News Articles
CFI Invests $1M at U of G
Eight projects receive support from Leaders Opportunity Fund
BY LORI BONA HUNT
The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) invested more than $1 million in research at U of G in December. In total, the CFI announced $59 million in support for 262 projects at 40 Canadian institutions.
The eight Guelph projects receiving support range from advancing understanding about cancer to preventing violence against women.
“At U of G, our focus is on finding real solutions to real-life issues,” says Prof. Kevin Hall, vice-president (research). “This CFI support will provide the equipment and technology that are vital to our researchers’ ability to leverage their work into new knowledge and applications. It will also help train the next generation of innovators, attract new leading researchers and enrich the possibilities already available at Guelph.”
The U of G projects are being supported by the CFI’s Leaders Opportunity Fund (LOF), which was created to allow Canadian universities to attract and retain leading faculty and researchers.
“I’m thrilled,” says psychology professor Paula Barata, who received $85,460 to create a social psychology research facility where she’ll study the psychosocial factors that inhibit health promotion behaviour. “Obviously this will help me follow through with my research program.”
Barata will use both qualitative and quantitative methods to better understand women’s perspectives on programs designed to prevent violence against women and cervical cancer, specifically HPV testing, self-sampling and the HPV vaccine. The goal is to develop and evaluate intervention strategies to increase participation in cervical cancer prevention programs and help prevent violence against women.
Prof. Frederic Laberge, Integrative Biology, will use his $124,571 grant to create an integrative neurophysiology laboratory where he will study the physiology and anatomy of the central nervous system of selected amphibian species.
“My work in Guelph so far has consisted mostly of behavioural investigations,” he says. “This award will enable expansion to the study of the physiology of the nervous system. It will modernize our methods and enable an integrative approach to the study of the brain.”
His long-term goal is to describe the essential features of the brain that are involved in the control of behaviour in vertebrates.
Pathobiology professor Geoff Wood plans to buy cutting-edge tools to study genes involved in cancer across multiple species with his $117,954 award. He hopes to ultimately discover genes and signalling pathways that are important for cancer development and progression.
“This equipment will be vital for conducting the kind of research that takes full advantage of the great sample resources in our department,” says Wood. He adds that it will have a big impact on the type of sample analysis he conducts in the future.
“Analyzing hundreds of tissue samples at once or many dozens of proteins in one drop of serum will allow for more robust data, as well as save time and reagents.”
Other LOF projects and the lead researchers are:
- Prof. Cortland Griswold, Integrative Biology, $126,866 for a high-performance computer facility to support research on multivariate trait variation evolution.
- Prof. Claire Jardine, Pathobiology, $87,609 to support ecological studies of zoonotic diseases in wildlife reservoirs.
- Prof. Dmitriy Soldatov, Chemistry, $165,694 for a single-crystal X-ray diffractometer that will enable structural characterization of crystalline samples down to atomic resolution.
- Prof. Merritt Turetsky, Integrative Biology, $176,453 for an ecosystem analysis laboratory to evaluate the effects of climate change and disturbances on boreal ecosystems.
- Prof. Sarah Wootton, Pathobiology, $120,711 for infrastructure to study oncogenic betaretroviruses to further understand how similar malignancies develop in humans and animals.