It’s been a whirlwind of new experiences since I arrived in Vietnam two months ago. I am here to study seahorses, both underwater and those that are caught by fishing boats. It’s the field portion of my MSc degree, which I am completing at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, co-supervised by Drs. Amanda Vincent and Sarah Foster. My lab, Project Seahorse, conducts research all over the world, with a focus on Southeast Asia. My work is strengthening ties between Canada and Vietnam, and helps work towards greater conservation for seahorses.
Alberto Solis Serrano, from Mexico’s Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León is the recipient of the Mitacs Undergraduate Award for Outstanding Innovation for his research at the University of Alberta in summer 2015 under supervison of Professor Patricio Mendez in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering.
George Conidis, a PhD student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York University is the recipient of the Mitacs PhD Award for Outstanding Innovation for his research at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with Dr. Michael Richer through a Mitacs Globalink Research Award.
Sequential photography is best described as multiple photographic images arranged in sequences that explore the medium’s relationships to movement, memory, or narrative over an extended period of time. As part of my research, I spent three months in Paris, France, with support from the Mitacs Globalink Research Award.
More than 400,000 fishers, belonging to specific fisher castes, customarily depend upon the lagoon for their livelihoods. For my research project, which was based on Khirisahi Island, I analysed how they perceive and adapt to environmental changes.
Issues surrounding resources and sustainability, like water in developing countries, often require an interdisciplinary approach. Challenges related to water access are much more severe than in developed countries, due to factors such as rapid population growth, inadequate infrastructure, and lack of robust resource management policies. Compounding these challenges is an absence of appropriate theories and tools for knowledge integration to bridge the gap between resource management and research.
I learned about the Mitacs Globalink Research Internship from a friend of mine who was a Globalink alumnus. He told me about his experiences and encouraged me to apply to go to Canada in 2014. I was also motivated by the quality of research projects offered and the new educational, cultural, and life experiences I knew I could have.
I have been interested in visual anthropology and representations of cultural heritage throughout my degree. In discussions with my supervisor, Dr. Sara Shneiderman, I learned about the deep cultural histories of the Himalayan region, and I aimed to bring together my interest in visual anthropology with a field-based ethnographic study of a social phenomenon.
So far, my research has been conducted with software simulation and mathematical modeling; however, testbed implementation is more realistic and accurate.
Thanks to my home supervisor, Dr. Jianping Pan, I applied for the Mitacs Globalink Research Award to undertake a project with Dr. Ruonan Zhang at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU) in Xi'an, China. Dr. Zhang is a UVic alumnus: he received his PhD there and joined NWPU in 2010. One of his research areas is testbed development and implementation for wireless networks.
When Globalink Research intern Xiaoyang Li arrived in London, Ontario in early August, the first thing he noticed was London’s clean air and the difference in rush hour traffic compared to back home. Hailing from China’s Tianjin University, Xiaoyang is in Canada for 12 weeks working with a team of researchers in the Department of Computer Science at Western University on a project called “RoadLab.”
