With the aging of the Canadian population, the number of people living with dementia is projected to increase. Due to a lack of disease-modifying treatments for dementia, there is a pressing need to better understand how we can reduce dementia risk across all Canadians. A wide range of modifiable risk factors for dementia have been established and a 2020 report from the Lancet Commission found that addressing these modifiable risk factors might prevent up to 40% of dementias.

Most research examining risk factors and dementia outcomes has tended to focus on individual risk factors.

Nowadays, microfluidic systems have shown an excellent application in design and manufacturing of biological portable testing platforms that are utilized in the early diagnosis of viral diseases, rapidly. There is usually a gap between technology developers, engineers, and potential users such as physicians, and developing user-friendly tools in designing microfluidic systems requires a considerable effort in a trial-and-error process.

Functional and molecular imaging are vital parts of modern medical diagnostics imaging. These medical imaging techniques aim for early-stage disease detection that substantially advances personalized medicine. However, there are several challenges that are remaining unresolved.

Canadian companies have been struggling and lacking a systematic way to locate the ideal candidate for job postings externally and internally. The application of advanced AI-based algorithms can potentially extract information from at least 20 thousand resumes to build an automatic system to match candidate skills to required job skills which is the primary focus of this proposed research. This will help identify skill gaps and will develop a systematic training path to improve efficiency in Human Capital performance and recruitment.

The proposed Mitacs fellowship will provide a research opportunity for three post-doctoral fellows (PDFs) in a competitive R&D environment at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Research Institute (TBRHRI) – Canada’s newest health research institute. The research project is aimed towards the development and commercialization of the advanced radiation medical imaging detectors which will ultimately benefit healthcare in Canada and worldwide.

Imaging of cerebral perfusion (the delivery of blood to a capillary bed in the brain tissue) is significant for diagnosing a variety of diseases. There are multiple challenges associated with perfusion imaging which significantly limits the quality of cerebral perfusion images. I am planning to develop a novel approach of cerebral perfusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using hyperpolarized (HP) xenon-129 (129Xe). To conduct HP 129Xe perfusion imaging, I am developing a novel HP MRI Time-of-Flight (TOF) pulse sequence.

Plant exposure to pathogen contamination can lead to serious health and economic risks. With the modern just-in-time logistics system, it is more critical than ever to have the ability to detect plant contamination to avoid the economic loss and health implications that can arise from plant contamination. Ecoli Sense is looking to develop a fast, inexpensive, and robust pathogen detection device for plant-based pathogens.

Universities in Canada and around the world are adopting the DCP (Distributed Compute Protocol) as a method of obtaining free, abundant compute resources for research and innovation. In doing so, IT departments are deploying DCP workers on fleets of desktop computers in departments, libraries and administration offices on campuses. All of these computers, once connected to the distributed computer, consume network bandwidth, switching, and power resources. DCP is unique. Other utilities such as networks, cloud compute, and/or other mainframe systems have existed for years.

Imaging of cerebral perfusion (the delivery of blood to a capillary bed in the brain tissue) is significant for diagnosing a variety of diseases. There are multiple challenges associated with perfusion imaging which significantly limits the quality of cerebral perfusion images. I am planning to develop a novel approach of cerebral perfusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using hyperpolarized (HP) xenon-129 (129Xe). To conduct HP 129Xe perfusion imaging, I am developing a novel HP MRI Time-of-Flight (TOF) pulse sequence.

The rapidly increasing numbers of COVID-19 patients and long hospitalization periods place great strain on the current healthcare system in Canada. While some patients need hospitalization, most do not. To monitor those at home, accurate data is vital. There are several reasons that prevent continuous monitoring of the five physiological parameters (e.g., skin temperature, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate); most involve cost.