Ted Hewitt

Dr. Ted Hewitt has served as Vice-President (Research & International Relations) at The University of Western Ontario since February 2005. First appointed Western’s Associate Vice-President (Research) in May 2001, Hewitt spearheaded efforts to develop the University’s Strategic Research Plan and its Strategic Plan for Internationalization, both of which were approved by the Senate and Board of Governors in 2003. He currently sits on the Boards of the Canadian Language and Literacy Network, and the London TechAlliance, and recently completed a two-year term on the Board of the London Economic Development Corporation. He is Chair of the Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network, and the Ontario High Performance Computing Council, and was elected to serve as the Vice-Chair of the Ontario Council on University Research for 2007-2008. A sociology professor, Hewitt recently completed terms as the Editor and Managing Editor, respectively, of the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and is a leading Canadian authority on Brazil. He completed his PhD degree at McMaster University, and attended university in São Paulo, Brazil as a special student in 1984. In 2003, he led negotiations with the University of Calgary, York University, the Université du Québec à Montréal, and the Embassy of Brazil in Ottawa to establish the Canada Visiting Research Chair in Brazilian Studies. The first of its kind in the country, the Chair program has undertaken to promote Brazilian Studies in Canada by hosting a number of distinguished Brazilian scholars at the partner universities and by organizing widely-attended events on topics of national interest in both Canada and Brazil. He has published extensively on issues related to social movements and population health, local government, and international cooperation for urban development in Latin America. His work has appeared in a range of academic journals including Cities, Journal of Latin American Studies, Journal of Developing Areas, Third World Quarterly, and Habitat International. In 2002, he was named Commander of the Order of Rio Branco by Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Relations.