Insects are a high protein feed ingredient that can be grown sustainably. Insects need less food input, use less water, and grow well indoors making them more sustainable than traditional pet feed ingredients such as soybeans and animal proteins. Some aspects of the nutritional profile of insects can be manipulated by growing them on different […]

In the Nova Scotia healthcare system (and indeed across Canada), waitlists remain a major problem, particularly with regards to access to specialty care services. Virtual Hallway is a novel telehealth solution to this problem, providing an online platform which allows for rapid doctor-to-doctor communication with the goal of fast-tracking and improving patient care and reducing […]

The Windsor Lake drinking water treatment plant (WLWTP) in St. John’s Newfoundland is a microfiltration (MF) membrane plant. One shortcoming of membrane filtration is a phenomena called fouling; fouling refers to the build up of rejected particles on the surface or into the membrane’s pores that can negatively affect the membrane’s performance. Since it’s installment, […]

Liver cancer is the fifth most common cancer and has the third highest death rate world-wide. Patients are usually diagnosed once the disease has progressed to a point where a cure is not possible. An emerging treatment to help manage this type of cancer uses small particles to block blood from reaching the cancer while […]

The research project we have undertaken alongside Clean Valley Biofiltration CIC is a novel solution to the highly inflated cost of face masks and other hospital PPE gear in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our objective is to create a biomask and other PPE using an antiviral compound derived from a Canadian sourced marine […]

Front-line clinicians have reported that different respiratory stiffness results in different COVID-19 patient conditions on ventilators. In this project, we test and improve NovaResp’s monitoring hardware and analyze the collected data for development of algorithms with focus on respiratory stiffness of patients with COVID-19. The resulting algorithms and monitoring device could lead to determine whether […]

This proposal seeks to identify the most promising lead candidate for a COVID-19 vaccine that could be rapidly and inexpensively scaled-up to meet Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine needs. In collaboration with a Canadian biotech company, Entos Pharmaceuticals, we will determine the safety and efficacy of several vaccine candidates to identify the most promising candidate to move […]

We are building a machine learning system to help clinical experts accurately label medical notes with diagnosis codes. This will make it faster and cheaper to train machine learning models to identify important codes, including those related to infectious diseases and COVID, in large amounts of medical notes.

This project will evaluate whether an innovative approach to looking at consciousness allows for the diagnosis and management of concussion. The device, cali-ed the Halifax Consciousness Scanner (HCS), reads the brain waves of a person while listening to a special sound recording, and uses this information to determine a score for their level of consciousness. […]

Micro-algae, which are being used to derive biofuels from, are typically grown in large volumes of water in systems which either expose the algae to, or protect it from, the natural environment. There are two key problems associated with large-scale commercial biofuel production: the identification of high yield and high lipid producing algal species, and […]

The intern will conduct a bio-physical audit of Agrimarines new salmon farming technology in China and British Columbia. By collecting data about the farming operations, he will be able to account for all the materials and energy used to build and run the farms. This includes things like building materials, feed and amount of energy […]

When blood-vessels in the brain are damaged, substances can leak from the blood into the brain. Such leakage can affect cognition and mental health, however there are currently no clinically-available tests for detecting such leakage. In this project we are developing a method for diagnosing blood-vessel leakage using MRI. We believe that this technology may […]