Gina Cody, as chancellor of Concordia University, welcomes graduates and their guests at a spring 2025 convocation.

By Dr. Gina Cody

July 28, 2025

I was a university student in the late 1970s when my country and my life were turned upside down. My homeland of Iran was in the grip of major civil unrest, as millions protested the increasingly authoritarian rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Massive demonstrations and strikes intensified throughout 1978, while the regime responded with brutal repression

. In January 1979, the Shah fled the country, and by April of that year, Iran was declared an Islamic Republic.

I was 22 years old at the time, having just completed my bachelor’s degree in engineering at Aryamehr University of Technology in Tehran (which is now known as Sharif University of Technology). My mother had always told my sister and me that a woman’s ticket to independence was higher education. Yet, the unrest in my homeland made it clear that both my education and my independence might be at risk if I stayed.

I made the difficult decision to leave my parents, my home, my country — everything I knew — to relocate to a land far away. Mine was just one of many lives whose trajectory was forever altered by geopolitics and fate.

In late August of 1979, I landed in Montreal as an international student. I chose Canada because my brother Mahmoud, who was studying engineering at Concordia University, had told me that Canada was a great country, where my future would only be limited by the size of my dreams.

And I had big dreams.

My brother had arranged for me to meet with one of his professors, Cedric Marshall. After a brief interview, I was offered a scholarship to pursue my graduate degree in engineering at Concordia . Suddenly my fear and uncertainty were replaced with hope and a path forward.

On a Toronto job site in the 1990s

In 1989, I became the first woman in Canada to earn a PhD in Building Engineering. I spent more than 30 years in the private sector as an engineer, corporate executive and principal shareholder of a national engineering firm. I provided professional engineering services to some of Canada’s largest Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), financial institutions, builders and developers.

In 2010 and 2011, I was named one of Canada’s Top Women Entrepreneurs by Profit Magazine, and my firm was recognized as one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies through Canada’s leading business awards program. I am currently, one of only a few women to chair a TSX 60 company – the Canadian Apartment Properties REIT.

I share my story not to boast, but to reveal the magic that can happen when a country opens its doors to a person searching for a safe place to call home and to realize their dreams. As an immigrant, I was determined to show Concordia and Canada that investing in me, with a scholarship, permanent residency and later citizenship, was indeed a solid investment.

After a rewarding career in engineering, I repurposed my dreams into philanthropy. My goal was to repay the support I was given — as a scholar, as a woman, as an engineer and as a newcomer. I wanted to ensure that others with similar visions — dreamers of every background, culture, race, religion and gender — could have the same opportunity now as I did back then.

With Concordia students in 2018

In 2018, I made a substantial gift to my alma mater, with the hope that it would encourage fellow Concordia alumni and others to also give back. My gift has funded three research chairs, and new scholarships for students with a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. My hope is that in 10 to 15 years there will be so many examples of women like me, international students like me, and donors like me that I am forgotten. I hope there will be so many women in science, engineering, and technology that it’s no longer noteworthy and has become the norm.

We live in challenging times. Human rights are under attack around the world. More and more governments are turning against “others” and even against their own citizens. Climate related disasters are growing with many storms, fires, flood and drought. According to the United Nations, at the end of 2024, an estimated 123 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and other events, both war-related and climate-related. The reality is that that number will only increase in the years to come.

So, when I see people arriving in Canada today from places like Ukraine, the Middle East, South America or Africa, I think of two things. First, my heart goes out to them because I know what it is like to be propelled by fear into the unknown. You calculate the risk that your own future and the future of your children and their children will be better in a place you have never been to.

Second, I wonder what their story will be. How will they make their mark on the country that gave them the possibility of endless possibilities? Not all newcomers will be captains of industry or be in a position to make transformative philanthropic gifts. But all of them will have stories.

Canada will change them just as Canada changed me. Yet how will they change Canada? They will work, they will fall in love, they will raise families. They will be neighbours and customers and employees and bosses and citizens. Canadian newcomers can live lives they would not, and maybe could not live, in the places they fled, as long as our immigration system and economy allow them to flourish.

Some people think that integrating newcomers is a lot of work. It’s true that inclusion requires considerable effort. Yet that work pays off. Today, Canada is considered one of the world’s most desirable places to live. If Canada’s history has taught us anything, it is that investing in the integration of immigrants is worth our collective efforts. Integration also counteracts the polarization that we all see growing in politics and society.

Canada continues to be a nation built by immigrants and their descendants. I hope we recognize and remember: diversity is Canada’s superpower. As my own story demonstrates, when you help immigrants make a living, they become free to make a life.

For that, I am an extremely grateful Canadian.

Concordia’s Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science is the first engineering and computer science faculty in the world named after a woman.