Canada Foundation for Innovation | Webinar Colleges Fund 2022 | EN

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For many, RNA vaccines seem to have appeared out of nowhere. The curious and the hesitant have wondered how a vaccine to fight COVID-19 could have been brought to market so quickly. In fact, messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines have been in development for over three decades. Here is the story about a persistent RNA vaccine pioneer and her socially connected admirer, University of British Columbia researcher, Anna Blakney.

10,000 ways podcast - Vaccination consteRNAtion

2023 COLLEGE FUND INFORMATION SESSION

2023 FONDS DES COLLÈGES SESSION D'INFORMATION

Brian Greenspan, director of the Hyperlab at Carleton University, forecasts what the consumer experience of the future might be like. 

GREENSPAN_BRIAN Attention future shoppers

Example of undirected song

Example of juvenile-directed song

Example of song development

Leyla Soleymani is Canada’s Research Chair in Miniaturized Biomedical Devices. Her passion for the miniature world of nanotech and her commitment to collaboration have led her and her colleagues at McMaster University  to inventions ranging from rapid tests that use pig saliva to disease detection to a plastic wrap that repels pathogens like rain drops off a lotus leaf.

10,000 ways podcast - Rapid diagnostics: Nano discoveries and mega results

Et si la musique nous permettait de mieux réaliser nos tâches quotidiennes? Et si l’on pouvait freiner les effets délétères de maladies comme la maladie de Parkinson grâce à un stimuli auditif? C’est ce dont Simone Dalla Bella est convaincu et ce pourquoi il co-dirige le Laboratoire international de recherche sur le Cerveau, la Musique et le Son.

Nombre de personnes ont la capacité de percevoir correctement les rythmes, mais elles n’arrivent pas à synchroniser leurs mouvements sur la musique, et vice et versa. Eh bien, des chercheurs et chercheuses du Laboratoire international de recherche sur le Cerveau, la Musique et le Son se penchent sur comment définir la corrélation entre la musique et nos capacités cognitives comme la parole, la mémoire, l'attention, et une foule d’autres fonctions exécutives. Les résultats de leurs travaux de recherche pourraient donc avoir d’importantes retombées pour les personnes atteintes de troubles cognitifs.

« 10 000 expérimentations » - Utiliser des stimuli auditifs pour traiter des maladies cognitives

On a cold March 2, 2004, Carla Prado arrived on the doorsteps of the University of Alberta. She left behind her native Brazil to fulfill a dream of studying abroad. Today, she is an academic leader in body composition research who passionately shares the benefits of protein-rich diets in the treatment of cancer. She uses social media and classic movies like The Wizard of Oz to help explain the science behind by her research.

10,000 ways - Using the power of nutrition to treat those living with cancer

Tel un athlète de haut niveau, Alexandre Langlois s’entraîne depuis l’âge de 9 ans à vivre dans des conditions de froid extrême. Aujourd’hui, fort de ses études en géographie physique et de nombreuses rencontres et partenariats, le scientifique comprend l’évolution de la Terre, passée et à venir. Dans le cadre de ses observations sur le rapport qu'entretiennent l'homme et la nature, il a notamment beaucoup à dire des impacts de l'homme sur le climat et son environnement.

« 10 000 expérimentations » - S’enflammer pour l’Arctique

Our power grid is vulnerable. For one thing, it’s aging. For another, it’s prone to hackers. In the meantime, climate change means we need to find ways to integrate renewable energy sources that are intermittent with the shining sun or blowing wind. To avoid the crippling cost of replacing this infrastructure, jurisdictions must find ways to adapt. Pirathayini Srikantha, from York University’s, Lassonde School of Engineering, is an award-winning engineer who is confronting these multiple challenges.

10,000 ways - Reinforcing the reliability of our vulnerable electricity grid

Le Canada a beau posséder l’expertise et la technologie, sa flotte de navires de recherche a connu de bien meilleurs jours.

Est-ce préoccupant pour l’avancée des travaux de recherche dans les domaines de la géologie marine, l’océanographie physique, la biologie marine et la chimie marine au pays?

Dans ce balado, le professeur de géologie marine de l’UQAR et chaire de recherche du Canada en géologie marine nous dit ce qu’il en pense.

« 10 000 expérimentations » - Une étoile (de la science) des mers

Shinnecock is a dialect derived from the Algonquian language. It means “people of the stony shores.” It’s along the stony shores of the Shinnecock Nation, on the Atlantic-facing eastern coast of New York’s Long Island that Kelsey Leonard developed her passion for the water. Undergraduate studies took her to Samoa and graduate studies brought her to the University of Waterloo, where she is the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Waters, Climate and Sustainability .

10,000 ways - Should bodies of water have the same legal status as people?

Céline Surette est doyenne de la Faculté des sciences et professeure au département de chimie et biochimie de l’Université de Moncton. Elle porte un regard unique sur les écosystèmes, le microcosme néo-brunwickois, ses mentors et ses personnes étudiantes dont elle est à présent la boussole. Et elle ne perd jamais le nord face aux vélléités de faire taire la science. Écoutez Céline Surette parler de toutes les dimensions de son travail sur le terrain ainsi qu’en laboratoire.

« 10 000 expérimentations » - L’interdisciplinarité est une seconde nature

Constantin Polychronakos has devoted his career to studying the genetics of juvenile diabetes and treating children afflicted with the disease. As head of the Child Health and Human Development Program at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, he is working towards new interventions to replace the need for painful daily insulin injections.

POLYCHRONAKOS_CONSTANTIN Using genetics to find a cure for juvenile diabetes - Podcast

Doug Wallace, a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Ocean Science and Technology at Dalhousie University, describes why research infrastructure draws new communities of aspiring ocean scientists. 

WALLACE_DOUG Dalhousie University - CFI Then and Now

The Canada Foundation for Innovation begins to assemble a team and quickly faces opposition from Quebec. Researchers try to adjust to a new “mind blowing” way of doing research. And..the Queen is not amused at CFI’s early success.

Our origin story - PART 4: An idea becomes reality

Antibiotic resistance is an increasingly serious problem – threatening to alter modern medicine as we know it. It’s an area of research that has captured Gerry Wright’s attention for over two decades. As the director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University, Wright and his team have made some exciting progress in identifying where resistant genes come from and how to beat them.

WRIGHT_GERRY Keeping ahead of infectious diseases

When non-Indigenous scientists wish to conduct research in Indigenous communities, cultural misunderstandings can arise over issues including the methods of research; ownership of data; and interpretation of results. In this podcast, Carrie Bourassa – Research Chair in Indigenous and Northern Health and Senior Scientist at Health Sciences North Research Institute in Sudbury, Ontario – introduces listeners to the complexities of conducting research in First Nations communities and the philosophy of Indigenous research methodology.

BOURASSA_CARRIE Knowledge, ceremony, and an Indigenous approach to research

Award-winning author Robert Sawyer dreamed of a career in science, but was discouraged by the state of Canadian research in the 1970s. So he decided to write science fiction instead. These days, he often sets his novels in Canada’s remarkable research labs, including the Canadian Light Source (where he was writer-in-residence) and SNOLAB (where part of his Hugo Award-winning novel Hominids is set). Speaking to a room full of researchers at a workshop for the country’s national research facilities in November 2018, he surveyed the state of Canadian science institutions from the time he was entering university in 1979 through to the world-class installations we have today. Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier said the 20th century would belong to Canada; Sawyer tells us why, as far as science is concerned and thanks to the CFI, he was off by a hundred years.

Music credit:

Soda Machine by Kabbalistic Village | https://soundcloud.com/kabbalisticvillage
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND 3.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/

Sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer imagines the future of Canadian science - Podcast

In this sound clip, Darko Odic, director of the University of British Columbia's Centre for Cognitive Development, reflects on how math curricula might be more successful if they took advantage of kids' intuitive sense of quantity. Read the full story at: https://www.innovation.ca/story/thinking-quantitatively

ODIC_DARKO Learning math, naturally

In this sound clip, Darko Odic, director of the University of British Columbia's Centre for Cognitive Development, describes “dyscalculia,” the mathematics equivalent of dyslexia. Read the full story at: https://www.innovation.ca/story/thinking-quantitatively

ODIC_DARKO New insights about math-related learning disabilities

Sound clip featuring Darko Odic, director of the University of British Columbia's Centre for Cognitive Development, discussing children's innate ability to estimate quantity. Read the full story at: https://www.innovation.ca/story/thinking-quantitatively

ODIC_DARKO To guesstimate is human

Fabien Durif, directeur du Laboratoire de recherche en nouvelles Expériences Utilisateurs et en écoresponsabilité, le GreenUXlab, s'est entretenu avec la FCI. 

https://www.innovation.ca/fr/reussites/sadapter-habitudes-consommation-qui-nont-rien-constant

DURIF_FABIEN Quel est le sens que vous donnez au mot « innovation » ? Réponse de FD

Hear Faranak Farzan describe how her research could  be more reliable than pharmaceuticals.

FARZAN, FARANAK  CLIP 01 “What if mental illness could be treated without drugs?”

LGBTQ+ youth are more likely to have a smart phone than anybody else. About 95 or 96 percent of LGBT youth have smart phones. What we do know about the youth that are homeless is they always have a smart phone. So it may not be a fancy smart phone and they go to different organizations and different services like Starbucks to get WiFi. So that is almost the best way to get a hold of any young person, is through their smart phone.

We've learned from a number of young people that we've worked with that when they're feeling depressed or when they're feeling suicidal, they will interact on their social media and they will get a lot of love and support from their friends on social media and that will in fact help them feel better.

So young people are not calling a crisis hotline like they used to. They're in fact turning to social media to get love and support and advice. Of course there's limitations to that. But that's an interesting trend. 

As part of the SSHRC study that we call the Project Query, we did an online study of a little over 6,000 LGBT youth in Canada and the U.S. One of the things we learned when we just recently did an analysis of the transgender and gender nonconforming youth and how lifesaving their social media was to them. That in fact, having Instagram saved their life. 

And of course it's not the Instagram itself, it's who Instagram connects to them to. People who make them feel valued, give them social support, help them make choices and navigate the challenges of their daily lives because they talk these things through with them on social media, whether it's an individual chat or sometimes putting it out broadly.

Because there's a real collective spirit I think that is often found online. Of course there's a lot of negativity and most research talks about all the negative aspects of information, communication technologies, particularly for youth. But one of the reasons that I decided to pursue this research is because it was not true in the same way for LGBT youth.

When we started our “I will survive” study, which was maybe it'd be 2010, and we were trying to understand the influence of more media messages on LGBT youth, it was different even then. I mean, we had smartphones, but they weren't as omnipresent I think as they are now. And even then, the way that young people talked about the media was very much it's a one-way conversation, right? So they're essentially consumers of media. What we've seen since then is a way for young people to be part of the conversation and also become producers as well as consumers. So they're also able to shape the messages that they hear and respond to them as well as creating their own messages.

CRAIG SHELLEY CLIP 02 "Smart phones and social can be lifesavers for LGBTQ+ youth"

I do have to say that transitioning from working with victims of violence in a domestic violence shelter was similar to working with LGBT youth because so many of them have been victims of violence, certainly discrimination, abuse, a much higher likelihood of adverse childhood events of any kind.

And even though at that point we didn't have the data, we certainly did have the practice-based data and the clinical information. And so that thinking from the lens of safety and protection became one of the things that I, that I transported with me.

But something that was different when working with LGBT youth was when I would tell people I worked with women who had been abused by their partners and talked about working in the shelter, people sort of understood it was a common … there was a common understanding that this is something that shouldn't happen. And when I was working with, specifically when I first started working with LGBT youth back in 1998 essentially, I still had to make the case that LGBT youth deserved to be safe and didn't deserve to be beaten, that they weren't asking for it, that they just didn't have to straighten up.

It was this interesting thing. At least — it doesn't really make it any better — but at least there's a bit of a social norm that domestic violence was something that was taboo and shouldn't happen, even though it does happen. At that point, it was really overt that, oh, you know, it's probably better for these LGBT kids, or we just called them gay kids at that point, but for these gay kids to be dead or, you know, parents would often say to kids, I wish you were a murderer instead of being gay. And they were constantly being kicked out and I was constantly trying to help, you know, figure out safe places for them to be. So there were some common elements I think that I transported with me. And then there were some other elements, the advocacy elements that I really had to continue to develop in terms of my skillset to be able to, I think really actively represent and support the young people that I was so lucky to work with.

CRAIG SHELLEY CLIP 01  “What LBGTQ+ youth and those who experience domestic violence have in common”

Stories and interviews with leading researchers supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation.  Histoires et entrevues avec des chercheurs de premier plan, appuyés  par La Fondation canadienne pour l’innovation.

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