Danika Goosney

Dr. Danika Goosney began her five-year appointment as the President and CEO of the Canadian Museum of Nature on September 1,2022.  Danika is passionate about science literacy and building public trust in science, as well as improving equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in STEM.

She obtained her Bachelor of Science (first class honours) from St. Francis Xavier University and her PhD in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Biotechnology Laboratory (now the Michael Smith Labs) at the University of British Columbia, for which she was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal, among other awards. She conducted her postdoctoral training as a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Immunology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.  

Following her postdoctoral research, Dr. Goosney worked as a research scientist at two Vancouver-based biotechnology companies. She joined the federal public service in 2006 where she served in increasingly senior executive roles. She held several director general positions at CIHR in the Research, Knowledge Translation and Ethics portfolio, before taking on the role of Associate Vice-President, Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat, at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Most recently, she served as the Vice-President, Research Grants and Scholarships at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.