Innovative Projects Realized

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

31133 Completed Projects

2940
AB
5159
BC
837
MB
685
NL
882
SK
9292
ON
9695
QC
97
PE
601
NB
1161
NS

Projects by Category

Development of an international consensual method for water use impact assessment in LCA Year Two

This project proposes to lead an international collaborative effort aiming to provide a method based on a scientific consensus to assess water use in Life Cycle Assessment, aligned with the ISO Draft International Standard 14 046 on water footprinting. It will provide industry with a harmonized methodology to compare potential impacts related to water use on a common basis. The deliverables of this project will be accomplished through the involvement of key method developers and stakeholders through the international working group WULCA (Water Use in LCA) of the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Manuele Margni

Student:

Partner:

Cascades;Hydro-Quebec;Veolia Environnement;École Polytechnique de Montréal

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Manufacturing

University:

École Polytechnique de Montréal

Program:

Elevate

Next City Video Documents

This applied research project builds directly on discussion generated by the 2021 CivicLabTO Academic Summit, an unprecedented exchange among academics from all eight Toronto-area Higher Education Institutions and representatives of the City of Toronto. Locating and elucidating key questions and opportunities shared during Summit discussions, Next City Video Documents seek to frame Toronto’s civic development post-Pandemic through a series of five to eight shorts videos. These short videos (2-3min) will be shot and edited by student teams working under the direction of a lead researcher (MiTACS intern). Building on OCAD University’s strength as a specialized art, media and design university, this partnership with the City’s Strategic Partnerships office will provide vital representations of unfolding urban situations and civic needs. In so doing, the videos will distill the key outputs from the future focused discussions shared through the CivicLabTO Academic Summit, providing the impetus and focus for future research and research partnerships. The internship is suitable for graduate-level researchers with skills and interests in documentary filmmaking, creative practice-led research, or strategic foresight. The project promises to provide a unique opportunity to work across disciplines and institutions, academic and municipal contexts.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Glen Lowry

Student:

Partner:

City of Toronto

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology; Public administration; Utilities

University:

Ontario College of Art & Design University

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

Improved monitoring to mitigate fugitive carbon emissions from industrial-scale CO2 storage

Carbon capture and storage requires a scientific basis for a legitimate social licence to be acceptable to the public as a carbon mitigation activity. This research program will augment groundwater monitoring to identify gas leakage around shallow carbon capture sites by integrating new approaches and analytes. In tandem, it will assess the subsurface occurrence of radon and helium and improve the subsurface understanding at a research site with active injection.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Cathy Ryan

Student:

Partner:

CMC Research Institutes Inc

Discipline:

Physics

Sector:

Administrative and support, waste management and remediation services; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Calgary

Program:

Accelerate

The Biocontrol of Blackleg Using Carnivorous Bacteria

Canola is one of Canada’s most important agricultural crops. Blackleg is a serious disease of canola potentially causing losses of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. This project will provide a new method of biocontrol of blackleg which will prevent or reduce losses to canola. This biocontrol method uses bacteria which are predators of other bacteria and fungi such as Leptosphaeria maculans, the cause of blackleg. The Mitacs intern for this project will isolate these predatory bacteria from soil and determine whether they can kill or stop the growth of Leptosphaeria maculans. The intern will identify these bacteria by a combination of traditional microbiological techniques and molecular techniques. When successful predatory bacteria are isolated their usefulness in protecting canola in the field will be evaluated. The success of this project will provide canola farmers with a new tool in their arsenal of plant protection options. Predatory bacteria are natural, sustainable, do not involve synthetic chemicals, and are inexpensive.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Paul Holloway

Student:

Partner:

Canola Council of Canada

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Agriculture

University:

University of Winnipeg

Program:

Accelerate

Understanding the Benefits and Drawbacks of the Use of Technology to Further Education in Asian Countries

The development of an educational learning tool in the form of a mobile and desktop game. Intended to be accessed by people who do not have ready access to a consistent education due to factors varying from poverty to gender discrimination. The learning tool will allow users to learn at their own pace in an interactive and entertaining way. The hope of the tool is that it will increase literacy rates in countries whose rates struggle due to disadvantageous circumstances with regards to access to an education.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Shahram Yousefi

Student:

Partner:

Cansbridge Fellowship

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Education; Technology; Social Innovation

University:

Queen's University

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

Développement de batteries pour les véhicules électriques écoresponsables

Afin d’atteindre la carboneutralité et de gérer l’approvisionnement intermittent en énergie renouvelable, les batteries Li-ion – des dispositifs de stockage électrique sous forme d’énergie chimique, sont entrées en jeu. Bien que ces technologies énergétiques soient prometteuses, il faudrait encore améliorer leurs performances de plusieurs ordres de grandeur afin de les utiliser pour les véhicules électriques. Les objectifs de ce projet intitulé « développement de batteries pour les véhicules électriques écoresponsables » sont de (i) développer des méthodes de synthèse de matériaux d’électrode basé sur les covalent organic framework (COFs), non-couteux et transférable à l’échelle industrielle, (ii) valoriser les déchets chimiques (mélamine et ses dérivés) en les utilisant comme matières premières pour préparer les COFs, (iii) participer aux efforts de recherche actuels visant à concevoir une nouvelle génération de batteries Li-ion de haute densité d’énergie et stable avec de long cycle, (iv) créer une équipe de recherche multidisciplinaire de calibre international, (v) accroitre l’expertise du Québec dans le domaine du stockage électrique et (vi) former une main-d’oeuvre qualifiée qui assurera le développement futur de l’industrie des matériaux avancés au Québec.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Adam Duong

Student:

Partner:

Centre national en électrochimie et en technologies environnementales

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

Program:

Accelerate

Assessing captive and wild bumble bee health in Southern Ontario through parasite sampling and analysis

Wildlife Preservation Canada’s (WPC’s) Bumble Bee Recovery Program is mainly focused on the recovery of the Special Concern (may become threatened or endangered) yellow-banded bumble bee (Bombus terricola). The intern will be taking on a project that will help WPC assess the health of bumble bee queens in the wild and queens that are being used in WPC’s conservation breeding program. The intern will be sampling and analyzing bumble bee feces for parasites within the field to assess bumble bee communities’ health and within WPC’s Bumble Bee Conservation Lab to assess the health of queens coming into the program. Several bumble bee parasites are known to negatively impact multiple stages of their lifecycle, including their reproduction and ability to survive throughout the winter (i.e. overwintering). The intern will also be creating protocols on sampling and analyzing these fecal samples as this technique is new to WPC. This technique will be integrated into WPC’s internal framework to continuously monitor the health of their conservation breeding colonies, which is crucial to achieve the wider project goal of releasing declining bumble bees to increase populations to levels that are needed for adequate ecosystem functioning (e.g. pollination of crops and wildflowers).

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Faculty Supervisor:

J. Scott MacIvor

Student:

Partner:

Wildlife Preservation Canada

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Toronto

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

Small Food Enterprise Outreach (SFEO)

Small Food Enterprise Outreach (SFEO) Project: economic resiliency, ethnocultural food enterprise and urban sustainability collaboration (Phase 1).
The Culinaria Research Centre of the University of Toronto Scarborough is collaborating with the Economic Development & Culture Division of the City of Toronto under the direction of the Centre’s Associate Professor Jayeeta (Jo) Sharma, on a Small Food Enterprise Outreach project (SFEO). As part of phase 1, this SFEO project and MITACS internship will coordinate student researchers’ culturally informed outreach with 10-20 family-owned independent, ethnocultural restaurants across Scarborough municipal wards, examine the impact of the pandemic upon them especially the role of recent government support programs, as part of a wider study of economic resiliency and urban sustainability that prioritizes the role of BIPOC and ethnocultural food stakeholders in advancing resilient communities and local food systems. The MITACS intern will assist to identify a cross-section of ethnocultural BIPOC-run small food enterprises in Scarborough and Toronto wards toward a continuation of the project for a possible phase 2.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Jo Sharma

Student:

Partner:

City of Toronto

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology; Public administration; Utilities

University:

University of Toronto

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

Democracy and Access to Justice

Justice is a core element of a healthy democracy. However, during the pandemic Canada has been confronted with critical questions about how individual notions of justice interact with collective democratic principles. Where is the line between democratic participation and harmful discourse? How does partisanship politicize our protected rights and rule of law? What tools does the government have to help resolve these conflicts and how do they relate to our civil liberties? For Canada, the lack of healthy discourse on these questions has fuelled democratic backsliding, the deterioration of norms protecting civic participation, political accountability and transparent elections. With this reversion, Canada has also seen the rise of online toxicity in our digital public square as a barrier for inclusive civic engagement, particularly for women and people of colour. This project will develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between justice and democratic backsliding in Canada by exploring innovative justice solutions to address barriers to meaningful civic participation, including toxic online discourse, and present broad recommendations about how to address democratic challenges.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Jennifer Orange

Student:

Partner:

The Samara Centre for Democracy

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Public administration

University:

Toronto Metropolitan University

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

Effect of Wax Inhibitors on the Flow behavior of the Caledonia Field Paraffinic Oil in Consolidated Porous Media at Reservoir and Production Conditions

The proposed research activi~ies aim the chemical and physical characterization of the wax contained in the Caledonia crude oil for the establishment of customized wax remediation alternatives. It also proposes the evaluation of the effectiveness of the optimum remediation treatments through the establishment of the flow performance of the original oil and treated oil in porous media at actual reservoir and production conditions. The results of this experimental work would allow establishing the actual applicability of the identified remediation techniques and consequently the cost-effective production of the waxy oil in the Caledonia oil field.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Laura Romero-Zeron

Student:

Partner:

Corridor Resources Inc (Penobsquis, NB)

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Mining

University:

University of New Brunswick

Program:

Accelerate

Unlocking the unrealized value of data collected by internal systems through quality monitoring and data repair. Developing an algorithm for ongoing data repair of an Inventory Management platform as well as CRM system that enhances reporting accuracy

As the company is actively looking for scaling opportunities, the business data quality assessment & monitoring project aims to unlock the unrealized value of data from internal systems such as CRM and Inventory Proprietary Inventory System to discover high-impact insights for internal stakeholders. The data project is looking to align data extracted from such systems to assist in resolving marketing challenges, uncovering the unmet opportunities, and facilitating departments’ decision-making to establish a versatile business model.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Tiffany Bayley

Student:

Partner:

PlaceHolder Inc

Discipline:

Business

Sector:

Information and cultural industries

University:

The University of Western Ontario

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

Applying acoustic and tracking data to assess landscape- and fine-scale habitat use to inform the conservation of at-risk bats

Interns will help collect various data about Ontario’s bat species, and use these to investigate their distributions, use of different land cover, and interactions with the human environment in the Greater Toronto Area. One project will use ultrasonic recorders to monitor bat echolocation activity, and identify temporal and spatial activity patterns in an urban gradient, and activity around roosts. A second project will track fine-scale bat movements using radio transmitters to test variation in use of different land cover in urban areas. The interns will be hosted be the Toronto Zoo’s Native Bat Conservation Program, which will benefit from assistance with fieldwork and the scientific analyses conducted by the interns. These results will be applied by the Zoo in its work supporting Ontario bats with concrete conservation outcomes, applying the institution’s mission of “connecting people, animals, and conservation science, to fight extinction”.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Christina Davy

Student:

Partner:

Toronto Zoo

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Arts, entertainment and recreation; Other services (except public administration)

University:

Carleton University

Program:

Accelerate

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Mitacs — Return on Innovation

Mitacs is funded by the Government of Canada, the Government of Alberta, the Government of British Columbia, Research Manitoba, the Government of New Brunswick, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Government of Nova Scotia, the Government of Ontario, Innovation PEI, the Government of Quebec, the Government of Saskatchewan, and the Government of Yukon.