Understanding the factors that influence the financial decisions that individuals make is particularly important in difficult economic times. The proposed research seeks to understand the factors that influence financial decision-making under economic stress, with a particular interest in the efficacy of interventions to influence decision-making and the role of financial literacy and related constructs.

This project will investigate the creation of an accessible digital platform that will serve as the basis for all future publications of PUBLIC as well as a model for similar organizations looking to make the transition from print to digital. Importnatly, this project centers dis/ability communities, methods, and methodologies. Not only will this research situate PUBLIC and Public Access as a leader in digital publishing, but they will be providing access to a larger audience and be better equipped to work with dis/ability communities in the organization’s operations.

Pain is among the top 3 most common reasons for seeking medical help. ManagingLife has developed a mobile-based app, called Manage My Pain, to help chronic-pain patients by providing a simplistic, customizable and comprehensive interface to track pain symptoms and pain experience at a frequency chosen by the users. ManagingLife is interested in understanding the benefits of the app use on its 27,000 and constantly growing user base by identifying user cohorts that ultimately experience improvement in pain experience given self-disclosure tracking behaviours.

Durham Region recently created a plan to help guide future decisions about adapting to climate change. The plan shows how extreme future weather is expected to be and identifies many ways that the cities and towns in the region and other agencies that deliver services like water and electricity need to be prepared. Some municipalities and agencies are further ahead than others in having policies and plans to adapt to climate change.

This research project deals with the development of the next generation of a set of chemicals on an industrial scale that form a catalyst in conjunction with a metal. The new catalysts are intended to be employed by Digital Specialty Chemicals’ customer in the manufacture of plasticizers, paints, and detergents. The intern will focus on the optimized chemical synthesis of critical components toward the final products, as well as the identification of commercially more viable options in terms of solvents used for the process.

This project focuses on the concept design and ACS/Geolocation simulation of an Earth-observation microsatellite in Low Earth Orbit. MSCI has a long history of building microsatellites, but not for an Earth observation mission. In this research, we will evaluate the current MSCI multi-mission bus design capability, given its current hardware, for use in the QEYSSat microsatellite mission proposal. QEYSSat is a proposed mission to create a quantum link between ground and space using polarized photons and to transmit encryption keys to ground based users using this link.

The West Bolton SNAP project will test methods for increasing the number of suburban households undertaking home energy retrofits in a neighbourhood of Caledon, Ontario with the aim of reducing residential energy consumption and the resulting GHG emissions. The Program will utilize locally targeted marketing, community events, and face-to-face Home Retrofit Consultations to engage households in West Bolton.

Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) has become the leading cause of hospital acquired nosocomial diarrhea worldwide. The prolonged hospital stays associated with CDI has enormous impact on the healthcare systems in terms of costs and patient outcomes. While treatment of CDI is an important area for ongoing research, prevention efforts will need to be enhanced to interrupt CDI transmission.