Innovative Projects Realized

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

31620 Completed Projects

2978
AB
5221
BC
856
MB
696
NL
899
SK
9419
ON
9858
QC
98
PE
619
NB
1192
NS

Projects by Category

High Performance Lipid Nanoparticle Production System

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are a form of new dosage form for delivering drugs, including anticancer agents and vaccines. A highly controlled production system is needed to produce high quality LNPs, and the existing production systems suffer from a few drawbacks, such as lack of variable control and automated functions. Dionamix will employ their technologies and develop a new production system to improve LNP manufacturing. The interns from University of British Columbia will help validate the new system for the LNP production. The project will expand Dionamix’ product portfolio and potentially generate new revenue and jobs.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Shyh-Dar Li

Student:

Partner:

Dionamix Scientific Inc.

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Life Sciences (not health); Nanotechnology; Pharmaceuticals

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program:

Accelerate

Développement des outils d’usinage des superalliages de nickel

Optimum Canada, une entreprise québécoise qui développe et fabrique des outils de coupe, s’associe avec le Centre technologique en aérospatiale (CTA), le Laboratoire des Revêtements Fonctionnels et Ingénierie de Surfaces (LaRFIS) à Polytechnique Montréal et le Laboratoire d’Optimisation des Procédés de Fabrication Avancés (LOPFA) à l’École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) pour développer et industrialiser de nouveaux revêtements par dépôt physique en phase vapeur (PVD) pour les outils de fraisage de superalliages de nickel et l’amélioration du processus de production, et cela du concept à la fabrication. L’objectif principal du projet est d’améliorer la durée de vie de ces outils de 200 à 300 % en mettant en place un processus de production optimisé, en particulier, aux étapes de design, de préparation de surface et de déposition des revêtements

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Lisa Giachini

Student:

Partner:

Optimum Canada

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Manufacturing

University:

Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel Edouard-Montpetit

Program:

Accelerate

Literature review on extraction technologies and functionalities of isolated lupin proteins

The intern will use both the electronic and paper reference materials available at the University of Manitoba libraries to search for published articles and books on lupin seed with a focus on protein extraction methods as well as data reported for physicochemical and functional properties. The intern will then use the assembled literature materials to write a comprehensive review manuscript detailing various isolated lupin protein products coupled with their structural and functional characterization. Once approved by the industry partner, the review manuscript will be submitted for publication in a top-tier food science journal. Lupin Platform plans to commercially exploit the results of the project which would stimulate wealth creation for Canada through technological innovation; job creation (mostly highly skilled) and creation of new products and services.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Rotimi Aluko

Student:

Partner:

Lupin Platform Inc

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Agriculture

University:

University of Manitoba

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

Cultural Diversity and the Persistence of the BIPOC Community in the Chemical Sciences

The representation of the Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) community decreases at higher levels of education/academia. This phenomenon is proverbially referred to as the ‘leaky pipeline’ and has been studied extensively with various populations in multiple disciplines. However, despite scholars identifying some key factors that contribute to the persistence of the BIPOC community in STEM fields in general (e.g., stereotype threat), there is a limited understanding of how the cultural composition of the learning and working environments in the chemical sciences contributes to this phenomenon. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to understand how the cultural composition of chemical science faculties at post-secondary institutions in Canada influences the persistence of BIPOC students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty members. The findings will be used to create webinars designed to maximize the retention of the BIPOC community in the chemical sciences and enhance the diversity of the CIC’s membership.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Tricia Carmichael

Student:

Partner:

Chemical Institute of Canada

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Windsor

Program:

Accelerate

Measuring Kingston’s Economic Resilience

This research project will create data dashboards that measure Kingston’s economic resiliency a year into the pandemic. The data will be collected from multiple organizations and sources to create a comprehensive look at the pandemic’s impact. The data dashboards will cover the areas of business and tourism, health and community, mobility and home and employment. The Accelerate student intern will play a pivotal role in implementation of this research project. The student will be responsible for developing the data dashboards, analyzing the varying sources of data and building a public facing webpage to display and visualize the data collected. These dashboards will provide critical insight into understanding the City of Kingston’s resiliency over the past year and how we recover as a city to build back better. This project will also contribute to emergent research regarding the impact of the pandemic on local economic development across Canada.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Betsy Donald

Student:

Partner:

Kingston Economic Development Corporation

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services; Public administration

University:

Queen's University

Program:

Business Strategy Internship

Coaching Mental Health Providers and Adults to Achieve Optimal Sleep

Millions of Canadians struggle with insomnia, but common methods of dealing with poor sleep (e.g., medication) have poor side effects, do not have lasting effects, and are not preferred by patients and providers. Although cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is the gold-standard treatment, there is limited access because most mental health practitioners (MPHs) do not have sufficient training to deliver CBT-I. To address this problem, Dr. Colleen Carney, one of six recognized behavioural sleep medicine trainers in the world, developed a sleep optimizing algorithm (SOA) to coach MHPs, as well as to create a product that adults can use to optimize their sleep. The project will demonstrate the usefulness of this program in improving sleep and increasing access to effective insomnia treatments. Because of how common poor sleep is in the population, the partner organization is expected to benefit from an extremely valuable intellectual property that has been scientifically shown to improve sleep.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Colleen Carney

Student:

Partner:

I-INC Foundation for Business Development

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Toronto Metropolitan University

Program:

Accelerate

Animal identification and emotion detection using deep convolutional neural networks

According to a recent report, when it comes to animal protection laws Canada has not been performing adequately, receiving a grade of “D” on the Animal Protection Index (API). The low marks received were for not having adequate legislation protecting wildlife in captivity, working animals, farm animals, animals used in research and companion animals. At the same time, public support for improving animal welfare is high. In an effort to address this, we propose mobile application to identify animals and understand their emotions, which will utilize state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks. This solution will have a wide range of applications such as assisting in finding lost pets, preventing undesired animal trading, diagnosing emotional wellbeing of animals, and helping humans and wildlife to coexist by allowing humans to identify individual animals that frequent their communities or properties.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Loutfouz Zaman

Student:

Partner:

Petnerup Inc.

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and cultural industries; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Ontario Institute of Technology

Program:

Accelerate

Smart handheld device for automatic blood analysis: Innovative prediction of livestock pregnancy and litter size

Have you ever done a finger prick to get a few drops of blood to test your glucose level using a handheld device? Or taken a “bed-side” pregnancy test using urine and a device at the palm of your hands? We’re planning to follow the same model and develop a device that can detect pregnancy and litter size in sheep. This is a novel device in the livestock industry and can provide results within minutes. The producers would have to collect a few drops of blood (probably from an ear prick) from the sheep, get it to the detection device, and get the result on their phone.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

David S. Wishart;Susan Markus

Student:

Partner:

Alberta Lamb Producers;Ontario Sheep Farmers;Tricca

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Agriculture

University:

University of Alberta

Program:

Accelerate

Bridging the Gap: A Research Evaluation of a High School to Post-Secondary Preparatory Program for At-Risk and Underrepresented Groups

Mathstronauts’ NEXUS Program is a 12-week program in which grade 11 and 12 students from underrepresented groups gain fundamental technical skills in the areas of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and soft skills (time management, note taking, etc.) to support their transition into post-secondary education. To investigate the impact of this intervention, our intern will use surveys and focus groups to identify the feasibility of the program in an online format, the short-term impacts of this program on the technical and soft skills of participants, and the long-term impacts of the program on post-secondary attitudes and decisions six-months after program completion. These assessments will contribute to a final NEXUS Program report which will be used by Mathstronauts to inform future improvements on the program. Additionally, the report will be a tool for school boards, community organizations, and research institutions to make similar programs widely accessible to students.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Karen Robson

Student:

Partner:

Mathstronauts

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

McMaster University

Program:

Accelerate

Towards Automated Recommendations for Taxonomy Expansion

The partner organization is building a knowledge graph to integrate the knowledge in the SharePoint documents/pages of each domain, which will be used as the central information base to support various information retrieval tasks such as intelligent chatbots that can automatically identify relevant information. A critical element of the knowledge graph is a taxonomy of the entities (keywords) extracted from the SharePoint documents/pages, which can enrich the relations between the entities. However, with the explosive increase of entities, maintaining the taxonomy becomes beyond the capacity of the taxonomists. Thus, this project aims to develop a prototype tool to assist taxonomists in expanding the taxonomy with new entities. The tool accepts a new entity as its input, analyzes its relationship with the existing taxonomy, and outputs the recommendation for how to integrate the entity. The tool is expected to save the analysis time of the taxonomists by 50%.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Heng Li;Foutse Khomh

Student:

Partner:

Banque Nationale du Canada

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Finance and Insurance; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Polytechnique Montréal

Program:

Accelerate

Communicating outcomes of future what-if scenarios for municipal climate action

This project communicates interactive cross-sectoral data about how municipal planning policies related to urban form may address both climate action and urban livability. The research generates numerous measured future what-if scenarios for neighbourhood-scale changes to population, population density, built form, building energy, mobility, urban greening. This project addresses a problem of communication by designing and delivering an interactive visually accessible dashboard to communicate the results of the research to planners and their constituent audiences- the public and elected officials.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Cynthia Girling

Student:

Partner:

Esri Canada Ltd

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Information and cultural industries; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program:

Accelerate

Presence of SSAT-1 as a marker for early diagnosis and monitoring of cancer

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In Canada, cancer accounts for 30% of all deaths, and half of all
Canadians will develop cancer in their lifetime. Many cancers can be prevented or controlled through early detection, but the
availability of such tests is scarce and a reliable general biomarker for different types of cancers has not been yet discovered.
Moreover, cancer survivors are at greater risk of developing a second cancer, and affordable and safe monitoring for the rest
of their lives is not available. We propose the development of serological and qPCR tests for early diagnosis of cancer based
on the presence of SSAT-1.
Since the technology will be used to screen for early-stage cancers, it is a life-saving approach, and therefore of clear social
benefit to Canada. The health benefits to Canada in developing reliable and cost-effective early cancer detection and screening
devices will assist the Canadian medical community and patients at large. Early detection and screening save lives and costs
that burden the medical budget. Also, this methodology is beneficial to monitor populations at high cancer development risk,
such as smokers, industrial, and occupational workers.

View Full Project Description
Faculty Supervisor:

Horacio Bach

Student:

Partner:

Biomark Diagnostics Inc.

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program:

Accelerate

Previous
1…1,6231,6241,6251,6261,6271,6281,629…2,635
Next

Join a thriving innovation ecosystem.

Subscribe to our newsletter now!

Subscribe

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.