Developing Talent
As a link between industry and academia, the not-for-profit organization Mitacs connects graduate students and post-doctoral fellows with nation-wide internships to develop their professional skills and help them apply their knowledge and research to social, technical and scientific challenges.
Doctoral student Hoi Ting (Wilson) Poon (Computer Science) and master’s student Fadi Younis (Computer Science) were both recipients of Mitacs Accelerate fellowships to support professor Ali Miri (Computer Science) with his research in partnership with information and communications technologies partner iG2 Group Inc. The project, Efficient Computations on Encrypted Data Stored in the Cloud, looks at the privacy or security issues arising as more individuals and organizations rely on cloud-based storage for massive amounts of data.
Master’s student Avneet Dhillon (Journalism), received a Mitacs Accelerate fellowship to support Is no news bad news? An investigation of local news poverty in Canada, a project in partnership with Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and led by professor April Lindgren (Journalism). Set against the 2015 federal election, the project surveyed voters in eight of Canada’s smaller communities about whether local media provided them with sufficient news or information to cast an informed vote.
Post-doctoral fellow Huiwen Goy (Psychology) was supervised by professor Frank Russo (Psychology) for her investigation into the challenge of perceiving music when dealing with hearing loss, Improving signal processing in hearing aids. Through the support of a Mitacs Elevate research fellowship, her research informed the company Unitron Hearing’s ongoing product advancement in hearing aid technologies.
Open to Ontario post-secondary students and administered by the Ontario Centres of Excellence, TalentEdge is a key component of Ontario’s Youth Jobs Strategy, partnering with industry to create student placements. While TalentEdge covers all disciplines and sectors, the projects must have a research and development component. Through internships and fellowships at leading companies, Ryerson students translate classroom learning into validated experience. In turn, businesses have access to skilled and capable talent.
With approximately a third of Ontario’s bridges requiring replacement or rehabilitation, the estimated expense for provincial and municipal infrastructure runs into billions of dollars. V-ROD Canada Inc., a global leader in glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP), provided four students with internships to analyze the sustainability of using GFRP bars in concrete reinforcing. Gledis Dervishhasani and Hanieh Pourmand, both master’s students (Applied Science), and Mahmoud Sayed Ahmed and Michael Rostami, both doctoral candidates (Civil Engineering), conducted a parametric study to test vehicle/truck impact and vehicle/truck weight to determine slab thickness and amount of GFRP bars. Professor Khaled Sennah (Civil Engineering), whose expertise includes bridge design, evaluation, retrofit and rehabilitation, is the principal investigator.
Individuals with lower limb paralysis are mostly confined to manual or electric wheelchairs, and this immobility inevitably leads to secondary health issues, such as pressure ulcers, pain and genitourinary problems. Bionik Laboratories, a medical device and robotics company that is at the forefront of rehabilitative technologies, has developed ExoLegs™, a battery-powered, motor-driven product that allows individuals with lower limb paralysis to walk. Doctoral candidate Taha Mehrabi (Electrical and Computer Engineering) is currently halfway through a two-year TalentEdge internship to design the sensor-actuator mechanism of the mobile components of ExoLegs™ and to optimize the battery-driven charging scheme. The TalentEdge allocation was enabled by the project’s principal investigator, professor Kaamran Raahemifar (Electrical and Computer Engineering).