Projets novateurs réalisés

Joint Research Program in Atmospheric Chemistry

The objective of this international collaboration between P.M. Mayer and J. Giorgi at the University of Ottawa and Maxi Burgos Paci at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba is to understand the fate of reactive organic carbon in the atmosphere. Reactive Organic Carbon (ROC) includes a wide diversity of chemicals that react with atmospheric gases, free radicals, and particulate matter such as aerosols and ice to form hazardous products. The two interns will conduct experiments in their host institution exploring fundamental aspects of these reactions to better understand the chemistry. This collaboration will bring unprecedented resolution to atmospheric reaction pathways leading to improved simulation models for the atmospheric fate of reactive organic carbon.

Development of mixed wettability surface for high yield solar desalination

This project focuses on developing a mixed wettability surface to improve the freshwater yield of a solar thermal desalination system. The solar desalination system that will be used for this project is the solar still system. The objective is to find the optimized ratio of high wettability to low wettability area on a polymeric surface that gives the highest freshwater yield for the solar still system. A mixed wettability surface is developed by introducing different wettability ratio on the polymeric surface. Laser micro machining is used to fabricate a high wettability area on the surface. The fabricated surface will be used as the cover of the solar still and will be placed on the inner side of the solar still to promote condensation and freshwater collection. The intern will use the ultrafast laser at the University of Ottawa to texture and thus controls the wettability of the solar still, and will set-up an experiment to test the solar still desalination potential.

Exploring access to abortion services in India during the COVID-19 era: A multi-methods study

Public health restrictions imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic have caused a decrease in access to sexual and reproductive health services including abortion care. In April 2020, the Indian government declared abortion care an essential service. Even though abortion is legal in India, the access to abortion care has been far from equitable owing to structural barriers relating to gender discrimination, caste, and class. Some evidence suggests that the pandemic could have worsened these barriers, thus further impeding women’s access to abortion care. We know very little about the comprehensive impact of the pandemic on women seeking abortion care, especially widely used medication abortion. Drawing from the data from the field, this project aims to assess and document the impact of COVID-19 on abortion care in India through the experiences of women and providers (doctors and pharmacists), highlight innovative strategies in service delivery, and further the development of resilient population health interventions.

Ultrafast Laser Interaction for Chemical and Topological Functionalization of Metallic

This project is to understand the chemical modifications induced by laser irradiation leading to the formation of periodic nanostructures on the surface of metals. Such a study is very significant since it will allow to tune metallic surface properties to control for instance wettability, i.e. whether surfaces are hydrophillic (attract water) or hydrophobic (repel water). Laser surface modification also have applications in catalysis, biomedical fields, etc. The main goal of the work is to create chemical modification on the surfaces of metallic samples using the ultrafast laser in Prof Weck’s lab. Specifically, we aim to better understand the kinetics of surface contamination and aging after laser irradiation in various processing environments, to tune the physico-chemical properties of the resulting surfaces.

Rigidity of Pham-Brieskorn Threefolds

Algebraic geometry is generally concerned with understanding the properties of geometric objects defined by polynomial equations. These geometric objects, called “varieties”, are points, curves, surfaces and higher dimensional objects. To each variety there is an associated abstract object called a “commutative ring”. It is interesting to try to determine whether a variety contains a certain type of structure that we call a “special cylinder”. A given variety contains a special cylinder if and only if the associated commutative ring is “non-rigid”. The goal of our research is to understand whether a particular family of varieties called Pham-Brieskorn varieties contains these special cylinders, or equivalently, to understand whether the commutative rings associated to them (Pham-Brieskorn rings) are rigid.

Understanding which Pham-Brieskorn rings are rigid has been an open question in the field of algebraic geometry for over 20 years. In the 3-dimensional situation, only three open cases remain. Our immediate goal and expectation is to solve these three remaining 3-dimensional cases, and over the longer term is to bring new insights and techniques towards characterizing rigid rings.

Financial Social Media Analysis for Canadian Market

With the rise of mobile technology and online communities, social media has become an increasingly important information channel for investors, especially the younger-generation retail investors whose number is rapidly growing. The recent ‘MEME’ stocks phenomenon clearly demonstrates the potential influence of social media on the market. A ‘MEME’ stock refers to a stock that gains frenetic attention from retail investors on social media such as Reddit forums, which often prompts dramatic price movement. In order to better understand the market behavior, it is very helpful to be able to systematically monitor and analyze the social media contents that are relevant to financial markets and investors. In view of the increasing importance of social media to detect anomalies in the Canadian derivatives market, we propose in this project to expand the data coverage by building an analysis pipeline to focus on social media posts that are relevant to Canadian market.

Bomford Studios Digester

In order to address the growing need for urban composting of organic matter, Bomford Studios has successfully created a working prototype putrescent organics processing unit (the Loki Digester), which breaks down organic matter into fertilizer suitable for both gardens and large-scale farms. Working with Camosun Innovates, Bomford intends to create a more robust, user-friendly, and cost-effective device, by optimizing the machinery and the manufacturing process. Once design work is completed, the Loki Digester will be suitable for production and sale to local and regional organizations. Two organizations have already expressed a desire to purchase a finished unit, and initial sales will allow for refinement and further distribution, eventually scaling up to Canada-wide distribution.

Summer Analyst – Impact Investing, Acceleration, and Advisory – Western University

The Social Innovation Academy will be working with a network of Mitacs interns to develop national-scale backend infrastructure resources for incubation and acceleration organizations across Canada. These resources may include (but are not limited to): initiatives for advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion; impact measurement frameworks; In addition, interns will provide marketing, research, and financial analysis for social purpose organizations over the duration of the 14-week internship.

Development of a Social Innovation Franchising Model

Create a Social Innovation Franchising (SIF) model for CMIM
CMIM would like to expand their operations regionally and nationally to provide programming to students across all of Canada through what is called social franchising. The social franchising model is defined as using entrepreneurial principles that make up traditional franchising to create, organize and manage a venture to solve a social problem — in this case, inequity within the education system, the employment sector, and entrepreneurial streams.

Digital Health Northwestern Ontario 1: Implementing a User Engagement Platform

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are the digital collection of a patient’s health information. EHRs can benefit clinicians, healthcare administrators and patients through the use of information technologies to manage various aspects of healthcare. These investments require sustained efforts to engage a multitude of stakeholders, and allow them to seek opportunities to automate, integrate and digitize healthcare processes. Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC) is upgrading its EHR shared among 12 regional hospitals across a sparse geography. The success of the new system requires unprecedented levels of stakeholder engagement where traditional approach may not be effective.

This project seeks to 1) implement a crowdsourcing platform to continuously engage stakeholders of this project, 2) design and implement data visualizations and reports to monitor and report the usage, performance and results, and 3) document several types of end user engagement and provide instructions for future use in engagements.

Usability Testing will be employed in this project, where the intended users will perform specific tasks in this new system. This will help identify potential problems and improvement for the system, and also reveal insights as to the effectiveness of the platform.

Analyzing and reporting team dialogue to enhance psychological safety

The proposed project will be to examine Reticle Ventures Canada Incorporated’s (Reticle) current way of coding and reporting on team psychological safety and validating their end-to-end system against current validated psychological safety measures. The overarching goal is to establish content validity of their current system by assessing whether their current framework is measuring what it is supposed to be measuring in line with current research. This will consist of three primary activities. First, developing a rigorous and effective reporting and debriefing process for teams to better understand their current level of psychological safety. Second, creating one individual psychological safety measure using current validated measures that are aligned with the Reticle framework to establish content validity. Third, develop and plan the validation study to begin in Winter 2023. The expected benefits to the partner organization is an improved system that is evidence-based that encompasses all of the current standards for psychological safety and team functioning.

Using design thinking to Improve operational efficiency of a consumer health-tech product so it can scale and help Canadians avoid chronic disease

Molecular You is a health-tech start-up on a mission to help people live longer, healthier lives.

Using a new type of blood test, we’re able to give people unparalleled insight into their health and make precise diet, exercise and supplement recommendations to help them live longer healthier lives. The product consists of a mobile application and some powerful operational software systems that manage blood samples, ingest data, ensure data quality and allow us to derive new health insights from the data. The users of these systems are our operations team, quality management team, data science team and the user-facing app itself.

These operational software systems are too labour-intensive for us to scale. So we need to invest in creating more automated and efficient workflows. This project with MITAC will allow us to uncover the biggest pain points for our internal users and design better workflows that reduce errors and improve efficiency.