of the East, where he was bestowed Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) by President Abdul Hamid of Bangladesh, the Chancellor of the University for his outstanding leadership in education and research.

Public Service

Chakma is a passionate advocate for promoting international education and has written and commented extensively on this topic. He chaired an Advisory Panel on Canada's International Education Strategy in 2011-12. One of the key recommendations was to double the number of international students in Canada The Government of Canada has endorsed this key recommendation and adopted its International Education Strategy in 2014.

He served as a member of Canada's Science and Technology Innovation Council from 2011-2017 and co-chaired the working group for the State of the Nation Report 2014 that benchmarks Canada's science, technology, and innovation performance against international standards of excellence.

International Engagement

Chakma has served as Chair of the Board of Directors of a Canada-based development organization of long standing the World University Services of Canada (WUSC) from 2011-2015.

He also served on the Board of Trustees of the Asian University for Women (http://www.auw.edu.bd/), an international liberal arts university located in Chittagong, Bangladesh from 2012-2015 as Vice-Chair and Acting Chair.

Controversy

While he was dean of engineering at the University of Regina in 1998, Chakma hired Lana Nguyen as a professor of systems software engineering. Chakma said in his recommendation that "Nguyen's candidacy has been the fruit of our relentless proactive efforts in identifying potential women faculty members." Nguyen taught at Regina for two years before students and faculty, suspicious on account of Nguyen's apparent lack of knowledge, discovered that she had defrauded the University by claiming her ex-husband's doctoral degree as her own.

On March 27, 2015, Chakma came under criticism after reportedly earning $967,000 in salary and benefits in 2014, a year in which class sizes grew as Western administrators squeezed faculty, shrunk staffing and left empty vacated positions. Chakma's pay was a result of "double-dipping," allowing him to collect a second full salary for choosing to work during his paid administrative leave.

On March 30, 2015, Member of Provincial Parliament for London-West, Peggy Sattler asked in the Provincial Parliament question period whether the government would prohibit university boards of governors from negotiating similar double payouts to university presidents. Training, Colleges and Universities Minister Reza Moridi replied that a bill was passed last year allowing public sector executive compensation to be capped, but that Chakma's contract was signed before this legislation came into force.

On March 31, 2015, The London Free Press reported that Chakma had similarly cashed in an unused sabbatical in 2009 when he had left the University of Waterloo to become president of Western. A retired Waterloo faculty member told The Free Press that "There was quite a bit of alarm expressed by UW faculty over this, since if (a regular) faculty (member) resigns, they never receive anything for any unused sabbatical credit." Chakma had been paid more than $741,000 by Waterloo in 2009 and another $229,000 in pay and benefits after he had moved to Western that July.