Innovative Projects Realized

Explore thousands of successful projects resulting from collaboration between organizations and post-secondary talent.

29670 Completed Projects

2811
AB
4990
BC
801
MB
663
NL
825
SK
8841
ON
9197
QC
95
PE
568
NB
1088
NS

Projects by Category

Field evaluation of bacilin 20: Herbicide stress and accelerated flowering

Plants are always associated with a well coordinated and beneficial community of microbes – the phytomicrobiome; this plus the associated plant forms the holobiont, the entity that provides crop yield. There is considerable communication between the phytomicrobiome and the plant, often in through signal compounds. Bacilin 20 is a small protein produced a Bacillus thuringiensis strain and discovered by the Smith laboratory. It is improves plant ability to tolerate stress when applied at very low concentrations. One plant response to stress is accelerated flowering, leaving longer time for grain production. The proposed work will evaluate the potential for bacilin 20 to mitigate herbicide stress on widely produced Canadian crops: wheat, corn and soybean. It will be applied post emergence with glyphosate (corn and soybean) or buctril (wheat), to assess effects on herbicide stress, or at the mid-vegetative stage to determine if flowering is affected and yields increased as a result.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Donald Smith

Student:

Partner:

CXC

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Agriculture; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

McGill University

Program:

Accelerate

Business Development Intern

PigeonBox is a company that operates smart lockers at various Skytrain stations in Vancouver; this reduces stress for consumers because they do not have to worry about packages getting stolen. The company won Translink’s Open Innovation Call this past year and, by doing so, was awarded these locations. As a business development intern, I will be researching local companies to try and on-board them in order to diversify our revenue stream when ridership is down.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Robert Helsley

Student:

Partner:

PigeonBox

Discipline:

Business

Sector:

Transportation and warehousing

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

Developing forward curve models for power risk management

When a company has excess power generation at its disposal, a natural course of action will be to seek to market that power. However, power markets are notoriously volatile, and this makes the cash flows that result from selling the power unpredictable and hard to plan for. The aim of this project is to help develop models for power forward prices that can be used to help manage this risk.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Tony Ware

Student:

Partner:

Suncor Energy Inc (Calgary, AB)

Discipline:

Mathematics

Sector:

Mining; Wholesale trade

University:

University of Calgary

Program:

Accelerate

Bacterial P450 engineering for production of high value antibacterials

Many pharmaceutical drugs are synthesised by traditional organic routes, however this approach is limited to the scope of traditional chemical catalysts that often yield predictably similar products. Pharmaceutical synthesis is moving towards alternative synthetic routes such as biosynthesis in order to develop sustainable, cheaper routes of novel small molecule production. This is crucial for antibacterial discovery, as alternative approaches are required to tackle the antibacterial resistance crisis. P450 BM3 is often utilised due to its rapid catalysis, diverse range of biotransformations and variant promiscuity yielding valuable existing and novel metabolites. We aim to address the problem of antibacterial resistance by screening variants of BM3 developed in the Munro group against antibacterial and bacterio-modulating pantothenamide analogs developed in the Auclair group. New analogs will be screened against several bacterial strains to assess their antibacterial/bacterio-modulating activity. Utilising biosynthesis to produce novel analogs of a class of compounds that will potentially resensitize the host immune system to infectious bacteria may yield several analogs of interest with a new mode of antibacterial action.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Karine Auclair

Student:

Partner:

University of Manchester

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Education

University:

McGill University

Program:

Globalink Research Award

Evaluating Haptic Feedback for Vehicle Safety in Field Robotics

This project aims to evaluate a novel device of my own design and making which is able to communicate information about a remote robot’s state to a human operator via vibrating feedback. For example, hazards such as loose terrain or a steep incline may not be well reported to the operator via a camera feed. The focus of my PhD is the design of this novel control device and its application in making robot teleoperation safer for the robotic vehicle and less prone to errors.
My proposed project in Canada will progress in two phases. The first phase will take advantage of my proposed supervisor’s unique combination of expertise in mobile robotics and human perception, to conduct experiments to determine how vibrating haptic feedback can best be used to represent or recreate hazardous situations a mobile robot might encounter in real world use. These results will then very quickly inform the parameters for a second study, using the large scale off-road and aquatic robots to complete tasks that, by design, will involve navigating certain environmental hazards such as loose terrain, obstacles, very uneven ground, strong water currents, etc.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Michael Jenkin

Student:

Partner:

Queen Mary, University of London

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Technology; Ocean Tech

University:

York University

Program:

Globalink Research Award

The Petawawa Biofibre Harvest Trial

This project will assess the potential for using unmerchantable wood as feedstock for the production of biofuels and bioenergy. Large tracts of forests within the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Forest (GLSL) consist of low quality pine- mixed woods that could supply feedstock if the unmerchantable wood were recovered in a sustainable and cost-effective manner. We will conduct biomass harvesting trials at the Petawawa Research Forest to assess the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of whole-tree harvest operations in pine-mixed forests characteristic of the region. The intern will assist in monitoring the harvest operations and analyzing the data. The results will help the partners to better estimate the amount of biomass that can be harvested from pine-mixed wood forests. In addition, quantifying costs will help them modify harvest operations to incorporate biomass harvesting

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Faculty Supervisor:

John Caspersen

Student:

Partner:

FPInnovations (Pointe-Claire, QC);Heideman Forest Services;Ontario Natural Resources Ministry;BioFuelNet

Discipline:

Earth science

Sector:

Environmental Science and Technology

University:

University of Toronto

Program:

Accelerate

Characterizing modulating retroreflectors for laser comms

Laser comms is a branch of wireless communication using a laser beam which directed at a given target, allowing higher speed connections. Specifically, we consider devices called modulators, these are used to encode information into a laser beam, analogously to sending a Morse code message. The modulator allows more of less of the laser beam to pass through it creating pulses equivalent to on and off signals (binary data). These devices have been computationally designed to predict improvement on the current technology. This project will test the existing devices of the current technology and then the new designs to show the predicted improvements. The results will inspire further design of an optimized device for search & rescue applications.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Jonathan Holzman

Student:

Partner:

Cardiff University

Discipline:

Mathematics

Sector:

Information and Communications Technology; Nanotechnology; Aerospace

University:

The University of British Columbia - Okanagan

Program:

Globalink Research Award

New generation of Diagrammatic Monte Carlo methods

The goal of this project is to combine the respective strengths two novel, complementary approaches to solving the Quantum Many Body Problem, the name given to the problem of the equations of quantum mechanics becoming impossible to solve by conventional methods due to very large numbers of particles being involved, such as in materials. To deal with this, an abstract mathematical formalism was developed, which requires advanced numerical alorithms, implementation and large-scale calculations on a computer. We will attempt to
bring together the key advantages of two pf the most promising algorithms, the well established Diagrammatic Monte Carlo method, and the more recently discovered Algorithmic Matsubara Integration (AMI). The new technique produced will allow physicists to reliably describe and control the most challenging, and most important, phenomena of strong electron correlations in a class of problems previously out of reach for any state of the art method.

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Faculty Supervisor:

James Leblanc

Student:

Partner:

King's College London

Discipline:

Mathematics

Sector:

Education

University:

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Program:

Globalink Research Award

Co-op Analyst / Junior Consultant

The intern team will be dedicating half their time to strategy development for other clients and the other half supporting UWCA. This inters will provide UWCA with the resources, insight, and fresh perspective. As an intern I will support with consulting activities for Criterium Group’s private sector clients (non pro-bono), as well as UWCA (pro-bono). These private sector clients range from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Robert Helsley

Student:

Partner:

Criterium Group

Discipline:

Business

Sector:

Management of companies and enterprises; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

E-Commerce Marketing Coordinator

Identify the ecommerce partner (web design company) most suited for the role of building the site for online marketing and sales. The key responsibilities would be to ensure that the project is moving forward, and we are meeting ourdeadlines for launch of the web store. Arranging and coordinating action items in our project charter and work with the internal and external partners.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Robert Helsley

Student:

Partner:

Divine Specialty Teas

Discipline:

Business

Sector:

Manufacturing

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

Timing of passage through an aperture between approaching people

The ability to perceive the motion of approaching person and to make appropriate adjustments to avoid collisions is an essential component of safe locomotion through the environment. The proposed project will investigate young and older adults’ collision avoidance behaviours with an approaching young adult in order to understand the visual information used to accomplish the task. The proposed research project will have two individuals approach an open doorway from opposite sides and pass through without colliding with each other. Both individuals’ movements will be tracked as they approach and pass through the doorway. The project will determine whether individuals use optical information, such as Time-to-Contact (TTC), to determine who will pass through the doorway first and avoid colliding with the other individual. It is believed that young adults will be in-tune with this optical information and use it to guide their actions whereas older adults may not use this information. The results from this project will help provide insights into any age-related behavioural changes and whether older adults are at a greater risk of collisions with other pedestrians in natural environments.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Michael Cinelli

Student:

Partner:

Université de Haute Bretagne Rennes 2

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Education

University:

Wilfrid Laurier University

Program:

Globalink Research Award

Does Spiroplasma protect against trypanosome infection in Drosophila?

Maternally inherited bacteria are commonly found in insects. Many of these have been found to provide beneficial traits to their hosts. One particular bacterial-mediated trait which is being found to be increasingly common within insects, is protection against natural enemies. For instance, the maternally inherited bacteria of fruit flies, Spiroplasma, can protect against nematodes and parasitic wasps. The defensive properties of these bacteria are important in terms of application. Maternally inherited bacteria are now being deployed to help control the spread of vector transmitted diseases such as Dengue and Zika. Trypanosomes represent a parasite of medical and economic importance as the causal agent of several human and animal diseases such as African sleeping sickness. In this project we will determine whether the natural bacteria of fruit flies, Spiroplasma, is able to protect fruit flies against trypanosome infection. This project will further our knowledge on the generality of Spiroplasma-mediated defense within insects and more generally, a greater understanding of a relatively novel model system within the laboratory.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Steve Perlman

Student:

Partner:

University of Liverpool

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Life Sciences (not health)

University:

University of Victoria

Program:

Globalink Research Award