The QCC is a membership association for those working in and retired from the public service sector in Ontario, and is eager to increase equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) within its organization and for its membership. To do that, QCC is partnering with a research intern who will gather and analyze information about QCC from documents, its staff, membership, and Board of Directors to determine what barriers and gaps QCC faces to increasing EDI within its organization.

The COVID-19 pandemic affected every aspect of our lives, and recreational water facilities were not immune to this with several questions and concerns about potential exposure to the virus at these facilities. This research project aims to understand experiences, needs, and opportunities towards the use of pools in residential buildings and hotels.

Patients in the US and Canada have been suffering from overcrowding and long wait times in emergency departments, along with poor health conditions. In order to provide guidelines for nurses, medical directives can request certain diagnostic tests during triage, which speeds up the process by providing test results to the physician when making the initial assessment. Our research will use the data from patients’ electronic health records to build and validate various machine learning models and to predict the downstream testing needs for children.

It is critical for farmers to have cultivars so that they can make decisions on the best practices to undertake when growing a new crop and maintain productivity and competitiveness in the marketplace. Pulse production is growing in demand and is an established market in Canada. In addition, plant based protein products are growing in popularity. We are working on developing a set of tools and information and varieties that will enable farmers to grow more pulses in Quebec. We will also determine basic agronomic parameters that will maximize crop yield and minimize risk of crop failure.

Using simplified language understandable to a layperson; provide a general, one-paragraph description of the proposed research project to be undertaken by the intern(s) as well as the expected benefit to the partner organization. (100 - 150 words) 7 Fathoms Seaweed Skincare (7FSS) is a small business that has developed products which incorporate an extract of Laminaria Digitata seaweed. The extract is prepared using a proprietary method and customers have reported dermatological and other benefits to using their products.

Mineral exploration and natural disaster risk reduction involve reasoning with uncertainty about complex descriptions of parts of the Earth. Such complex reasoning is traditionally carried out by human experts who, through years of training and field experience, develop specific knowledge and are able to take the right decision at the right time. This project will advance the previous work to build computer models and tools that assist human in these decision making processes.

Blood tests are highly sought after to enable earlier cancer detection. We previously developed a blood test for breast cancer that is in prospective clinical study in Alberta, Manchester (UK), Oklahoma (USA) and South Korea. The proposed project will investigate some clinical samples collected through this work to support the primarily focus of identifying biomarkers for a new cancer, multiple myeloma (MM). MM has a need for new monitoring approaches as it accounts for 10% of hematologic malignancies and is hard to cure, with a low five-year survival rate.

In recent years, significant attention has been paid to ending chronic homelessness in Canadian communities. As communities implement these initiatives, they confront many practical problems. Given the nuances of implementation and the many decisions and compromises that communities need to make, having a robust and thoughtful community engagement and co-design process that incorporates the relevant stakeholders is essential.

Nurses and care workers have long struggled to provide high quality care for people with dementia. Struggling to connect is one of the main causes of responsive behaviours and staff injuries within hospitals and long term care homes. Staff must be empowered to deliver individualized care with a focus on what matters to the older person. Our objective is to develop a mobile app called “WhatMatters” to equip the staff with the tools needed to deliver individualized care to people with dementia.

With the advances of microscopy techniques, scientists can monitor the neurons in large brain areas of living animals. But at the same time, it creates significant challenges for scientists to make sense of the generated data due to its scale and complexity. This calls for new componential methods and systems for augmenting the current workflows of neuroscientists. This research aims to address this problem by leveraging and innovating advanced machine learning and visualization techniques.