Calgary Reads is a not-for-profit community literacy organization that seeks to improve children’s lives by helping them become confident, joyful readers. The role of the intern is to create two knowledge mobilization products to share the science of reading with volunteers, parents, teachers, and other collaborators. Calgary Reads facilitated delivery of a tutoring program for 20 years. However, the program needs to be updated in the science of reading and available as a deliverable for training of volunteers both in person and online.

Episodic memory refers to an ensemble of memory processes and is the capacity to recollect where and when past events occurred, which involves subjective consciousness and a sense of time in retrieving past experiences. The hippocampus is essential for representing spatiotemporal context and establishing its association with the sensory details of daily life to form episodic memories and the olfactory cortex shares exclusive anatomical connections with the hippocampus as a result of their common evolutionary history. This makes olfaction a privileged sense for accessing memories.

The goal of this industry partnered project is to develop accessible online cognitive tests for children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Presently, Cambridge Brain Sciences is a leader in offering on-demand cognitive testing for typically-developing children and adults. An intern who is a graduate student in school psychology, will work with Cambridge Brain Sciences staff to develop audio/visual instructions for children with neurodevelopmental disorders.

We will review the literature and determine which cognitive tests best quantify executive function in individuals with varying substances of use. We will then empirically validate the aforementioned tests using a remote platform, ensuring these tests can be administered remotely (online), without compromising the validity of the test. We will then administer these cognitive tests to incoming patients at baseline, after completion of the program, and one year after completion.

Millions of Canadians struggle with insomnia, but common methods of dealing with poor sleep (e.g., medication) have poor side effects, do not have lasting effects, and are not preferred by patients and providers. Although cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is the gold-standard treatment, there is limited access because most mental health practitioners (MPHs) do not have sufficient training to deliver CBT-I. To address this problem, Dr.

The annual economic impact of mental health illness and addiction on the Canadian economy is estimated to be around $50 billion, with projected increases in future years. Little research exists that has evaluated mental health illness and addictions in the Canadian workplace. The provision of counselling and therapy services helps to boost both mental health well-being and employment productivity, with gains well exceeding the cost of treatment itself.

Currently there are few standards for evaluating service delivery, and since health care service delivery is a domain of the provinces, new health care services need to be tested and evaluated in each province before being widely offered. This leads to inefficiency in evaluations as well as unequal access to new services across the country. Also, the evaluations that are done are usually based on what the service delivery organization values about the programming rather than what the patient community served by the programming values.

Chronic pain (CP) is a prevalent, disabling, and costly disorder. The gold standard treatment for chronic pain is care from an interdisciplinary pain clinic (IPC) - a rare resource in Canada that is often associated with long wait times (up to five years). These long wait times increase the risk of physical and mental deterioration for the patient and so there need to develop tools to assist CP patients who are on an IPC waitlist. Research suggests that the use of web-based clinical platforms are helpful in health domains (e.g., migraine management).

Bipolar disorder affects 2.2% of Canadians and profoundly impacts their quality of life, functioning, and overall health. There is a major unmet need of understanding the illness course and knowing which patients will present a higher risk to develop worse outcomes. This knowledge is important to develop new preventative treatments.

Recently, principles gleaned from research on learning have been applied to change people's brains. Specifically, there is evidence that how the brain communicates can be changed through the application of positive and negative reinforcement, a concept known as neurofeedback. Importantly, researchers claim that by changing how the brain communicates, neurofeedback can change behaviour and reduce clinical symptoms. As these techniques have grown in popularity, companies such as Neurotech Forty have applied neurofeedback to serve Canadians.