Air pollution is composed of gases and Particulate Matter. Wood Smoke (WS) and Traffic-Related Air Pollution (TRAP) are the two most common sources of air pollution. Air pollutants arising from WS and TRAP differ chemically. Additionally, they undergo chemical changes due to atmospheric processes, such as photochemical aging. The role of the chemical composition of […]

Rain-on-snow events, where rain falls on pre-existing snow, cause some of the highest peak flows in mountainous coastal regions, such as Southwestern British Columbia. Operational hydrologists have a difficult time predicting runoff during these events because of an incomplete knowledge of the energy fluxes into and within the snowpack over large areas, and because of […]

There are currently tens of thousands of locations throughout North America where pipelines cross stream channels. At these locations, instability of the stream bed and banks poses a serious risk to pipeline infrastructure, and has the potential to cause environmental harm. The objective of this internship is to improve the numerical models used to monitor […]

Marine plastic pollution is a growing environmental concern that is plaguing coastal communities around the world. Remote locations face unequal waste burdens from the inequitable global flow of plastics and limited waste management infrastructure, causing social and environmental injustices. Small-scale fishers and rural coastal communities directly depend on a healthy marine ecosystem for subsistence and […]

As communities seek to advance their climate adaptation plans, deciding what projects to implement and when poses a significant challenge, particularly given the remaining uncertainties related to climate impacts, as well as dealing with limited resources for project implementation within communities. Using the Coastal Flood Adaptation Strategy of the City of Surrey, the proposed research […]

Access to clean water is essential; however, it is becoming increasingly complex due to climate change uncertainties, which affect small, rural, and marginalized communities worldwide, including Indigenous communities within Canada. These communities rely on often-contaminated surface and rainwater sources, making them exceptionally vulnerable to climate change impacts. Microbial growth and unpleasant odors during water storage […]

With rapid population growth worldwide, major cities around the world are seeing an upsurge in high-rise building construction. At the same time, there is an increased awareness about the importance of designing buildings so that they will have limited damage due to strong earthquake shaking. An innovative structural system is proposed that utilizes an outrigger […]

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites provide wide area global perspectives through images of the Earth’s surfaces and its governing processes. Capable of detecting small variations in surface roughness, and unconstrained by lighting and weather conditions, SAR is a robust remote sensing instrument. Designing and operating a SAR is a complex process, as there are numerous […]

This Mitacs Acelerate proposal is the first of three-phase project of Adriana’s Goncalves master’s thesis. For this present MITACS proposal, it will be investigated routes to extract gold, mercury and other possible valuable minerals from a representative sample of AGM tailings from Costa Rica. The tailings belong to a small Canadian company, Newlox Gold that […]

The aim of the proposed research is to develop renewable textiles from agricultural residues. The project will use an alternative process, proposed by Earth Protex, for converting primarily wheat straw into a wood pulp like material while minimizing the losses during the process. The pulp will undergo further chemical treatment under mild conditions before being […]

In many applications, Machine Learning (ML) predictions are used to make downstream decisions. Acting on ML predictions however can change the distribution of features that the ML model relies on for predictions. The implication is that such downstream decisions procedures implicitly expect the ML model to generalize outside of the observational distribution. Unfortunately, this is […]

This study proposes a new signal optimization technique that can help reduce crashes at intersections. Using data from sensors installed at the intersections, vehicle trajectories can be used to identify near-misses that would provide insight into crash-risk. By quantifying the crash-risk using extreme value models, a crash-risk metric is derived that can be used to […]