• Canada
• 2023 close

This research proposal aims to develop advanced power sources that can convert indoor light into electricity to operate electronic sensors for the internet of things (IoT) - an emerging trillion-dollar industry that impacts all human life. The proposed new technology is termed 'indoor photovoltaics'. The technology is based on current organic photovoltaics that can be made flexible, lightweight, rollable, semi-transparent and of different colours at an ultra-low dollar per-watt cost. Using new chemistry principles, photoactive materials design, device engineering, advanced printing and electrical connections, the project aims to deliver fully functional indoor power devices ready for market evaluation. The proposed concept is new and expected to have a broad impact on Canada's and the UK's energy, communication and manufacturing sectors. The proposed chemistries are unique and should lead to paradigm shifts in the view of molecular self-assembly of organic photoactive materials. The ability to fabricate fully printed devices and integrate them into circuits all at once is the key strength of this proposal and serves to immediately validate or invalidate specific materials and/or device designs to ensure objectives are met in a timely fashion. The development of prototypes at the University level enables faster innovations and will allow this technology to bridge the infamous "valley-of-death" laboratory to market transition. The iOPV technology embodies a new paradigm in photovoltaics fabrication using solution-processable materials that can be delivered under ambient conditions (much like ink printed on paper). The simple additive manufacturing process mitigates CO2 production by requiring significantly less energy than traditional lithography-based methods. In addition, the potential for large scale roll-to-roll processing requires only a small capital investment, allowing for localised manufacturing. Printing equipment can tremendously reduce human interaction and the labour required for mass production. Thus, this can promote cost-effective local manufacturing for electronic devices.

Insects are the little things that run the world (E.O. Wilson). With increasing recognition of the importance of insects as the dominant component of almost all ecosystems, there are growing concerns that insect biodiversity has declined globally, with serious consequences for the ecosystem services on which we all depend. Major gaps in knowledge limit progress in understanding the magnitude and direction of change, and hamper the design of solutions. Information about insects trends is highly fragmented, and time-series data is restricted and unrepresentative, both between different groups of insects (e.g. lepidoptera vs beetles vs flies) and between different regions. Critically, we lack primary data from the most biodiverse parts of the world. For example, insects help sustain tropical ecosystems that play a major role in regulating the global climate system and the hydrological cycle that delivers drinking water to millions of people. To date, progress in insect monitoring has been hampered by many technical challenges. Insects are estimated to comprise around 80% of all described species, making it impossible to sample their populations in a consistent way across regions and ecosystems. Automated sensors, deep learning and computer vision offer the best practical and cost-effective solution for more standardised monitoring of insects across the globe. Inter-disciplinary research teams are needed to meet this challenge. Our project is timely to help UK researchers to develop new international partnerships and networks to underpin the development of long-term and sustainable collaborations for this exciting, yet nascent, research field that spans engineering, computing and biology. There is a pressing need for new research networks and partnerships to maximize potential to revolutionise the scope and capacity for insect monitoring worldwide. We will open up this research field through four main activities: (a) interactive, online and face-to-face engagement between academic and practitioner stakeholders, including key policy-makers, via online webinars and at focused knowledge exchange and grant-writing workshops in Canada and Europe; (b) a knowledge exchange mission between the UK and North America, to share practical experience of building and deploying sensors, develop deep learning and computer vision for insects, and to build data analysis pipelines to support research applications; (c) a proof-of-concept field trial spanning the UK, Denmark, The Netherlands, Canada, USA and Panama. Testing automated sensors against traditional approaches in a range of situation; (d) dissemination of shared learning throughout this project and wider initiatives, building a new community of practice with a shared vision for automated insect monitoring technology to meet its worldwide transformational potential. Together, these activities will make a significant contribution to the broader, long-term goal of delivering the urgent need for a practical solution to monitor insects anywhere in the world, to ultimately support a more comprehensive assessment of the patterns and consequences of insect declines, and impact of interventions. By building international partnerships and research networks we will develop sustainable collaborations to address how to quantify the complexities of insect dynamics and trends in response to multiple drivers, and evaluate the ecological and human-linked causes and consequences of the changes. Crucially, this project is a vital stepping-stone to help identify solutions for addressing the global biodiversity crisis as well as research to understand the biological impacts of climate change and to design solutions for sustainable agriculture. Effective insect monitoring underpins the evaluation of future socio-economic, land-use and climate mitigation policies.

euCanSHare will develop the first centralised, secure and sustainable platform for enhanced cross-border data sharing and multi-cohort personalised medicine research in cardiology. At its heart, the platform will contain the most comprehensive cardiovascular data catalogue ever assembled, which will facilitate data discoverability and exploitation in full alignment with the FAIR principles. The project will implement the interoperability of currently fragmented yet mature IT solutions developed by the consortium members for generating a comprehensive multi-functionality platform. It will also integrate major cardiovascular data sources from Europe and Canada, including the renowned MORGAM, BiomarCaRE and CAHHM initiatives. euCanSHare’s legal framework will be built through detailed ethical and legal interoperability analysis, while investigating innovative solutions for promoting responsible Open Science based on the emerging blockchain technology. Initially populated with 35 European and Canadian cohorts (corresponding to about one million records), the platform will provide extensive functionalities, including for data deposition, data harmonisation and quality control, which will support the integration of new cohorts beyond the duration of the project, thus ensuring its scalability. Moreover, sustainability will be targeted by leveraging through our multi-disciplinary partners the most established data infrastructures, namely ELIXIR, EGA, BBMRI and euro-BioImaging in Europe, as well as Maelstrom from Canada. The unique features of the platform will be demonstrated and adjusted through several use cases, including for biomarker validation, knowledge discovery, cardiovascular risk assessment, public health research and industry-driven studies. Furthermore, intensive outreach campaigns and hands-on workshops will be organised to attract a range of stakeholders, data providers and end-users from the academic, public health and industrial sectors.

MRC : Lydia Daniels Gatward : MR/N013700/1 Diabetes is a disease affecting around 10% of the population which is caused by an inability to regulate blood glucose levels. Sex differences exist in diabetes; men have increased incidence of type 2 diabetes compared to women, an effect which is lost after the menopause. Blood glucose levels are normally tightly controlled by insulin release from beta cells in the pancreas, a process which involves calcium signalling. Dysregulated calcium signalling in these cells disrupts insulin release and has been associated with the development of diabetes. Considering the sex differences in diabetes and findings that other tissues show sex differences in calcium handling, we want to investigate whether sex differences exist in calcium handling in beta cells. To do this, we plan to use state-of-the-art imaging technology to study calcium signalling in two of the main calcium storage compartments in beta cells isolated from non-diabetic and diabetic male and female mice. Understanding these pathways in more detail could help determine whether the sex of the patient should be more carefully considered when choosing treatments for diabetes.

The project examines social innovation initiatives in the field of inequality carried out by actors within multinational companies interacting with civil society and government actors in different industrial, community and national contexts. It focuses on three developed economies (Canada, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) and two emerging economies (Brazil and Mexico). The multidisciplinary research team in these countries will investigate the different types of social activists who stimulate, disseminate and sustain social innovations, the resources and social skills they deploy, and the impact they have across national institutions.

MRC : Erik Igelström : MC_UU_00022/2 People who live in countries with low inequality (where the gap between the rich and the poor is small) tend to be healthier on average. Countries with low inequality (like Finland and Denmark) also tend to have a lot of social mobility across generations. In other words, people's chances of success don't depend on how well off their parents were. But this isn't always the case. For example, Canada has high social mobility, but also high inequality. We don't know much about how these two factors work together to affect health: Does Canada's high social mobility compensate for the negative impact of high inequality? To help understand this, I will compare parts of Canada, and look at whether inequality seems to matter less when there is a lot of social mobility. To do this, I will first need to calculate the amount of social mobility in different metropolitan areas. To make studies like this easier in the future, I will make the social mobility data available to other researchers.

Planet Earth faces unprecedented environmental changes that will affect all members of society. Arctic climate warming is more than twice the global rate and unpredictable extreme events cause major impacts on ecosystems and people. However, the Arctic atmospheric circulation causes extreme events and societal damage beyond the Arctic which need international research and monitoring to understand and predict. Furthermore, attitudes need to be changed throughout the world through outreach while the next generation needs to be equipped to live in a different world. INTERACT III innovates a pan-arctic network of 86 research stations in 16 northern countries to provide a fully integrated, advanced infrastructure now able to meaningfully address major societal challenges and provide services for 155 global and regional networks. Furthermore, the global reputation of INTERACT has attracted world-leading partners and enterprises to participate in reducing the impacts of hazardous change while maximizing the opportunities arising from new technologies. Specifically, INTERACT III provides comprehensive coordination of 64 partners and 86 research stations. The station managers design best practices to ensure excellent research, monitoring, education and outreach. INTERACT III builds on an extremely successful transnational access program that has already populated the Arctic with 900 researchers to further provide excellent science while reducing the environmental footprints of researchers through improving remote and virtual access. The access transnationality ensures new collaborations, innovative science and science diplomacy at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. Station managers, transnational access and joint research activities cooperate to address major societal challenges in a fully integrated infrastructure while their data and understanding are made globally available through exceptional outreach and education and policy briefings to decision makers.

Most human activity in the Arctic takes place along permafrost coasts, making them a key interface. They have become one of the most dynamic ecosystems on Earth because permafrost thaw is now exposing these coasts to rapid change: change that threatens the rich biodiversity, puts pressure on communities that live there and contributes to the vulnerability of the global climate system. NUNATARYUK will determine the impacts of thawing coastal and subsea permafrost on the global climate, and will develop targeted and co-designed adaptation and mitigation strategies for the Arctic coastal population. NUNATARYUK brings together world-leading specialists in natural science and socio-economics to: (1) develop quantitative understanding of the fluxes and fates of organic matter released from thawing coastal and subsea permafrost; (2) assess what risks are posed by thawing coastal permafrost, to infrastructure, indigenous and local communities and people’s health, and from pollution; (3) use this understanding to estimate the long-term impacts of permafrost thaw on global climate and the economy. NUNATARYUK will be guided by a Stakeholders’ Forum of representatives from Arctic coastal communities and indigenous societies, creating a legacy of collaborative community involvement and a mechanism for developing and applying innovative evidence-based interventions to enable the sustainable development of the Arctic.