Alexia’s project will help determine whether links exist between local pollen counts, a mother’s allergies (or lack of them), and biomarkers of children’s potential allergies in umbilical cord blood.

Twenty-one-year-old undergrad Wilmer Yan is making an educational journey around the world this summer. Wilmer, who calls Sydney, Australia, home, is in Canada as a Mitacs Globalink intern where he’s working with Professor Mike Smith at the University of Calgary.

Is there a connection between diabetes and dementia? This summer, researchers at the University of Manitoba are investigating just that, with help from Mitacs Globalink intern Jesua Bueno Gasca.

Supervised by Professor Shantanu Basu, Shyam is applying the latest in astrophysics research to further our understanding of star formation in our galaxy — and beyond.

Twenty-two-year-old undergrad Luanna Siqueira is getting used to the quietness of Regina this summer — a city she describes as “small and cozy” compared to the hustle and bustle of her home city, João Pessoa, Brazil, with a population of more than 800,000.

The human body contains over 600 muscles that connect to the brain via a network of trillions of nerves. So imagine how difficult it must be to understand how these muscles and networks communicate with one another.

“We have found that there is certain types of sounds that humans process faster than spoken word. For example, people tend to process the sound of a scream — in my study’s case, a screech from a violin — faster than they would process someone saying ‘I’m feeling scared,’” cites Karina.

“By modelling real and simulated floods, the program helps researchers develop prevention and response plans,” Houssem explains. “We also gain insight into morphology, or how a body of water changes shape over time, and sediment transport, and how all these factors affect flooding and what we can do to prevent it."

For many Prairie dwellers, Saskatoon’s winters are a great excuse to escape to balmier climates. But for Mengying Liu, snowdrifts and cool temperatures were actually an attractive reason to come to the University of Saskatchewan.

Canada has the highest rate of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in the world. Currently, about 10 to 20 percent of sufferers, including pediatric IBD patients, don’t respond to existing treatments, and that number is expected to increase in the years ahead.

Caroline Mattos has always been fascinated by computers. It started when she was a young girl in Brazil watching her older brother play on his Apple Macintosh.

David St-Onge has a passion for robotics. Currently a postdoc at Polytechnique Montréal, David has spent more than 10 years researching robotics for both academic and commercial projects — and now he’s seeing his passion come to life.