The Queen’s projects were funded through the Small Infrastructure program of the ORF. This helps to cover the costs of acquiring research experiments such as specimens, scientific collections, computer software, and information databases. It provides matching funds with the John R. Evans Leaders Fund through the Canada Foundation for Innovation which aims to secure infrastructure needed to support outstanding research.

Learn more about the Queen’s-funded projects:

Kristine Spekkens (Canada Research Chair in Gas-Rich Galaxy Structure) – Atomic Gas in Galaxies as a Cosmological Probe – $250,000

• This project will build a new research lab at Queen’s to analyse radio telescope data with custom-built software. It will piece together how galaxies form and evolve within the cosmological model that describes the history of the universe itself, further building excellence in astronomy in Ontario.

Emily Oby (Canada Research Chair in Non-Human Primate Models of Health and Disease) – NHP Models of Health and Disease – $200,000

• This research uses multi-electrode recordings and a population-level view of neural activity to explore the neural mechanisms of motor control and learning. Understanding these neural mechanisms enables the acceleration of learning or developing rehabilitation strategies following neurological impairments.

Mariam Guizani (Electrical and Computer Engineering) – Towards Sustainable Open Source Software and Developer Productivity – $187,741

• This project uses recent advances in AI to dismantle Open-Source barriers to entry, especially for underrepresented groups, to understand developer productivity and wellbeing and develop tools that help maintain healthy productivity levels in the face of accelerating technological change.

Akihiro Nakamura (Medicine – Rheumatology) – Investigation of Biomarkers and Novel Therapeutic Targets in Spondyloarthritis – $142,460

• This research program, QURE-SPA, at Queen’s is studying Spondyloarthritis (SpA), a common arthritis affecting up to 1.4 per cent of Canadians. It seeks novel therapies and new biomarkers that predict treatment response, reducing healthcare costs and strengthening Canada’s leadership in rheumatology research.

Jianbing Ni (Canada Research Chair in Intelligent System Security and Privacy) – A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Edge Catching Framework in Next-Generation Mobile Networks – $125,000

• This project aims to build a secure, privacy-preserving, and trustful edge-caching framework, including privacy-preserving content placement, secure content delivery, and trustful content usage schemes, for next-generation mobile networks to prevent severe damage of potential cyber attacks on network access and information service.

Farzaneh Sadri (Canada Research Chair in Chemical Extraction of Critical Metals) – Technology Development for Chemical Extraction of Critical Metals – $125,000

• This research targets technical and environmental issues in chemical extraction and separation of critical metals. By advancing fundamental knowledge in hydrometallurgical processes, the central aim is to develop sustainable methods for recovering critical metals from resource materials.

Effie Pereira (Psychology) – Uncovering the Temporal Dynamics of Selective Attention – $119,200

• This project will use computer tasks, neurophysiological tools, and computational approaches to track how, when, and why our attention shifts between different information over time as a means of quantifying its impact on processing in the laboratory and across our real and digital worlds.

Sean Kauffman (Electrical and Computer Engineering) – Advanced Fault Detection for Software-Controlled Aerospace and Automotive Systems – $90,000

• This project will develop new methods to detect and mitigate disastrous errors in safety-critical automotive and aerospace software. It will develop cutting-edge techniques to learn mathematical models of running systems and use those models to automatically circumvent dangerous behaviour.

Lisa Butler (Canada Research Chair in Global Health Equity) – Global Health Equity – $30,000

This project will contribute to the establishment of a world-class lab called “The Global Health Equity Collaboratory,” dedicated to advancing transdisciplinary research in health equity and population health. Key project elements include fostering collaborative partnerships, developing innovative health interventions, and promoting equitable health outcomes.

For more information, visit the Ministry of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security website.