Members in the News – Summer and Fall 2019
October 30th, 2019
Significant funding announcements, research licenses and new centres; Springboard Atlantic had an excellent quarter.
One important piece of news that benefits the entire network was announced at the end of August when ACOA said it will refund Springboard, giving our organization another three-year runway. Springboard will receive $9.6 million from the government along with a matching contribution of $5.1 million from out members.
This quarter saw even more funding news at the University of Prince Edward Island’s Atlantic Veterinary College, Memorial University and Acadia.
UPEI’s AVC received $1.3 million in federal funding to expand on research projects that will benefit the dairy industry. Meanwhile, entrepreneurship programs at Memorial University and Acadia received provincial ACOA grants totaling to almost $1.9 million.
The grants will be used to fund Memorial’s Centre or Entrepreneurship (MCE), while at Acadia it will go towards the LaunchBox, a new entrepreneurship “sandbox” at the University.
Aqualitas, a cannabis company in Windsor Nova Scotia, entered the European cannabis market. This article covered that story and gave a particular shout out to our organization, acknowledging the researchers at Dalhousie and Acadia that they were connected with via the Springboard network.
It said:
“The organization benefits from the powerful relationship it shared with Springboard Atlantic, which represents 19 member universities in the Atlantic Canada.
It has established deep rooted, strong collaborative research partnerships with two of Springboard’s members, Dalhousie (Halifax, Nova Scotia) and Acadia (Wolfville, Nova Scotia) universities, to build a method of producing organic cannabis with minimal environment damage, and to develop sustainable products.”
Huddle wrote an excellent piece on our friends over at the Collège Communautaire du Nouveau-Brunswick and the institutions advanced manufacturing capabilities. The article covers the local impact of CCNB-INNOV’s Applied Research Network and it’s ability to assist the manufacturing sector with specialized technical assistance on business or production challenges.
Canutra Naturals Ltd, a cannabis-based natural products company in British Columbia was awarded its cannabis research licence, which means it can continue the development of its proprietary cannabis genetics and phenotypes at its flagship 76-acre campus in Kent County, New Brunswick, with the Université de Moncton as its research and development partner.
Innovative food chemistry research on the StFX campus received a boost with the news that human nutrition professor, Dr. Marcia English at St.FX, will receive nearly $200,000 in research funds to continue her innovative food chemistry research.
The funding will be used to purchase research equipment for her project entitled, “Food Chemistry Research Platform for Investigating Aroma-active Compound Interactions in Plant-based Proteins.” She has also received $88,626 in matching funds from Research Nova Scotia.
The Nova Scotia Government awarded $300,000 to Université Sainte-Anne professors, Karine Pedneault and Gustavo Leite to develop a winemaking research laboratory. This will include a wine making room, fermentation rooms and refrigerated storage rooms.
The New Brunswick Community College’s (NBCC) Centre for Applied Research in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing is aiming to open a lab that will support the region’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by boosting the provinces web-design and UX capabilities.
To execute this project, NBCC was awarded a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) toward equipment to begin Phase 1 of the lab.
And three new research centres were unveiled at Memorial University, UPEI and the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC).
UPEI received $18.5 million to build the new Canadian Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation. The university will be home to a new 45,000-square-foot facility that will be a centre for research, and support UPEI’s Bachelor of Science in applied climate change and adaptation as well as proposed master’s program.
Memorial University is establishing a new Harsh Environment Research Facility (HERF) to strengthen the region’s infrastructure and expertise in technologies operating in harsh environments, such as the ocean, energy, shipping, and aerospace sectors.
And finally, NSCC has officially launched its Sensing, Engineering and Analytics-Technology Access Centre (SEA-TAC) thanks to a 1.75 million investment from the Government of Canada.