Selkirk College, in southern BC, built a network of Mitacs-funded internships with nine community partners to advance social and economic wellbeing in its rural region. In areas from conservation to culture, Selkirk students undertook research to address pressing local challenges.

Based in St. Albert, Alberta, Medidas Digital developed TrypScore, a mobile app that gathers and analyzes driver risk data and uses challenges, leaderboards, and incentives to nudge behavioural improvements.

Across Canada, businesses and organizations grappling with the impact of COVID-19 are getting support from an unexpected resource: top local business students.

Thanks to the recently launched Business Strategy Internship (BSI) program, Mitacs helps match students from top schools with employers looking for support to manage and grow their operations in an environment disrupted by the pandemic.

With the cost of living sky-rocketing and incomes lagging, it’s no wonder why people are anxious about their financial futures.

No one teaches you this stuff in high school. But there will soon be an app for that, thanks in part to recent York University research funded by Mitacs.

“Most Canadians don’t have a tool to optimize their investments and only the wealthiest Canadians have access to professional financial advice. But everyone needs a solid plan for retirement,” says Dr. Michael Chen, Professor of Mathematics at York University.

When your business relies on a natural habitat, your number one priority is protecting it. For John Grace and his family — owners and operators of the world-class Old Post Lodge on Northwestern Ontario’s Lake St. Joseph — conservation has been an important part of the corporate vision from day one.

Buddy is as old as maple syrup, and it’s not friendly. This burned-Tootsie-Roll taste can ruin syrup flavour and is undetectable until sap is processed — far too late for small producers to recoup costs.

The annual cost of buddy, which the Ontario Maple Syrup Producers Association (OMSPA) estimates can reach into the millions, is a lot of liquid gold for small producers who are forced to sell buddy product at highly reduced rates. To avoid the risk, some producers stop production too early in the season, missing the opportunity to make high-quality syrup.

That’s why Jess is on a mission to develop first-of-its-kind active workwear for women, creating an innovative, fire-retardant fabric with stretch that will form the basis for her first clothing line, set to launch in spring 2020 under her textile and clothing start-up, Jess Black Inc. Her target audience is the growing number of women choosing to work in the trades, currently pegged at four percent according to Statistics Canada’s most recent Labour Force Survey, accounting for 34,800 women.

Norman called up his friend Mark Nathan, a cardiologist. 

“We put our heads together to develop the concept further,” said Dr. Nathan. “We were inspired by the idea of a cardiac stent, which is a sterile device used in heart surgery to allow arterial blood flow in patients with heart disease. Stents are different in all the important respects from what we had in mind, however; as with stents, we wanted to create sleeve-like scaffolds that can wrap around a stud, contain and release effective medication, dissolve predictably, and disappear.”

This is what the team at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences (CHEOS) is curious to explore. And this summer, they’ve engaged Cianan Thomson, a Mitacs research intern from Deakin University in Australia, to help the CHEOS team understand existing tools, as well as the opportunities they might provide for a novel approach.