Every year, thousands of Canadian children are diagnosed with, or treated for, brain disorders such as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and cerebral palsy. As a national scientific research network, NeuroDevNet has dedicated its mission towards finding the root causes of these disorders.

Through a Mitacs Accelerate internship at the end of her Masters at Simon Fraser University, Vivien Lo was asked to develop a cost-benefit model for their technology— a challenge which landed her a job with the company full-time.

When Ali Ahmadi came to Canada to complete a doctorate in applied science, he had a very personal goal of making a difference within cancer research. Using the many skills which he developed through Mitacs Step workshops, Dr. Ahmadi has contributed to a team whose device may do just that.

Mitacs Elevate Fellow, Kinfe Tadesse Mengistu has come a long way (literally) to get to where he is now. And congratulations are definitely in order as Kinfe starts his new position as speech scientist for Nuance Communications, a company he’s always dreamed of working for.

Gurjit Singh credits the Mitacs Elevate program with facilitating the transition point between postdoctoral education and finding a fulfilling research position. He obtained his Ph.D. (psychology) from the University of Toronto, his M.A. (social psychology) from the University of Waterloo, and his M.Sc. (Audiology) from Western University.

What makes Mitacs Step workshops such crowd pleasers? From professors to participants its rave reviews all around. I sat in on a workshop to see, first-hand, what sets these workshops apart.

Blackbox, which specializes in offering GIS services to the oil and gas sector in Calgary, is a fast-growing company, Gedamu says. “To keep growing, we need to innovate, and in order to innovate, we need to partner with researchers. Mitacs provided me with this kind of opportunity, and now I’d be glad to offer others the same kind of opportunity in a way that would be mutually beneficial,” says Gedamu, who is the Director of product development at Blackbox.

“The Mitacs Elevate program helped prepare me for a career where I’d be merging ideas and leveraging the abilities of people with seemingly divergent skill sets and disparate backgrounds. I feel like I’m much better prepared to coordinate projects that involve balancing the different expectations of clinical, academic, and industrial partners. I have been given the tools that will allow me to manage diverse stakeholder interests while maintaining a focus on our common goals.”

The new Quartier des spectacles at the centre of Montréal offers a potential which the company Réalisations-Montréal hopes to help fulfill. “We are in the business of ideas which apply to show business, entertainment and resorts”, explains Realisations.net president Roger Parent.

Their research can turn skin cells into blood cells, create new jobs and encourage industry innovation, and there is every indication it will continue to change and improve our lives for years to come.

“I thought I might benefit from learning a little bit more about the business environment, but I didn’t have very high expectations about the workshops themselves,” El Saadany says. It turned out his expectations were to be exceeded by far. In the end, El Saadany took part in half a dozen different Mitacs Step skills development workshops.