Grants and Contributions

The purpose of the Jordan Program Support Facility (JPSF) is to increase the overall quality and effectiveness of development programming in Jordan supported through Canada’s Official Development Assistance (ODA).

Open data – information from governments and other institutions made accessible to all - is becoming a major driver for social change, innovation and development, contributing to increasing trust in institutions, more transparent and accountable governance, more innovative economies, more effective service delivery and more engaged citizens. Through the Open Data for Development (OD4D) program, Canada supports innovative approaches to help realize the full potential of open data to transform governments, civil society and business, to empower women and girls, and to ensure benefits for citizens in developing countries. OD4D supports a coordinated network of initiatives and institutions around the world whose activities include providing training for civil society and government officials; evaluating the impact of open data; creating regional peer networks; and supporting governments to plan and implement open data policies.

This third phase of OD4D seeks to facilitate the use of data to improve inclusion and gender equality, good governance and economic growth, thus ensuring that open data contributes to achieving the 2030 Agenda. OD4D activities include: (1) exploring how data can drive inclusion, better governance and empowerment, including for women, Indigenous and LGBTQI+ people; (2) supporting research on the impact of data use on development outcomes; (3) enhancing southern perspectives in data governance; and (4) further building OD4D regional hubs’ capacity.

This project aims to improve the lives of Lebanese and Syrian women and girls by strengthening the capacity of key national and local government institutions and Lebanon Crisis Response Plan (LCRP) implementing partners to support gender-responsible policy making. The project also works to integrate gender into the LCRP to ensure that development and humanitarian efforts consider the experiences, needs, and contributions of women and girls. Project activities include: (1) providing technical support and capacity building for gender mainstreaming to national institutions, ministries, municipalities and LCRP implementing partners; and (2) developing in-focus briefs and guidance notes to inform advocacy on particular topics from a gender perspective, such as gender-based violence, economic inclusion, empowerment and voices in decision-making, capacities for reconciliation, and conflict resolution.

This project aims to carry out community liaison activities that link local leaders (women and men) to the military demining units assigned to clear mines in their communities. These liaison activities work to contribute to ensuring that the needs and priorities of women and men from local populations are met by fostering the population’s active contributions to mine action identification and prioritization processes. The project also aims to provide mine risk education to vulnerable communities, including women and girls, in order to promote safe behaviors and reduce the incidence of landmine accidents and victims. This includes both communities where demining activities are occurring and communities where there have been recent incidents of landmine accidents but where security situations do not permit demining activities.

Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria, many war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed. This project supports the Syrian Legal Development Program (SLDP) work with Syrian civil society organizations (CSOs), to increase their understanding of how to use judicial systems and public institutions, to attain justice and hold perpetrators of crime accountable. The project also focuses on identifying and holding companies and business leaders that have committed crimes accountable. The SLDP works to accomplish this by providing Western governments with information that can help them develop more targeted and robust sanctions.

Modern technological materials are typically multi-component compounds with complex structures that determine their opto/electronic/chemical properties. The design of new functional materials has been greatly assisted by developments in efficient and accurate electronic-structure methodologies, most notably Density Functional Theory (DFT). But DFT is too expensive to perform the rapid screening of thousands of candidates required for the design of new high-performance materials. This project aims to harness the power of modern Artificial Intelligence to build on the success of DFT and ferret out optimal design parameters. This project is of prime socioeconomic importance, aiming to reduce the environmental footprint of the Alberta oil sands by designing new nanocatalysts for the chemical reactions involved in in-the-reservoir upgrading.

Designing a drug for a specific disease type is highly challenging due to tremendous molecular search space and limited understanding about the disease of interest. Successful discovery of a medicine for a target (gene/protein/pathway) usually last for many years and costs a private pharmaceutical organization billions of dollars, which in turn determines the unaffordable price of medicines in the Canadian and global markets. The emerging of massive biochemical and high-throughput genomic data acquisition techniques and the rise of advanced artificial intelligence paradigms provide an unprecedented opportunity for automatic design of new drugs with much faster pace and much lower cost, igniting hopes to discovery drugs for diseases where no medicines have been found yet. A develop a data- and AI-driven drug design platform/pipeline will be developed for precise and effective treatment of cancers and complex diseases. The project will take advantage of NRC’s unique multidisciplinary expertise in AI, data science, and human health therapeutics, as well as external collaborators’ knowledge and facilities, to tackle challenges in every step of drug design. Project technologies and outcomes will be disruptive and beneficial to all Canadians.
This project will focus on the development and testing of AI methods and molecule parameterization.

Designs for devices that use the atomic silicon quantum dot technique will be determined. This design will attempt to tailor the SET array to optimize the size and arrangement of the SETs and the associated connections so that the capacitance and consequently the charge energy, Ec, make its operation as a CBT at high temperatures possible. The method to interface the SET to the macro-world to enable the measurement of the temperature-dependant electrical conductance change will be developed.

It is well-known that asphalt pavements in cold regions such as Canada are exposed to number of environmental stresses such as thermal fatigue cycles and low-temperatures which result in different modes of distresses most commonly cracking. In addition, repeated application of traffic loads on flexible pavement induces structural cracking known as bottom-up fatigue distress. Considering that cracked pavements are more susceptible to water seepage and frost action, it is crucial to reverse the cracking process through use of self-healing bituminous materials in order to extend the service life of the infrastructure, reduce the amount of Greenhouse Gas emissions and decrease the energy usage. Improving the self-healing properties of asphalt binder and Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) through innovative techniques and novel applications is still at emerging stage. This project will investigate the rheological properties and healing characterization of nano-clay modified asphalt binder and performance testing of HMA specimens containing nano-clay modified asphalt binder.

Silicon nitride is becoming established as an important nanophotonic platform because of its compatibility with CMOS fabrication and its substantially broader spectral transparency range compared to silicon. Silicon nitride allows CMOS integrated photonics to break into new application areas, in particular sensing in the visible and mid-IR spectral ranges, quantum photonics and nonlinear optics. However, silicon nitride poses some fundamental challenges. The high index contrast, which allows device miniaturization, causes significant optical scattering losses, mode size disparity between optical fiber and on-chip waveguides results in high coupling losses, and fabrication tolerances are tight, making manufacturing yield a major concern. Subwavelength engineering was successfully used to overcome similar challenges in silicon waveguides and we believe that this strategy can also be advantageously implemented in the silicon nitride platform, which has not yet been done. In this proposed New Beginnings project, the benefits of subwavelength metamaterial engineering for the emerging nitride nanophotonic platform will be demonstrated. This can result in major advances in state-of-the-art silicon nitride integrated devices, including new photonic sensors, next generation quantum communications chips and on-chip optical amplifiers for telecom applications.