History

CASRAI is a non-profit corporation registered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is governed by a volunteer Board of Directors composed of senior leaders in the research community.

CASRAI was founded in 2006 to solve a problem. There was a strong need by organizations like the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to see better pathways for sharing information and reducing the administrative burden on research teams.

CASRAI was founded in July of that year by the Directors of eVision Inc. eVision was and is a leading provider of IT solutions in the research domain and was advising NSERC and SSHRC at the time. David Baker, Adil Hamdouna and Abder Loukili joined together to submit an application to Industry Canada for the creation of a new, non-profit organization.

Soon after its founding, and cognizant of the importance of CASRAI remaining completely separate from any one solution provider, Mr. Hamdouna and Mr. Loukili vacated their spot on the initial CASRAI board to make room for leading representatives from early member organizations.

David Baker continued in his role in order to keep the fledgling organization moving forward and worked to maintain a separation between his duties as a Director at eVision from those at CASRAI. In 2009 Mr. Baker left his position at eVision in order to devote his full-time effort to CASRAI.

eVision has since formally joined CASRAI in order to play a role alongside other IT solutions providers.