Developing Talent
Strategic collaborations with industry, government, institutions and partner organizations provide opportunities for our students to build skills, gain hands-on experience and create profession-related networks.
Mitacs is a not-for-profit, nationwide organization that links universities to industry and connects graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to opportunities to apply their knowledge to research-based industrial and social innovation.
Post-doctoral fellow Parisa Pouladzadeh (Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering) received a Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship to support professor Dimitrios Androutsos (Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering) with his research being done in partnership with digital pathology systems company Pathcore Inc. The project, Image analysis and machine learning for digital pathology images, aims to eliminate laborious and subjective manual analysis approaches to medical imaging by developing a computational pathology tool that identifies breast cancer tumours.
PhD candidate Hanako Smith (Communication and Culture) received a Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship for the project, Media/communication repertories of Canadian small business owners. In Canada, over 95 per cent of registered businesses are small businesses. Hanako Smith’s work supported research into the media habits and purchasing behaviours of individual owner-managers of small businesses in order to better understand how to communicate with this widely disparate group. Professor Charles Davis (Media) and industrial partner Agency 59 were the principal investigators.
Master’s of Building Science student, Carleen Lawson, received a Mitacs Accelerate Internship to support professor Jennifer McArthur (Architectural Science) and industry partner, the Real Property Association of Canada, to develop an analytics tool and predictive model that can identify key characteristics necessary to classify and predict real estate assets that are likely to demonstrate significant improvement in energy performance. By predicting which buildings are most likely to benefit from targeted incentives, the research provides valuable input for both member industries and government sustainability policy.
Administered by the Ontario Centres of Excellence, the TalentEdge program is a key element of Ontario’s Youth Jobs Strategy. It provides Ontario students and recent graduates with placements in either companies or institutions to work directly on projects that have a research and development component. The benefits are reciprocal: students gain valuable experience in their discipline, and businesses gain a competitive advantage through access to new research talent.
With a fatality rate of approximately 47 per 100,000 workers, the mining industry is the second most dangerous job in the world. Improving mine personnel safety is the objective of post-doctoral fellows Nima Nikvand and Sikder M. Kamruzzaman, PhD candidate Lloyd Emmanuel (all in Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering) and Master of Applied Science student Christopher Mekhiel. Their TalentEdge Fellowship will go towards the development of a smart computing platform that combines data from digital wireless radio with thermal and video images in real time. PBE Canada, a global leader in the design and manufacture of products for the underground mining industry, and SOSCIP (Smart Computing for Innovation), a research and development in advanced computing consortium based in Ontario, are key partners on the project. Professor Xavier Fernando (Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering) is the lead investigator.
Bombardier Aerospace is the third largest aircraft manufacturer in the world. Apart from manufacturing and selling aircrafts, the company also offers its customers after-market support, such as workshops, seminars and instructor-led training. Ranjani Ranganathan, who is completing a Master’s of Business Administration, received a TalentEdge Internship at Bombardier to help develop an advanced training package on aircraft reliability and maintenance cost concepts in a classroom setting for airlines operating Bombardier products. Led by Ryerson professor Aziz Guergachi (Information Technology Management), Ranganathan worked with Bombardier’s Maintenance Data and Aircraft Economics team to undertake marketing strategies and conduct an analysis of the current market landscape in order to optimize training services to enhance customer experience.