Grants and Contributions

The Innovation in Apprenticeship Stream aims to support innovative approaches and strengthen partnerships to address apprenticeship challenges in the Red Seal trades.

The stream supports projects that:
• use innovative approaches or expand best practices to address challenges limiting apprenticeship outcomes in Red Seal trades
• involve broad-based partnerships between organizations across sectors, regions or trades

This contribution supports the development of a series of short videos and documentaries highlighting foundational Kwantlen stories, testimonies and/or cultural presentations from knowledge keepers of Indigenous culture.

While wearable devices which monitor physical parameters (heart rate, blood pressure) exist already, wearable sensors which monitor chemical biomarkers in bodily fluids have yet to be commercially developed. In this research, we will advance our already successful fabric-based plasmonic electrode chip technology towards the end goal of detection of human health biomarkers in sweat, a "headband of the future". Specifically, we will focus on identifying elevated levels of stress biomarkers in an effort to reduce the occurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder for certain occupations, including military personnel and front-line health care workers.

In this project, we will explore printed fabric sensors for reliable concurrent electrochemical and surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy measurements of stress biomarkers in sweat as an early marker for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Additional funds will be used to administer targeted, peer-based sessions with diverse survivors and prepare a What We Found report to inform the National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence in Canada

In order to achieve our goal, i.e. the design of small-yet-bright and safe-to-use optical bioprobes (Ln-NPs), research at the HemmerLab will focus on the synthesis and surface modification of inorganic lanthanide-doped nanoparticles and their structural and optical characterization. Herein, we will use the emerging technique of hyperspectral imaging in order to gain insight into environment-specific photoluminescence of the Ln-NPs incubated with various biological cells.

Current histological methods for analyzing the changes happening within the extracellular matrix (ECM) cannot accurately
resolve the biochemical and 3D structural composition of specific proteins and components. We will be responsible for assessing the
models developed at the NRC using super-resolution optical microscopy techniques as well as transmission electron microscopy
(TEM) to assess 3D structural features of ECM molecules. We will be responsible for acquiring such images and develop new image
analysis methods to assess how the fibers and fibrils morphology are altered, as well as establish metrics to capture the 3D structure
of the bioprinted tissue fibers.

The objective of this collaboration is to test how systemic disruption of sphingolipid and phospholipid metabolism converges on systemic and nervous system-based immune responses to activate the NLRP3 inflammasome. We propose that this activation leads not only to cytokine production but, ultimately, ensures a vicious cycle of systemic aberrant immune responses by perpetuating pathological release of neurotoxic lipid mediators. Here we, will identify, using in vitro models and unbiased lipidomic approaches, the lipid mediators that initiate NRLP3 inflammasome activation, establish whether this induction is required to sustain systemic lipid dysregulation, and finally provide proof-of-principle that inhibiting the NLRP3 inflammasome will reverse the induction by pro-inflammatory lipid mediators.

To reduce the number of modes, we plan to use strong reflection in random grating of a few centimeters to replace kilometer long weak Rayleigh fiber.

In this project, we will apply optical spectroscopy and data analytics technique to address problems in gold mining process.