Innovative Projects Realized

Bioremediation with fungal mycelia

This project aims at the removal of contaminants from water through bioremediation with fungal cultures. Specifically, the feasibility of a range of wood substrates will be tested. The project will use bioassays (Microtox) for testing degrees of contamination before and after treatment.

Phase 1: In the first phase of the project a bioassay will be performed with contaminated water (from tailing ponds or from other pollution sources). In extreme cases of pollution some dilution may be necessary.
Phase 2: Preparation of fungal inoculum using a combination of wood and grain based substrates. (This step may require about 3 weeks). Several different fungal strains will be used.
Phase 3: The third phase of the project involves the development and testing of floating devices with fungal inoculum. This phase will allow and even call for a substantial degree of creativity and experimentation by the student researcher. The floating device, to be tested in containers with water should both hold fungal inoculum and float on water ensuring that the inoculum with the fungal mycelium will have adequate immersion in water and at the same time allow access of sufficient oxygen from above. The ideal floating device will have a maximum amount of inoculum surface area exposed to polluted water and at the same time have sufficient oxygen supply for all metabolic activities. Floating devices filled with fungal inoculum could be mesh bags, wooden or plastic containers or any other materials that fulfill the requirements above.
Phase 4: Two or three of the most promising fungal floating devices will be used to treat a defined volume of the contaminated water. The number of devices per container as well as the fungal species will vary.
Phase 5: After a week of exposure treated water will be ‘harvested’ every three days and subjected to a bioassay.
The results of this pilot project in applied research may pave the way for some promising practical applications of fungal bioremediation and will certainly results in more follow-up research.

Purple Martin Conservation in Central Alberta

Purple Martins, the largest species of swallow in North America, are mostly dependent on humans for nesting structures. Martin populations have been declining across the continent for the past 20 years. I am investigating ways to engage the public in martin conservation, through appropriate nest box provision and management, support for caretakers of these nest boxes, research on martin migration, the role of citizen scientists in martin research, and promoting a public festival for Purple Martins.

Lymphatic function in cancer metastasis

The goal of this study is to address the role of tumor draining lymphatic function and cancer immunity during lymphatic metastasis and ionizing radiation (IR) therapy. Metastatic cancer cells invade lymphatic vessels, traffic through collecting lymphatic vessel and enter lymph node (LN) to form metastasis. The presence of cancer cells in the tumor draining LN (TuLN) is a poor prognostic indicator of patient survival/recurrence. The TuLN functions as a site of cancer metastasis, and as a lymphoid organ to generate immune response to the primary cancer. Lymphatic contraction is the major driving force of lymphatic transport, which is driven by smooth muscle cells (SMCs). Using a novel intravital imaging system that allows for the visualization of mouse lymphatic contraction, we observed lymphatic contraction strength is suppressed when tumors reach 6-8 mm in diameter with potential or very small LN metastases. The suppressed lymphatic contraction is correlated with reduced antigen transport to TuLN. We will evaluate how cancers modulate lymphatic contraction and impact lymphatic transport of tumor antigen and tumor associated dendritic cells (TuDCs) to the TuLN. We will further assess how the impaired lymphatic transport causes immune tolerance. IR therapy is widely used to treat cancer patients. Recent studies show that the efficacy of radiation therapy depends on activating host CD8+ T cell responses. We will investigate if IR therapy boosts anti-cancer immunity by improving lymphatic function.

Aim 1. To determine if myeloid cell suppress lymphatic contraction by interruption of lymphatic smooth muscle cells. This study will reveal which population of myeloid cells interact with lymphatic vessels during cancer metastasis and how these cells interact with lymphatic smooth muscle cells to suppress its contract activity.

Aim 2. To determine if suppressed lymphatic contraction impair TuDC or lymph node CD169 macrophages acquire tumor antigen and present to T cells. This study

Low Temperature Catalytic NOx Control under High Sulfur Environment

NOx is a well known hazardous gas which can not only form acid rain and destroy ozone, but also cause respiratory diseases of human body. There are multiple methods developed currently to remove NOx. Among them, selective Catalytic Reduction, SCR, represents the most widely used and efficient post-combustion technique for mitigation of NOx emissions from stationary combustion sources. The most common SCR process for coal-fired power plants is the high-dust (HD) configuration, in which the SCR catalyst is located between downstream of economizer and upstream of the precipitator or other particle collection devices and processes the full dust loading leaving the boiler. The reason for HD configuration is because of the desired reaction temperature of 500-700 °F at this configuration. However, HD configuration can cause significant catalyst deactivations by mechanism of masking, fouling, and poisoning. If a catalyst that could efficiently remove NOx at a relatively lower temperature 350 °F, the typical temperature downstream of particle devices, and can tolerate high concentration SO2 as well as H2O, then fast deactivation problems at HD configuration could be easily avoided. However, such a low temperature SCR catalyst development still remains a big challenge nowadays faced by the entire catalysis field.

Although the amount of flying ash from coal combustion is significantly reduced after the electrostatic precipitator (ESP), the low temperature makes a notably negative impact on the achievement of similar catalytic activity as that obtained at hot side. This type of catalyst deactivation is physical and catalyst can therefore be regenerated easily by simply washing or heating up to slightly higher temperature. Furthermore, the formation of ammonium sulfate or sulfite on the catalyst surface has a higher tendency at low temperature end than at hot end, which will cover the active sites of the SCR catalyst, resulting in the catalyst deactivation. In addition, the presence of high concentration water vapor will create more unfavorable influence on the maintenance of high activity at cold side than at hot side due to pore condensation, although its influence is reversible. If a chemical bond is formed between the active metal containing in the catalyst and adsorbed SOx, the formed metal sulfite or sulfate will permanently poison the catalyst and is very difficult to be removed from the catalyst surface even under high temperature.

Based on aforementioned challenges to do NOx removal in flue gas from high sulfur coal-fired power plant at low temperature, the conventional high temperature SCR catalyst is not suitable to address all the difficulties facing at cold side. It is critical to develop a new catalyst which can remain active under such harsh environment.

MovingStories Interdisciplinary Research Cohort

MovingStories Research: Science and Art Collaboration

www.movingstories.ca

The MovingStories research partnership explores the design of digital tools for movement, meaning and interaction. Human movement is ubiquitous but is also complex it is simultaneously expressive, communicative, functional and intelligent. MovingStories is an interdisciplinary research project that brings together scientists and artists in computing science, dance, music, theatre, machine learning, cognitive science, psychology, health, game design and virtual reality. Movingstories researchers work together to understand movement knowledge, and to integrate research methods from a diverse range of disciplines highlighting somatic movement expertise, and including arts, design, social science, computer science and engineering.

The movingstories research is interdisciplinary. Students will work together in a cohort to develop software, to create new digital tools for performance, health and computing science. Students in computing science, machine learning, dance, movement analysis, music (electroacoustic and electronic) and theater are welcome to apply to this research cohort.

This research partnership is led by Simon Fraser University and the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, and includes international partners including the Laban/Bartinieff Institute of Movement Studies based in New York, The University of Illinoiss eDream Center housed at the National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA), the University of Illinois Dance Department, the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, the University of British Columbia Department of Theatre. MovingStories is also working with Industry partners that explore movement interaction and design: H+Technologies that explores whole body movement interaction using vision-based gesture recognition for contemporary sensing such as mobile platforms and kinect and leap-motion, Credo Interaction that has created a software tool for choreography and human movement animation that is focused on graphics software development, and NZ Technologies that explores movement ergonomics using new depth cameras that enable mapping between vision-based sensors and point cloud technology to support health and well-being.

Because todays digital interaction relies so much on visual and textual modalities we need to develop more digital tools that create affordances for movement awareness and that support the activation of within-body awareness as well as between-body awareness. The interconnection between cognition and affect is crucial to facilitating meaningful experiences within interactive technologies.

Research will include usability testing in dance, music and performance settings, comparing movement sensor data (kinect, mobile accelerometers/gyroscope, mocap, biometric) for representing movement, examining appropriate motion feature extraction from sensor data, analyzing and testing appropriate machine learning techniques to recognize movement quality as defined by models such as Laban Effort/Shape analysis, validating higher level semantic and affective recognition of movement features that can combine personal, behavioural and social meaning constructs.

MovingStories interdisciplinary research will require experience design, interaction design and software engineering. The critical feature of our research is its integration of movement expertise in both the design and validation process and the interdisciplinary sharing of assumptions regarding movement, meaning and interaction at all stages of design. It is the intention to locate these initial explorations within socially relevant application areas that support well-being including creativity support tools, dance and music performance, mobile applications, health, domestic computing.

Development of a next-generation biomanufacturing platform for the conversion of greenhouse gases to value-added chemicals

The uncertain price and tight supply of crude oil, and the considerable damage that society’s over-use of oil products has wreaked on the environment have created an urgent need to develop and implement sustainable manufacturing technologies for the production of cleaner fuels. This goal is especially relevant for Canada, whose annual per capita greenhouse gas emissions are amongst the highest in the world.

Of the manufacturing alternatives that have been suggested, metabolic engineering is particularly promising since it strikes two birds with one stone. Not only are biomanufacturing processes that employ engineered biological systems the ultimate demonstration of green chemical manufacturing, but genetically manipulating microorganisms to directly convert carbon dioxide to useful products at industrial scales could also greatly mitigate the greenhouse gas content in the atmosphere. In fact, the fixation of carbon dioxide to liquid fuels by engineered microorganisms is poised to become one of the most prominent bioprocesses in Canada once oil production in Alberta’s tar sands ramps up to its installed capacity in the next few years. The tar sands occupy no more than 1.5% of the total landmass of Canada but are projected to account for nearly 20% of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, and the need to design and develop sustainable bioprocesses that can efficiently convert a major fraction of these emissions into liquid transportation fuel could not be more urgent.

The development of an integrated gas-to-liquid biofuels manufacturing process will occur through four distinct project modules: (1) metabolic engineering of the bacterium Escherichia coli to express heterologous (or foreign) metabolic pathways derived from other microorganisms to produce the metabolite acetyl-CoA from carbon dioxide in copious quantities, (2) metabolic and enzyme engineering of E. coli to synthesise advanced (C8-C10) biofuels from acetyl-CoA, (3) co-expression and co-optimisation of the carbon dioxide-fixing and biofuels-producing metabolic pathways to demonstrate gas-to-liquid fuels production, and (4) development of a pilot-scale bioprocess to demonstrate integrated gas-to-liquid fuels production.

Successful Globalink Research Fellows will be assigned to Module # 1. The candidates will work in a dynamic and multidisciplinary team comprising chemical engineers, chemists, biologists and process engineers who will be working on the other modules in parallel. The successful candidates will be assigned lead authorship and/or co-inventorship of all papers and/or patents that will result from this work, as well as the option to join the research group in the future as graduate students should he/she satisfactorily meet the goals of the project. The successful candidates should be students of science or engineering, have knowledge of analytical chemistry and molecular biology concepts and techniques, and demonstrate a strong potential to rapidly assimilate new concepts and master experimental methodologies.

Political Scandal and the evolution of political culture

Precisely what a nation finds scandalous says a great deal about the shared values of the population, and should indicate something about the nature of political culture within that community. The Profumo Affair in Britain, and the sex scandals of a variety of American politicians – from Jefferson’s slave mistress through Anthony Weiner’s most recent “sexting” scandal – suggest a certain fascination with the private lives of politicians and a predilection to moralize about them. Canadian politicians, on the other hand, seem to have largely avoided sex scandal and, some would argue, the Canadian political environment as a whole remains devoid of particularly scintillating scandal.

A closer examination of the revelations that have exercised the Canadian public reveals that this characterization of the nation as “boring” and lacking in scandal is far from the truth. This current project rejects the conventional wisdom and examines the history of political scandal in Canada. It has three main goals: 1) to first provide a taxonomy of scandal in Canada from the mid-19th century to the present; 2) to contextualize scandals and use them to understand the evolving political culture in Canada; and 3) to identify the salient features of scandal in Canada and create a “scandal scale” that will serve to measure public outrage regarding contemporary political circumstances.

This project is rooted in other research my team is conducting on the centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office in the years since the 1960s. The PMO has recently become the focus of extraordinary legal and civic attention as revelations of the power and influence exerted by staffers have come to light; this has pointed to both the centrality and the obscurity of scandal in our contemporary political reading. It has also highlighted how little we know about the history of political scandal in Canada. The taxonomy and context will extend our knowledge; the scale will allow that information to play a role in current political and public policy decisions.

Understanding the contours of scandal in Canada, and the changing definition of scandalous over time, is the goal of this new project.

Human Rights, Drug-related Violence and Democracy in Mexico

This project will examine forced disappearances in Mexico in the context of electoral democracy and militarization. According to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, forced or enforced disappearance refers to the involvement of state authorities in the arrest, detention, abduction of people in the form of authorization, support or acquiescence. My work with organizations of relatives of the disappeared, the United Forces for Our Disappeared in Mexico and Coahuila (FUNDEM and FUUNDEC) and Citizens in Support of Human Rights (CADHAC), indicates that the context of disappearances has changed in Latin America. Whereas forced disappearances occurred in the context of military dictatorships, authoritarianism and civil war in Latin America, this is taking place in Mexico in the absence of civil war and in an electoral democracy. A deeper understanding of the transformations in Mexican state-society relations, particularly between state, organized crime and the relatives of the disappeared, since 2006 may give us key insights into how militarization and the lack of restorative justice and social policy are intensifying the problem of forced disappearances in Mexico.
The purpose of this new research therefore would be to document policy responses at the local and national level to forced disappearances in those years and examine the implications of local and national policies on the families’ search for their disappeared in Mexico.
This research fills an important gap in the human rights and the Latin American politics literature. Most of the research in these fields has been done in areas where enforced disappearances have taken place in the context of civil war and authoritarian governments. For instance, while Colombia has been considered a democracy since the 1960s, enforced disappearances took place in the context of civil war between the Colombian state and guerrilla movements after the 1960s. In Guatemala, enforced disappearance took place under authoritarianism in the 1980s and 1990s, targeting the Mayan population and social justice activists. In Argentina and Chile, enforced disappearance was conducted by the state under a military dictatorship in the 1970s. Most victims were students, social activists and members of the Communist party. Unlike these cases, enforced disappearances have taken place in the absence of civil war and in the context of democracy in Mexico. The responsibilities of organized crime and the state are continuously blurred since state authorities might participate directly or indirectly on behalf of organized crime or state authorities in these disappearances. Also, no particular group of the population has been targeted in these disappearances. Thus, the contextual elements of the research, the unclear lines between state and organized crime and the lack of targeting of a particular group of the population make this case study a new scenario for the study of human rights abuses, particularly disappearances.

Delivering evidence-based health care to children with common health conditions and their families using technology

The MITACS student will join in a large and diverse research group that has developed and disseminated national programs with the use of technology (e.g., computers, internet, smartphones) to treat health problems in children and adolescents, through the following programs:

OPERATIONAL PROGRAMS
Clinical programs for Disruptive Behavior, Anxiety, and Enuresis: These programs are being delivered as evidence-based service to children and families seeking help for mental health over the phone and internet, or paper-based manuals. These services are offered by the Strongest Families Institute (http://strongestfamilies.com/), which is a non-profit organization. All these programs remain in the process of constant evolution to keep them up to date with the latest evidence based research.

PROGRAMS UNDER DEVELOPMENT
We are developing and testing the efficacy of the following programs. If we are able to prove that these programs are efficacious, they will be implemented both nationally and internationally.
? Web-based parenting programs targeted to the public health sector to address the following problems :
– Behavior problems (e.g., Disruptive Behavior Disorder)
– Anxiety problems
– Improving communication with adolescents
– Preventing alcohol problems

? Web-based parenting programs targeted towards clinical populations to address the following problems:
– Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)
– Behavioral problems (e.g., Disruptive Behavior Disorder)
We are building a new version of our current operational program for fathers specifically. We want to increase fathers involvement in these programs, since it is usually only the mothers who engage in them. .
We are also working to increase the durability of changes as result of the intervention, by increasing length of the follow-ups using automated tips and reminders.
– Better care for babies hospitalized in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

? Mobile optimised web-based programs addressed to the public health sector to address the following problems:
– Headache
– Adolescent depression

Production of Apolipoprotein B Fragments for Structural Analysis

Regulation of the secretion of hepatic very low density lipoprotein (VLDL) can modulate the plasma level of atherogenic apolipoprotein (apo) B-containing lipoproteins. We have shown that sequences within the ?1 domain of apoB are important for lipid recruitment during assembly, irreversible anchoring of apoB to lipoprotein, and degradation when VLDL assembly is inefficient. We hypothesize that specific apoB polypeptide sequences, with unique structural features, mediate the interaction with hepatocellular components of degradation pathways and that this surveillance system may be compromised with disease or aging leading to enhanced VLDL production.

In this summer research project, we will use bacterial and eukaryotic cell systems to express and purify apoB fragments from the ?2 and ?2 domains of the protein for subsequent characterization of their structural and lipid-binding properties. Fragments of approximately 20 kDa, derived from the ?1, ?2 and ?2 regions of apoB100 will be expressed as hexahistidine-tagged fusion proteins and purified from E. coli or from stably transfected HEK293 cells. The purity of the proteins will be assessed by SDS-PAGE and the identity of each protein region will be verified by immunoblot analysis using a panel of monoclonal antibodies. Preliminary structural analysis will use circular dichroism and the ability of the proteins to bind to phospholipid emulsions and triglyceride droplets will be assessed in vitro. The studies outlined will provide important information on the structural properties of apoB sequences that lead to pre-secretory degradation of apoB.

Direct analysis of food by electrothermal vaporisation coupled to inductively coupled plama optical emission spectrometry

With the help of a graduate student, develop methods based on electrothermal vaporisation (ETV) coupled to ICP-OES for the direct multi-element analysis of food, with a focus on food items, such as rice-based or soy-based products that may contain significant levels of toxic elements. If there is time, develop a method allowing the direct speciation analysis of elements, whose chemical form determines toxicity, in the solid so as to determine the portion that is actually toxic.

Highway Runoff Treatment Systems

With the increasing scarcity of water resources throughout the globe, many jurisdictions have turned their attention to the protection, remediation and enhancement of existing freshwater sources. The primary aim of this research will be to develop and assess a novel roadside treatment system which has the capacity to capture, detain, and infiltrate the suite of stormwater pollutants while operating within Ontario’s unique seasonal climate and traffic conditions. Using a combination of continuous field monitoring and discretely-collected water quality samples, the performance of the field-scale test facility will be evaluated for its ability to detain and dampen the migration of pollutants including petroleum hydrocarbons, metals (Zn, Cu, Fe, As), sediments and chlorides.