Unmanned aerial vehicles, or as they’re more commonly known, drones, are staple pieces of equipment in military applications. More recently, their popularity has expanded to humanitarian and even recreational uses.

This summer, Ina Werninghaus has travelled from Bonn, Germany to Edmonton, Alberta, where she’s using her background in molecular biology to take part in a research project on pregnant women’s immune responses to malaria.

Tao Xiong loves anything related to civil engineering, from planning and design, to construction and maintenance. This summer, Tao’s taking part in a Mitacs Globalink research project of seismic proportions.

A self-driving wheelchair is cruising the halls of University of Toronto this summer. The autonomous wheelchair, a joint project between U of T, Université de Sherbrooke, and Cyberworks Robotics, is being tested by 20-year-old Xinyi Li, an undergraduate student at Zhejiang University who’s in Canada for 12-weeks as a Mitacs Globalink intern.

Whether it’s in the shower, on the commute to work, or when helping little ones fall asleep, singing is an everyday activity in many people’s lives. But a research project based at the Université Laval hopes to demonstrate that singing can also benefit neurological health.

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.