Innovative Projects Realized

Mitacs Business Strategy Internship

The student would be asked to participate as part of a team that is working on CSP’s scenario planning in response to COVID-19 and will specifically be focusing on finance. Responsibilities would include collecting and analyzing data to predict the effects that the pandemic will have on CSP’s business operations. This will involve forecasting and making recommendations on business decisions. Data collection and analysis would focus on CSP’s cash flow, hedging, exchange rates and could include an environmental scan. Student will also help create process flows for CSP’s new subscription vendor. As part of a team, the student, supervisor, and other key staff would work together to interpret findings and inform business decisions.

HR & Talent Coordinator

Envol is your people partner in growth, in crisis, and everything in between. We deliver agile, cost-effective solutions for your HR needs throughout the full employee life cycle, from attracting and hiring the best for your business to developing and retaining a high performing team. Our solutions include HR, recruiting, DE&I, and employer branding.

The HR & Talent Coordinator will work alongside our dynamic team of experienced HR, talent and people leaders to support the full spectrum of our customer’s HR needs and support the development of new service lines. From simple questions about vacation obligations and recruiting top talent to collaborating on strategic programs like learning and development and building DE&I programs, this student will be part of a total people solution for organizations across North America.

Business Strategy Intern

Our organization believes that we need fully digital systems to manage and monitor our complete business cycle. An Intern will help us in identifying the digital tools we need as per our business needs, and more importantly, will be a lead in implementing those tools from an organizational behaviour aspect. The internship doesn’t involve development of tools, but a selection from commercially available tools matching with business needs. This will allow our organization to become a fully performing team in a remote work environment, and allow as to succeed in the new normal of post-COVID.

Business Management Intern

Calmura Natural Walls is a manufacturing startup focused on production of healthy and sustainable wall building materials. Our lab-scale research has been interrupted due to the shut down of the lab facility in which we were based, and we are now needing to establish the location for continued operation and production. Raising funds has become more challenging since the onset of the pandemic and we will need to re-think how we can work to establish a working environment to continue our venture and raise the seed funding needed. Having a business management intern assist to build the right strategy and prepare the business plan and other investor-ready documentation will be crucial to continuing with our venture. The scope of this internship will be to understand the market and applications of our technology and to help create the strategy and business plan to operate successfully in the post Covid world. Responsibilities include: Market research, competitor evaluation, financial review and forecasting, operational planning, risk mitigation, roadmapping, investor analysis, pitch deck design and overall business statement preparations.

Business Development and Marketing Associate

I will be working on 4 key anticipated projects. The first one is Partnership Management which includes working with the CEO to create a solid partnership management plan, outreach to new potential partners for AVA in plant science and hardware, upkeep conversations and make sure we respond in a timely manner, and manage existing relationships as a main contact point. Second will be Retail Management which includes evaluating retail opportunities, creating a rollout timeline with sales, marketing, production and innovation teams and looking into the possibility of an AVA-branded pop up store and official store launch. Thirdly will be Crowdfunding Management which includes helping to organize our campaign to make sure we’re launching our crowdfunding on time, working with marketing team to coordinate with agencies and third parties and documenting and bring weekly reports back to the team. Lastly will be Fundraising Management which includes determining angels, VCs, and accelerator programs that would be a good fit for our stage, assisting with applications, interview prep, and due diligence room management, finding warm introductions via portfolio companies, advisors, or emails for cold intros and working with the CEO to prepare pitches.

Market Researcher and Analyst

We are at the midst of launching our next-generation product in the field of cloud-based services to the international medtech industry. Covid-19 had altered all our existing marketing and sales, promotion, and other business development activities in markets originally targeted this year. A new sales aspect of this launch is a free trial of our SaaS application, provided once someone shows interest, through our website or through direct sales. The main scope of responsibility is investigating current situation in multiple targeted markets in the EU and the far east to analyze the effect of Covid 19 on the decision-making process in regards to entering new markets and access new sales approvals in the next 12 months.

Field evaluation of bacilin 20: Herbicide stress and accelerated flowering

Plants are always associated with a well coordinated and beneficial community of microbes – the phytomicrobiome; this plus the associated plant forms the holobiont, the entity that provides crop yield. There is considerable communication between the phytomicrobiome and the plant, often in through signal compounds. Bacilin 20 is a small protein produced a Bacillus thuringiensis strain and discovered by the Smith laboratory. It is improves plant ability to tolerate stress when applied at very low concentrations. One plant response to stress is accelerated flowering, leaving longer time for grain production. The proposed work will evaluate the potential for bacilin 20 to mitigate herbicide stress on widely produced Canadian crops: wheat, corn and soybean. It will be applied post emergence with glyphosate (corn and soybean) or buctril (wheat), to assess effects on herbicide stress, or at the mid-vegetative stage to determine if flowering is affected and yields increased as a result.

Business Development Intern

PigeonBox is a company that operates smart lockers at various Skytrain stations in Vancouver; this reduces stress for consumers because they do not have to worry about packages getting stolen. The company won Translink’s Open Innovation Call this past year and, by doing so, was awarded these locations. As a business development intern, I will be researching local companies to try and on-board them in order to diversify our revenue stream when ridership is down.

Developing forward curve models for power risk management

When a company has excess power generation at its disposal, a natural course of action will be to seek to market that power. However, power markets are notoriously volatile, and this makes the cash flows that result from selling the power unpredictable and hard to plan for. The aim of this project is to help develop models for power forward prices that can be used to help manage this risk.

Bacterial P450 engineering for production of high value antibacterials

Many pharmaceutical drugs are synthesised by traditional organic routes, however this approach is limited to the scope of traditional chemical catalysts that often yield predictably similar products. Pharmaceutical synthesis is moving towards alternative synthetic routes such as biosynthesis in order to develop sustainable, cheaper routes of novel small molecule production. This is crucial for antibacterial discovery, as alternative approaches are required to tackle the antibacterial resistance crisis. P450 BM3 is often utilised due to its rapid catalysis, diverse range of biotransformations and variant promiscuity yielding valuable existing and novel metabolites. We aim to address the problem of antibacterial resistance by screening variants of BM3 developed in the Munro group against antibacterial and bacterio-modulating pantothenamide analogs developed in the Auclair group. New analogs will be screened against several bacterial strains to assess their antibacterial/bacterio-modulating activity. Utilising biosynthesis to produce novel analogs of a class of compounds that will potentially resensitize the host immune system to infectious bacteria may yield several analogs of interest with a new mode of antibacterial action.

Evaluating Haptic Feedback for Vehicle Safety in Field Robotics

This project aims to evaluate a novel device of my own design and making which is able to communicate information about a remote robot’s state to a human operator via vibrating feedback. For example, hazards such as loose terrain or a steep incline may not be well reported to the operator via a camera feed. The focus of my PhD is the design of this novel control device and its application in making robot teleoperation safer for the robotic vehicle and less prone to errors.
My proposed project in Canada will progress in two phases. The first phase will take advantage of my proposed supervisor’s unique combination of expertise in mobile robotics and human perception, to conduct experiments to determine how vibrating haptic feedback can best be used to represent or recreate hazardous situations a mobile robot might encounter in real world use. These results will then very quickly inform the parameters for a second study, using the large scale off-road and aquatic robots to complete tasks that, by design, will involve navigating certain environmental hazards such as loose terrain, obstacles, very uneven ground, strong water currents, etc.

The Petawawa Biofibre Harvest Trial

This project will assess the potential for using unmerchantable wood as feedstock for the production of biofuels and bioenergy. Large tracts of forests within the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Forest (GLSL) consist of low quality pine- mixed woods that could supply feedstock if the unmerchantable wood were recovered in a sustainable and cost-effective manner. We will conduct biomass harvesting trials at the Petawawa Research Forest to assess the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of whole-tree harvest operations in pine-mixed forests characteristic of the region. The intern will assist in monitoring the harvest operations and analyzing the data. The results will help the partners to better estimate the amount of biomass that can be harvested from pine-mixed wood forests. In addition, quantifying costs will help them modify harvest operations to incorporate biomass harvesting