Cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. A promising new way to treat cancer is through the administration of immune cells that target the cancer – an approach called cancer immunotherapy. The goal of this project is to engineer better culture vessels to produce dendritic cells. Dendritic cells are the "gatekeepers" of our immune system. They can have the capacity to activate other immune cells to attack cancers. The project involves two industrial partners: Kanyr Pharma, Inc. and Saint- Gobain, Inc.

The proposed project deals with the extrusion encapsulation of bioactive components using rice and corn protein based food matrix. It is well recognized that the performance properties of natural lake pigment encapsulated products are influenced by the structural properties of the matrix protein used for the extrusion encapsulation. The type, mixture and nature of proteins can have a significant effect on the extrusion encapsulated product as well as its functionality. Significant changes in the product properties can be expected due to the difference in the manufacturing steps.

Currently, the service provided by GRAD4 allows online storing and sharing of computer-aided design (CAD) models. However, there is no interface developed for visualization of CAD models in the service in a fast and comprehensible way to the users: both manufacturers and buyers. The main challenge of such implementations is in relatively high computational cost of such visualizations via tools used for web-development: while a regular PC handles such task efficiently, web-based tools have means insufficient for similar performance and, thus, mostly involve cloud computing.

The primary objective of this collaborative research project is to further advance an established industrial strength framework for the aerodynamic design optimization of Advanced Aerodynamic Systems. A major expense during a three-dimensional aerodynamic shape optimization (ASO) is the cost of obtaining design sensitivities or gradients at each design iteration. The computational cost grows rapidly as the number of cost functions and design variables are added.

Vertical farming is an agricultural approach that involves indoor, large-scale plant cultivation, at multiple levels, with controlled environmental conditions, a hydroponic nutrient solution and artificial light. This space-saving approach to growing fruit and vegetables has the potential to meet increasing fresh produce demand in dense urban areas. In recent years, several commercial entities have marketed smaller scale, vertical plant growth systems to consumers who want fresh and locally grown food.

Our sense of touch is vital to most daily activities we engage in, but is underused by most existing computing devices. Though haptics is an active research field, the main outcomes of three decades of research are limited to cost-effective vibrotactile feedback (as in mobile phones) or expensive force-feedback devices (mainly for surgical operation simulation). Software frameworks for haptics offer comprehensive haptics and physics simulation capabilities, however require expert engineering and software development skills.

There is an exponential increase in the network traffic worldwide due to the growth of social networks, multimedia sharing web services, streaming of video-on-demand (VoD) contents. However, the bandwidth isn’t growing at the same rate as the demand, resulting in a loss of Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) for the users. Distributed edge caching provides an effective mechanism for mitigating the bandwidth requirements of the growing traffic demands by trading off bandwidth with storage.

"Smart" clothing that responds to the wearer offers compelling advantages over today's inert clothing. By integrating living cells into the textiles that make up our clothing, we can endow them with these "smart" properties. This includes a shirt that begins to smell like flowers when soaked in sweat, pants that "self-heal" after an accidental tear, or industrial uniforms that detect and actively break down toxins. Lululemon and McGill scientists, working together, are aiming to create some of these wearables by growing living films of engineered bacteria on textiles.

Plants including Cannabis host distinct beneficial microbial communities on and inside their tissues designated the plant microbiota from the moment that they are planted into the soil as seed. Understanding the microbial partnerships with Cannabis has the potential to affect agricultural practices by improving plant fitness and production yield of Cannabinoids. Much less is known about these beneficial Cannabis-microbe interactions, particularly,the role that Cannabis may play in supporting or enhancing them.

Reeds for woodwind instruments are known to be extremely variable and change significantly with time. This makes it difficult for musicians to find and maintain a reed that performs at a level suitable for their personal preference. In this project, the magnitude of these changing properties will be characterized in both natural cane reeds and synthetic alternatives, thus examining the cost-benefit of supposedly more durable synthetic reeds.