Although those figures sound alarming, researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) are one step closer to understanding — and treating —pediatric diseases such as colitis, Crohn’s disease, and others under the IBD umbrella.

Under the supervision of Dr. Laura Sly of UBC’s Department of Pediatrics, Eyler Ngoh, a PhD student, wanted to build on his previous research on the impact of an enzyme called SHIP. His initial work indicated that patients with low levels of SHIP experienced increased inflammation, a symptom common in IBD.

Developed by an Ontario company, eSight glasses have the potential to help hundreds of thousands of Canadians with severe vision impairment to see better in daily life. The glasses use a real-time camera-to-screen set-up and look much like today’s virtual reality headsets, except they do much more.

This is what McGill University PhD student researcher, Derek Albert, set to find out.

Treefrog, based in Newmarket, Ontario, knows all about social media for businesses. It provides a variety of marketing services to clients, including ‘traditional’ social media strategy. But a series of ongoing conversations between Sean Stephens, Treefrog CEO, and Laurie Baker, then an anthropology PhD candidate at York University, sparked a shift in how the company approaches social media.

Ontario organizational development consulting firm ODScore asked just that. Except that instead of using actual video games to engage their clients’ employees, they use the principles that make video games engrossing to engage employees at work.

So when they wanted to develop a new service to tackle bigger organizational changes, ODScore turned to the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute for renewed expertise.

At a meeting with Professor Neil Randall, the company learned that what they thought was a technical challenge, was really one of human relations.

Professor Lorna Butler and her team at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Nursing and the International Centre for Northern Governance and Development aim to address this issue through a research partnership with the International Mineral Innovation Institute (IMII) and Mitacs’ Accelerate program.

Ottawa’s branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), in partnership with the Champlain Local Health Integration Network, has launched a unique program called “Familiar Faces” to overcome this problem.

Since 2014, the initiative has increased communication between hospitals and community-based mental health organizations to identify the ER’s familiar faces, pinpoint where they need more support, and direct them to agencies that can help. In partnership with Mitacs Accelerate, the project has been able to take another important step: research and evaluation.

As a former varsity athlete and PhD scholar in biochemistry and molecular biology, Jeremy has always balanced a passion for sport with his profession as a genetics researcher. The idea of combining the two into a company began to take shape during a Mitacs Accelerate internship.

In response, local researchers and companies have partnered to develop a new generation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). They hope to develop UAVs — commonly known as drones — that are robust enough to transport large cargo across vast distances without needing a pilot or GPS.