The International Commission on Illumination (CIE) is proud to announce that its President, Dr. Jennifer Veitch, has been inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), in recognition of her more than three decades of groundbreaking research in lighting and her significant contributions to the field. The ceremony took place on November 8 at the RSC Celebration of Excellence & Engagement 2024 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
"I am humbled and delighted to be invited to join a society whose members I have looked up to for so many years," says Dr. Veitch. "To be recognized as one of these leaders is a great honour, but it also carries a great responsibility to contribute to creating a better future, both in Canada and around the world."
Dr. Veitch was drawn to study lighting as an undergraduate psychology student, and has continued to pursue that calling throughout her career. Her professional career began in 1992 when she arrived at the National Research Council’s Institute for Research in Construction (now the Construction Research Centre). At that time, there was no established framework for studying lighting quality and its psychological impact, and it was not uncommon to hear that defining or studying quality was impossible. In the mid-1990s, she contributed to the development of the NRC's indoor environment research facility, which focused on how people interact with various environmental conditions and technologies—an area known as human factors. This facility's initial lighting experiments laid the groundwork for the research that has now brought her this prestigious recognition.
Her pioneering work demonstrated that improved indoor lighting could enhance employee well-being and productivity while promoting energy efficiency. This research not only transformed the field of lighting but also established a globally accepted framework adopted by international lighting associations, including the CIE . The framework first emerged following the NRC’s hosting of the First CIE Expert Symposium on Lighting Quality in 1998*. “Lighting quality” entered the CIE International Lighting Vocabulary in 2020 (the first ILV revision in three decades).
"We aspired to have a significant impact on the field," Dr. Veitch says. "It took the combined effort, over years, of many people to have that influence. My former colleague Dr. Guy Newsham and I worked together on many of the key publications, and we both served on the committees where this work was taken up."
Now, Dr. Veitch is part of the Human–Building Interaction team at the NRC's Construction Research Centre, focusing on the behavioural and health effects of indoor environments, including acoustics and air quality in addition to lighting. Her research has provided early evidence that low-energy green buildings can offer psychological benefits for their occupants.
As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Dr. Veitch’s long-term goal is to contribute to the better use of psychological science to enhance decision-making and policy, particularly with respect to climate change. "Our choices about what, how, and when to light influence not only human well-being and functioning but also the natural world, the visibility of the night sky, and the energy we consume to produce that light," she concludes.
Veitch, J. A., Julian, W., & Slater, A. I. (1998). A framework for understanding and promoting lighting quality. In J. A. Veitch (Ed.), Proceedings of the First CIE Symposium on Lighting Quality (Vol. CIE-x015-1998, pp. 237-241). Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage.
