Shift work is an increasingly prevalent work pattern worldwide. It’s estimated that anywhere from 10-25% of workers are shift workers in European and North American countries. Within the past few decades, night shift work has been linked to an increased risk for numerous types of cancer, including breast, prostate, and ovarian cancer. However, due to […]

Drug-impaired driving is a growing threat to the safety of road users in North America and Europe. In Ontario, over 10% of the total road fatalities involved drugs and 36% of fatally injured drivers had drugs in their system while driving. Point-of-care testing (POCT) devices, akin to the Approved Screening Device (ASD) test for alcohol, […]

Current methods for concentrating (removing water from) food and drinks for their transportation and/or storage rely on thermal or ultraviolet processing that is ultimately detrimental to the food product. This research proposes a novel method to remove the water that is based on forward osmosis, which solely depends on the ability of the draw solution […]

The healthy human gut contains a network of millions of bacteria that help to digest food, fight infection and promote human health. Stress, changes in diet, antibiotic use, and other environmental conditions can disrupt the bacterial network, and contribute to a wide range of illnesses including irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety depressive behaviors, autism, mood disorders, […]

Research has documented evidence of the positivity and desirability of self-continuity. A sense of self-continuity can be achieved by holding an identity that is stable, construing one’s life as a story, and making an associative link to the past. However, the current literature on self-continuity has not yet shown which strategy is more effective to […]

In the operation of CANDU reactors, the Zr-2.5Nb pressure tubes holding the cooling water and fuel bundles are susceptible to hydride cracking-induced crack initiation mechanisms, known as delayed hydride cracking and overload crack initiation. It is required to evaluate the likelihood of DHC and overload crack initiation from service-induced flaws to determine whether the pressure […]

The problem of accurately predicting the onset of sustained postoperative atrial fibrillation (AF) in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) remains open. Investigators have reported many clinical indices currently associated with postoperative AF following CABG. Contemporary machine learning techniques are well-suited to recognizing underlying trends in ‘training’ data consisting of several labeled examples, and […]

Flexible wearable sensors have found increasing application in many situations, especially in biomedical engineering and health care. Recent research has presented methods for fabricating flexible, stretchable, and conductive sensors using silver nanowires embedded in a flexible silicon elastomer (typically polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)) as dry electrodes for ECG (electrocardiograph). In this project, we will investigate how the […]

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are among the most prevailing infectious diseases on a global scale. Every year, an estimated of 150 million people are affected by UTIs worldwide, and the majority of those infections (~ 80%) are caused by uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC). Rapid, inexpensive and sensitive detection of UPEC is critical given its recurrence […]

For over than thirty years, chemists have applied sulfur-based organic molecules to gold sheets to form coatings with a single molecule thickness. Although these coatings have potential applications in sensors and microelectronics, they gradually decompose under moderate heat and in air, limiting their applications. In 2014, the Crudden group demonstrated that N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs), which […]

Pulmonary hypertension or elevated blood pressure in the lung caused by left heart diseases such as mitral valve stenosis is classified as Group 2 under the World Health Organization pulmonary hypertension classification system. Group 2 pulmonary hypertension is the most common type of pulmonary hypertension, but currently there is no approved therapies for this disease. […]

White-box cryptography seeks to maintain the secrecy of cryptographic keys used by software, despite an attacker having full control over the software. This project extends the work by Dr. Lin on the Chinese cipher SM4, as well as its application to a further cipher. The goal of this project is: 1) To implement a complete […]