Award Recipients: 2021 Innovative Approaches to Research in the Pandemic Context

Problem: Clinical trial participation offers various benefits to patients and society. Yet, fewer than 10% of patients are recruited into trials, mainly due to challenges matching diagnostics with trial eligibility criteria, especially for acute conditions like stroke, MI or trauma. Current strategies involve engaging frontline clinicians and hiring research personnel to screen patients. However, clinicians are too busy to routinely screen patients for various trials. Many eligible patients are never recruited, especially if seen after-hours or at smaller non-academic centres. These inequities in research resources and access to trials especially disadvantage rural, Indigenous, and low-SES patients. These issues have been magnified by the pandemic, which has severely restricted hospital access for research personnel, drastically reducing acute trial recruitment.

Research Approach: The key to efficient trial recruitment for acute conditions like stroke, is rapid interpretation of clinical and diagnostic (imaging/lab) data, screening patients against eligibility criteria and flagging potential matches. We seek to test Artificial Intelligence-based algorithms that can automatically and rapidly interpret clinical and imaging data of patients with acute conditions, and instantly e-notify frontline clinicians and research personnel of patients who may qualify for specific trials. 

Objectives: This proof-of-concept study will focus on acute stroke first. We aim to evaluate a) feasibility, b) usability and c) accuracy of a custom-built automated clinical trial recruitment solution in patients with acute stroke presenting to select tertiary and primary stroke centres (smaller, more rural hospitals) across Canada.

The study will use a stepped wedge design for site deployment and a mixed methods approach. Standard quantitative methods will be used to assess feasibility of deployment using metrics like time to notification, potential recruitment rates, and accuracy in identifying patients for ongoing trials. Qualitative methods (interviews, focus groups and surveys) involving clinicians and patients/families will be used to understand usability and impact.

Significance: By automatically screening patients for acute clinical trials, we will flip the conventional paradigm of manually intense, inequitable and inefficient physician-driven recruitment in favour of a more inclusive process that reduces hurdles to access trials, no matter where patients first present.

Unprecedented warming in the North threatens microbial communities, which dominate Arctic ecosystems. These unique microbial assemblages (environmental microbiomes) form the base of food webs and are critical to ecosystem function, and it is unclear what their fate may be, with warming projected to further accelerate at high latitudes. Changes in microbial communities may also impact the quality of resources collected on the land by Indigenous communities in the North, including drinking water or lake ice. It is therefore critical to actively monitor changes in polar microbial communities and to understand their role in thawing Arctic landscapes.

Microbial ecology studies are dependent on field sampling, which is typically restricted to summer due to logistical constraints: this means little data is available on microbial processes and dynamics during the rest of the year. Furthermore, travel to the North was completely halted over the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to the loss of critical data in these rapidly changing times. While collaborations exist between academics from Southern Canada and Indigenous researchers based in the North, resources are not readily available in Arctic communities to perform sampling. There is a dire need to reinforce scientific partnerships not only by making training and infrastructure available, but also by creating space for co-construction and knowledge sharing.

Building on our team's 20 years of collaboration with the hamlet of Resolute Bay (Nunavut), we propose to perform a year-round survey of environmental microbiomes, using genomic approaches, by working with and training local personnel and establishing appropriate facilities. Our specific goals are to: 1) follow seasonal changes in the microbial ecology of lake ice, which is used for travelling and as a source of drinking water in the North, especially in the poorly studied ice-off and ice forming periods; 2) identify seasonal tipping points in the aquatic microbiomes of lakes that are used for fishing and for drinking water practices; and 3) measure the response of microbial biofilms, which are hot spots of biological activity in the Arctic, to seasonal variations in nutrients and precipitation.

This project will generate new data on threatened microbiome diversity in the Arctic, identify new research avenues, and allow for training and capacity-building in the North, strengthening partnerships with our Inuit colleagues in Resolute Bay.

The research examines the effectiveness and impacts of innovative community- and youth-led approaches to collect and analyze qualitative data in a pandemic context in Mali and Senegal. The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged the ability of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and researchers to assess the impacts of community-based projects and to carry out qualitative research. However, the pandemic context has also generated new ideas for remote data collection methods, led by communities and project 'beneficiaries', such as photovoice, photo-journaling, digital storytelling, and community mapping. While some of these methods have been used by development INGOs as `add-ons' to standard, expert-driven evaluations and research studies, the abilities of marginalized groups, particularly girls, to drive and lead data collection, analysis, and dissemination have remained limited. This research will test the use of highly participatory, interactive approaches for qualitative data collection that can be used in and out of a pandemic context by adolescent girls. This research is a collaboration between the University of the Fraser Valley and the Canadian INGO, Right to Play. The objectives of the research are: i) to assess the effectiveness of using community- and youth-led approaches to collect and analyze qualitative data in Mali and Senegal; and ii) to understand the potential for these approaches to support the `empowerment' of marginalized groups with intersecting inequalities, by increasing their agency, voice, and decision-making abilities. Right to Play field staff in Mali and Senegal will identify adolescent girls from existing projects as research participants. The selected girls will engage in small community-based workshops (with adherence to Covid-19 restrictions) to identify areas of study, and to learn about and adapt several innovative data collection methods. Provided with journals, audio recorders, and digital cameras, they will document their views and experiences in their communities, while attending regular check-in workshops. The adolescent girls will also reflect upon and share their findings in small groups in their own communities, with families, school actors, community leaders, and other stakeholders. The PI at UFV and collaborators at Right to Play will rely on the girls' data and analyses to assess the effectiveness of the approaches as well as their potential to contribute to the empowerment of research participants.   

There is huge effort to develop novel interventions to treat major mental disorders (MMDs) since most remain severely disabling lifelong illnesses despite the most up-to-date treatments. Recent very promising advances include non-invasive neuromodulation with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to treat patients with the most severe forms of MMDs. For instance, Health Canada approved rTMS to treat those who suffer from major depressive disorders and have been refractory to usual treatments including one of the most effective, namely the combination of psychotherapy and medication.

Research on rTMS in humans around the globe completely stopped during the pandemic due to COVID-19 related restrictions. Further, although these restrictions have been lessened, it is hard to recruit individuals who suffer from MMDs to participate in research because of the complications (e.g. personal protective equipment) and fear related to COVID-19. This is particularly challenging for rTMS research because, in order to test for and induce lasting clinical benefits, protocols require patients to undergo several consecutive rTMS sessions (e.g. daily sessions over a 4 to 6-week period, that is the Health Canada approved rTMS treatment for depression), which is not fully safe during a pandemic and not possible during confinement. On the other hand, it is also important to mention that the mechanisms underlying rTMS remain more hypothesized than clearly established.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been searching for ways to pursue rTMS research. The goal of this project is to further elucidate the mechanisms underlying rTMS in order to make it evolve into a therapeutical approach that will be more effective and compatible with the requirements of the pandemic (particularly in regard to the treatment duration, number of sessions) in treating MMDs. To this end, we will study the mechanisms of rTMS using a methodology combining cultured neural networks of patients and their at-risk children obtained by neurodifferentiation from iPSCs with advanced neurophotonics techniques (very high resolution non-invasive multimodal microscopy) that we have been developing for many years. Knowing that each of these cultured neural networks has the genetic background of the individual from which it originates, this project also paves the way to develop an rTMS tool for personalized medicine with a prevention component when considering high-risk children.

COVID-19 encouraged us to reimagine an in-person project exploring art, archiving, and activism with 2SLGBTQ+ youth as a distanced endeavor. Using the mail to deliver supplies and engaging participants on Zoom and social media, we successfully engaged 50 2SLGBTQ+ Atlantic Canadian youth in a participatory visual research project held amidst the Pandemic (https://prideswell.org). We seek to extend our methodological innovations to explore opportunities for building intergenerational knowledge networks between 2SLGBTQ+ elders and youth in Atlantic Canada. We will catalyze broader public participation in understanding 2SLGBTQ+ youth- and elder-led activism through art production and intergenerational distanced, tech-enabled sharing.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has been particularly isolating for 2SLGBTQ+ elders and youth living under lockdowns and in remote communities. We seek to highlight how the production, sharing, and archiving of 2SLGBTQ+ youth- and elder-produced art adds to methodological discussions of exhibiting and digital archiving as a form of activist intervention and solidarity building within a contemporary moment marked by isolation and a lack of intergenerational connections within 2SLGBTQ+ communities.

By reflexively examining the co-curation of elder- and youth-produced art through social media and exhibitions in community spaces, we argue that co-producing digital archives is an important part of knowledge mobilization. We consider how a broader, intergenerational public can interact with the co-produced archives and seek to understand both the benefits and challenges this type of engagement presents to our understandings of 2SLGBTQ+ art, archives, and activism.

Engaging in participatory visual research through the mail is an original contribution to scholarly understandings of participation in virtual and distance-based projects. We propose that participant collaboration and control of the processes and outputs of digital archives contributes to understandings of elders' and young people's capacity to take ownership of these spaces. These participant-centred strategies make visible ways that DIY art-activism and solidarity-building through archiving can be made more accessible for and with communities who are socially and geographically marginalized or otherwise excluded from archival processes.

The Blanding's turtle is a semi-aquatic freshwater turtle native to central and eastern Canada and is listed as endangered in Canada.  The Great Lakes/St. Lawrence population has declined by 60% over three generations because of habitat loss and fragmentation in southern Ontario and southwestern Quebec, and the population will continue to decline 50% over the next three generations because of road mortality alone. These findings are based primarily on studies carried out on populations in southern Ontario, even though there are known populations occurring in eastern and northern Georgian Bay (GB). Lack of proper studies on GB populations compromises the ability of agencies to develop effective recovery strategies for this region because the undeveloped Precambrian Shield bedrock with tens of thousands of islands along the shore is such a contrast to the highly modified/developed landscape of southern Ontario. Habitats for Blanding's are very site-specific and no study has shown that results from southern Ontario can be extrapolated directly to GB. One reason that GB is poorly studied is because turtles live on islands or in areas that can only be accessed by boat, and it is challenging to reach them to monitor their movements using conventional tracking devices. Another reason is because turtles in this region have large home ranges that include public lands, as well as those owned by First Nations (FN), private cottagers, nature reserves and land trusts. To successfully track such populations requires collaboration from all land owners who can provide local knowledge of where turtles are found and to assist with tracking when academics are unable to go on their land, as was the case during COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021. We propose a new ecosystem approach to map Blanding's turtle habitat involving academics, FN and cottagers at all stages of the study, including field tracking and data collection by FN youth interns and cottage volunteers. We will use novel GPS-enabled tracking devices and as-yet field tested methods to confirm turtle occupancy using environmental DNA samples. The novelty and benefit of this strategy is that all stakeholders are involved at the beginning so that proposed remedial measures are more likely to be implemented upon completion of studies.  If successful, such a novel partnership in conservation will ensure long-term protection of turtles in these remote areas even if access becomes interrupted again in future pandemics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has gravely impacted the health, well-being and safety of older Canadians. Socially assistive robots (SARs) can be used to help mitigate the effects of the pandemic including loneliness and isolation, and to alleviate the workload of both formal/informal caregivers. Our research program develops intelligent SARs to aid with activities of daily living and cognitive interventions for residents of long-term care (LTC), including those living with dementia. With the advent of the pandemic, opportunities for social relationships, especially for older adults, have decreased substantially. Social isolation and loneliness have spiked, representing a major determinant of health, including increased risk of premature death. The prevalence of loneliness among older adults living in LTC is double that of those living in communities. During the pandemic, to meet public health guidelines, residents have been isolated from visitors/family, and group activities and communal dining have halted. These restrictions included our researchers and others conducting crucial human-robot interaction (HRI) studies with robots and vulnerable residents in LTC settings. Assistive HRI research is complex and requires obtaining needed training data for SAR development. In particular, large datasets are needed for robot learning during HRI in order to 1) perceive human activity and 2) respond appropriately using multi-modal assistive behaviours. The global pandemic offers a unique opportunity to design new HRI Research Methodologies and Pilot Studies to train and implement these novel intelligent robots, especially during this pivotal time. As we no longer can obtain crucial face-to-face interaction data in real settings; the proposed research aims to develop unique remote capabilities for SARs (residents and robots physically remote from each other but still interacting) to continue to engage seniors in daily stimulating interactions while learning to personalize assistive behaviours from their intended users. We see lasting impacts of this novel research methodology: 1) continued development of robot aids for our vulnerable population, bringing the technology forward without delay, and 2) sustained interactions of residents with SARs during the ongoing pandemic to combat loneliness/social-isolation, and improve physical/cognitive health. This research will uniquely investigate the efficacy of remote HRI and its potential to reach more LTC homes than ever before.

Wastewater surveillance (WWS) of SARS-CoV-2 has been used as an early warning mechanism for informing public health decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research team developed a passive sampling approach for WWS of SARS-CoV-2 using a 3D-printed COVID-19 Sewer Cage (COSCa) that suspends a filter in wastewater to capture high spatial resolution of viral occurrence within communities. Over 100 COSCas are deployed in sewersheds across Canada, the UK and Australia, and results have demonstrated more reliable SARS-CoV-2 detection when compared to conventional sampling approaches. For over a decade our team has developed a strong relationship with First Nations communities surrounding water management and directly contributed to the formation of the Atlantic First Nations Water Authority (AFNWA). The AFNWA and its member communities are preparing to implement the COSCa technology and have identified interest in monitoring other viruses of concern and developing a community health participatory approach to responding to viral detection. This project aims to address these calls to participate in WWS by building upon our state-of-the-art passive sampling approach in the following ways: (1) develop a multiplexed approach to detect other wastewater viruses using the current filter application; (2) create a new multiplex hydrogel system for more rapid and simplified detection of SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens of concern; and (3) co-develop participatory Indigenous public health responses with AFNWA and its member communities using the COSCa approach. Pictou Landing First Nation is working with the team to develop appropriate Band Council Resolutions that will foster the research provided appropriate data management protocols align with OCAP principles. This research will develop advanced capture and elution methods aimed at multiplexing virus detection through a simplified analytical procedure. The development of surface-activated hydrogels marks a paradigm shift in WWS that employs biochemical surface modification of an adsorptive matrix to capture SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens resulting in next generational virus detection technology. By simplifying detection processes, this work will facilitate participation in WWS for widespread use by water and public health professionals. This innovative research will be highly disruptive as it will empower community leaders to make decisions with their own data and be proactive in anticipating potential health concerns.

Variations in the early-life environment, beginning before birth, can effect physiological and brain development to impact health and well-being across the lifespan. Therefore, many studies on child development seek to quantify biological indicators of early-life exposures, or, more recently, the exposome-the totality of exposures from conception onward. Traditionally, this involves in-person collection of biological samples, which requires lengthy prospective studies and are a challenge to complete due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, there is urgent need for methods to retrospectively characterize early-life exposures using remote data/sample collection procedures. The goal of this study is to develop an integrated, innovative platform for retrospectively quantifying the prenatal and early childhood exposome using deciduous (primary) teeth.

Human teeth begin developing in the 2nd trimester of pregnancy and begin to shed around age 6. Teeth are unique relative to other biospecimens; as they grow teeth keep permanent and fossilized records of both the intensity and timing of prenatal and early childhood exposures occurring during their formation, including chemicals/molecules circulating in the blood. Our group has begun to develop an integrated platform to characterize the primary tooth exposome by measuring lead and other metals, exogenous and endogenous metabolites, as well as cortisol and DNA methylation (DNAm)-well-studied biological indicators of early life stress/exposures. Now, using primary teeth collected remotely, we will: 1) develop the methods for assessing the tooth exposome, including a) refining the temporal resolution to determine the timing of exposure using tooth growth marks, b) comparing levels in dentin vs. enamel, c) as well as in different teeth types (incisors, canines, molars) and 2) determine how chemical/molecular assessments relate to the more well-characterized structural anomalies in teeth associated with early life stress, for example, accentuated growth lines.

The methods for assessing primary tooth metals and metabolites have not yet been developed in Canada and for primary tooth cortisol or DNAm have not yet been developed anywhere in the world. These tooth biomarkers will be used to understand the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and other large-scale events, such as wildfires. This platform will also enable us to reach those often underrepresented in research, such as those living in rural or remote areas.

Objectives

In 2019, the British Columbia's (B.C.) government appointed Austin Cullen, a B.C. Supreme Court justice, to conduct an independent public inquiry into money laundering in the province's real estate, luxury vehicle, and gaming sectors. After listening to the testimonies of 200 witnesses, the inquiry will wrap up in December of 2021.  The objectives of the proposed research are twofold: (1) to understand the sentiments of the witnesses towards anti-money laundering practices in B.C. real estate, luxury vehicle, and gaming sectors; and (2) to analyze the polarity and factuality of Twitter data regarding the witness testimonies. Given the rapidly changing COVID-19 pandemic, this research is time-sensitive, and I will endeavour to pursue the project from January-December, 2022.

Research Approach

Initially, the plan was to conduct in situ discussions with key personnel from the real estate industry and field research in the casinos and luxury car dealerships in B.C. However, COVID-19 put an abrupt end to the planned research activities. To substitute field research, I plan to employ Deep Learning Methodology (DLM) to conduct emotional and sentiment analyses of the witnesses' testimonies in the Cullen Commission's ("Commission") inquiry using natural language processing (NLP). NLP techniques will be used to build a Convolutional Neural Network classification model to analyze discrete emotions of the witnesses' testimonies to the Commission. To examine the polarity and factuality of the Twitter data, I plan to use machine learning algorithms to explore the sentiments the public shares towards the witnesses' testimonies.

Novelty and Significance

DLM is a machine learning approach that performs classification tasks directly from images, sounds, and texts. DLM success relies heavily on computational resources to process large amounts of data. As the input data increases, the amount of computational resources (time, memory, storage space, and costs) to clean, process, and analyze the unstructured data increases.  The increase in model complexity amplifies the risks in DLM and can lead to model failure owing to flawed methodology and the statistical methods used. On the other hand, DLM can exploit large volumes of multimodal data and, if successful, can lead to high rewards for qualitative researchers. Complementary DLM and subject expertise can advance current research methods and enhance the usefulness of NLP in Qualitative research.

Overview: Infectious diseases cause some of the most pressing challenges faced by humanity today. Along with the social and economic turbulence, it highlights the importance of pandemic preparedness, including the development of new ways of doing research in a pandemic context. The 20th century was marked by major achievements in quelling infectious disease via sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics. Unfortunately, many of these achievements have been undermined by antimicrobial resistance (AMR) mechanisms that facilitate the emergence of drug-resistant microbes. This proposal will address an outstanding need for rapid tests to detect AMR infections. We will harness the power of CRISPR genome editing to create consortia of bacteriophages with barcoded genomes that will be used to monitor the emergence of AMR infections. Following validation, we will use this approach as the basis for a new point-of-care AMR detection tool.

There are two specific aims for this proposal.

Aim 1. To create a consortium of phages for multiplexing detection of drug-resistant bacterial pathogens. We will first isolate wild bacteriophage that infect high-priority AMR bacteria and sequence their complete genomes by high-throughput sequencing (HTS). Once we modify these phages with unique genetic barcodes via CRISPR genome editing, pilot experiments will be performed to identify phage that only infect and kill a microbe once it has required AMR. Once these phage biosensors have been established, they will be used in combination to allow AMR monitoring of complex microbial communities like those found in vivo.

Aim 2. To create a "portable" HTS surveillance system for early detection of AMR infections. We will establish low-cost detection suite consisting of an equipment-free DNA extraction and amplification protocol and a miniature version of the HTS platform, the nanopore minion. The efficiency and sensitivity of detecting AMR pathogens from clinical samples will be examined and optimized.

Impacts: this pandemic-inspired emergency solution project holds the potential to revolutionize AMR surveillance by creating a novel point-of-care detection tool and enabling this community-based system to function under pandemic restrictions. The detection platform developed in this project is low cost, making it an ideal tool in resource-limited regions in the world.

COVID-19 has had clear disruptive effects on global film festivals, with postponed editions and cancellations. Yet, it has also fostered a reflexive environment where problematic hierarchical issues have become productively salient. This project proposes a first step in the process of decolonizing film festival research by bringing together an international team of African film festival researchers to investigate methods to decolonize festival research. The team will design and trial an innovative and accessible two-part Decolonial Test, able to: 1) Identify potential unconscious bias in the research design itself; and 2) Develop a series of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion variables that can foster inclusive, dialogical and polycentric ways of knowledge production and dissemination which will in turn ensure ownership of the process for communities concerned.

There exists a range of tests to determine whether or not a film is feminist (Bechdel Test), but none to assess whether research on a festival can be considered as decolonizing. We are inspired by decolonial thinkers Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Bachir Diagne, who advocate for pluriversalisation of thought-a "rehabilitation of ancient and non-Western forms of economic and social organization, as well as the quest for new forms of solidarity between the various Souths." We will pioneer new directions in research methodologies, with direct application in film festival research and adaptation across related disciplines, such as creative industries and screen media studies. Our Decolonial Test offers a set of questions to guide the research process, from design to application, involving working multilingually, dialogically, innovatively and engaging in reciprocity practices, to define the kind of relationships forged at festivals that rely on mutual commitment. This test will foster important dialogue between researchers and practitioners of film festivals, first through the research itself and second, through pilot implementations across African film festivals in Brazil, Canada, Senegal, and the UK (Mostra de Cinemas Africanos de Brazil, African Movie Festival in Manitoba, Festival International du Film Documentaire de St-Louis, Dakar Court, Festival Films Femmes Afrique, and the TANO network composed of five UK-based African film festivals). Finally, the project will polish this test and identify strengths and limitations experienced throughout the process.

Cette recherche propose une méthode innovante reposant sur internet interactif (web app) pour explorer la façon dont les adolescents et jeunes adultes s'adaptent et se (re)construisent 2 ans après le début de la pandémie de la Covid-19, un événement potentiellement traumatique (Reger et al., 2020) engendrant un stress prolongé.

Les conséquences de la pandémie ont particulièrement touché les adolescents et jeunes adultes qui se trouvent à des périodes charnières de leur vie pour le développement de leur identité et l'établissement de repères stables à travers leurs relations avec un réseau social élargi, en dehors du cadre familial. Considérant que les mesures sanitaires de distanciation sociale ont entraîné des conditions à l'opposé de leurs besoins, les impacts négatifs de ces mesures chez les jeunes pourraient subsister. Il est maintenant essentiel de prendre en compte la santé mentale des adolescents et des jeunes adultes afin de mieux comprendre leur évolution post-pandémique.

Une méthode de recherche innovante et inusitée permettra de recueillir des témoignages vidéos fournis par les jeunes canadiens et canadiennes âgé.es de 14 à 25 ans sur une base régulière, sur une période d'un an. A partir de ces vidéos, une analyse automatisée de leurs émotions faciales permettra de suivre l'évolution de la valence émotionnelle à travers le temps. Des questionnaires adaptés aux sentiments rapportés par chacun des participant.es seront aussi colligés aux deux semaines à l'aide d'un site internet interactif bilingue (web app) où les participants auront un profil personnel. Des questionnaires aussi posées chaque deux semaines, afin de mesurer plus précisément les sentiments positifs et négatifs au fil du temps.

En plus d'être totalement en phase avec les façons dont les jeunes communiquent en 2021, cette méthode de recherche unique permet aux jeunes d'être actifs dans ce qu'ils veulent communiquer à l'équipe de recherche et à cette dernière d'adapter les questionnaires administrés en fonction de la détresse ou des situations qui se présentent. Dans le contexte pandémique, la communauté scientifique a dû réagir rapidement pour évaluer ses impacts sur les individus. Un site internet interactif sous forme de web app permet d'adapter les évaluations, a un grand potentiel de rendement pour les recherches dans le domaine psychosocial, en plus de permettre de rejoindre des communautés éloignées, difficilement joignables avec les méthodes habituelles de recherche.

Black and Indigenous communities experience mental health, service accessibility, and pandemic-related inequities (Fante-Coleman & Jackson-Best, 2020; SRCD, 2020; Public Health Ontario, 2020). Social-emotional capacities (e.g., emotion regulation, empathy) support mental health in minoritized children and families (Malti, 2020a). However, early years and child care (EYCC) programming in the Peel Region has not been adapted to the social-emotional and mental health needs of Black and Indigenous families, especially within pandemic confines. Our project will develop and test a community-led virtual training approach rooted in our decades-long research program (Malti, 2020b) for EYCC service providers to support Black and Indigenous children and families in Peel.

Our new community-led adaptation approach will involve Black and Indigenous community members and advisors at each stage. In year 1, we will conduct virtual interviews of 30 Black and Indigenous caregivers to understand the social-emotional and mental health strengths and needs of these communities. In collaboration with a panel of EYCC community advisors, we will then adapt our training based on thematic coding of these interviews. In year 2, we will conduct virtual focus groups of Black and Indigenous caregivers to further adapt the training. We will then deliver the training with community advisor co-facilitators to 100 EYCC service providers using a cutting-edge online learning management system. Findings will be published in scientific and policy outlets. Digital content (e.g., infographics, video clips) will be shared nationally and internationally through our social media networks and a digital hub website where stakeholders can connect, receive updates, and access knowledge and tools.

This project is high risk because there is no consensus on how to adapt efforts to meet the unique strengths and needs of different populations (Gardner, 2017). To ensure efficacy, our training must balance well-established, common training components with novel, specific components that incorporate community perspectives. This project is high reward because involving Black and Indigenous perspectives in all stages may identify specific mechanisms of flourishing in these populations. Also, in addition to transcending in-person pandemic restrictions, our virtual training transcends geographic boundaries, enabling scale-up to empower EYCC leaders locally and globally. 

The overarching aim of this project is to develop a non-invasive prophylactic therapy for SARS-CoV-2. We propose to employ the affinity between the cell receptor ACE2 and spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2 as a nasal formulation to be used as a prophylactic cure for the early symptoms of Covid19. The affinity between cell receptors and viruses has been validated, suggesting that it could potentially be therapeutically exploited. The purpose of the encapsulation is to prolong the release of recombinant ACE2 (rhACE2) by increasing nasal mucosal adhesion and increase the `active' residency time within the nose. Besides, preliminary results show that 20 micrograms per ml of rhACE2 remain stable when encapsulated by freeze spray drying and by using a formulation containing the 35, 52, and 13 of Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) with a molecular weight of 1300 kDa, D-mannitol, and L-leucine, respectively. Furthermore, we ensure that rhACE2 is not toxic on nasal cells; Calu-3 and BEAS-2B cell viability appeared to remain stable throughout a maximum concentration of rhACE2 protein of 50 mg/ml.

Self-administration makes nasal delivery non-invasive and easily accessible by patients without the need for hospitalization. The steps of this project are: measurement of the adhesion between virus' spike proteins and rhACE2, prediction of the optimal rhACE2 surface density to capture SARS-CoV-2 viral particles, cytotoxicity of rhACE2 and microparticles containing rhACE2, in-vitro and in-vivo determination of the location of the deposition, release rate, and drug's efficacy. A quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring and an atomic force microscope is used to determine the adhesion forces between receptor and spike proteins. A computational model is developed to predict the minimum drug dose, and thus to calculate the minimum required density of rhACE2 adhered to the mucus on the inner wall of the upper respiratory tract and to capture the virus.

To assess the potential cytotoxicity of the proposed new therapy two types of experiments will be performed:  in vitro using nasal epithelial cells and in vivo using a small animal (mice C5B1/6) model. The nasal deposition profile of the novel microparticle dry powder formulation will be assessed using a cascade impactor and RPMI 2650. In-vivo experiments involve 10 healthy mice (5 female and 5 male) and 10 mice (5 female and 5 male) infected with Covid19.

Results of this study will set stage for future clinical trials.

High quality research is central to Canada's COVID response, but fatal flaws and inefficiencies in core methodologies have been realized. Systematic reviews (SR), where knowledge is comprehensively synthesized, is considered the highest level of evidence.  SR methodology is problematic in a pandemic setting as question selection, protocol development, and  literature review, can  require years. COVID also disrupted how scientific communities engage (conference cancellation), partner with patients, and create teams for SR projects.

Immediately prior to COVID we initiated research evaluating whether SR completion could be accelerated by a community-based approach (crowdsourcing). Validation work replicating 6 SRs demonstrated feasibility to recruit individuals, with combined crowd assessment achieving 98-100% sensitivity and saving the team up to 80 % of work . To further evaluate and translate we developed an on-line software platform where projects are presented, community teams formed, and work completed. In recent pilot testing we have completed multiple large SRs (3000 to 25000 citations) by recruiting  teams of 10 to 30., with usual rate limiting steps (screening, data extraction) completed in days to weeks. Importantly, evaluation of participant feedback suggests the platform facilitates inclusion, gender balanced, geographically diverse teams who see value across multiple domains (educational, networking, scholarship, career advancement).

The proposed research has potential to reinvent how scientific communities work together, and can help replace the education, networking, and career advancement opportunities lost due to pandemic related cancellation of courses, conferences and lab-based opportunities (and augment post pandemic.) The primary risk is scientist willingness to adopt new research methodology and whether it can scale.

This project will evaluate risk : rewards by making the methodology available to Canadian scientific communities. We will evaluate willingness to adopt this approach, and seek to understand and address concerns. We will also test and integrate machine learning (ML)  to further accelerate citation screening. Our pilot work suggest ML algorithms could eliminate up to 50% of human workload, with minimal loss in sensitivity. However, ML adds new risks in terms of community acceptance. Finally, we will optimize the platform to facilitate living reviews in the post pandemic period that can enhance emergency preparedness.

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated how changing a person's situation can profoundly impact their mental health. In Canada, as in other countries, lockdowns were linked to increased rates of substance abuse, depression and suicide. Although, we understand specific influences on mental health, we do not understand the way these change across situations, nor how they vary with age, gender, sexuality or ethnicity. Moreover, as the COVID pandemic highlighted, changes in situation can preclude social interaction, establishing a need for novel methods that  quantify influences on mental health without in-person data collection.

One barrier to studying specific contextual influences of mental health are difficulties in obtaining accurate "in the moment" descriptions of peoples' experience. To overcome this hurdle, our project will examine if characterizations of thinking collected via smart phones provide sufficient information to identify how the context a person is in can influence their mental health.  Our project has grown out of a study conducted during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom, where we identified how changes in routines impacted patterns of thinking in daily life. We established that smart phone descriptions of experience are sensitive to changes in a person's situation, and in the current project we wish to extend this approach to understand, in principle, whether experience sampling from smartphones can usefully characterise contextual influences on mental health.

We will measure a person's "in the moment" thinking using smart phones, as well as validated descriptions of their health and well-being. Machine learning will identify how these thought patterns are linked to two features of their mental health: (i) their happiness and (ii) their productivity. Our project is "high risk" because it uses a novel method of real-time data collection (smart-phone application) that is analysed via non-traditional means (machine learning). Our project is "high return" because, if successful, it will enable the creation of a comprehensive mental health database that would help researchers build better models of how situations impact mental health, and, enable community members across Canada to identify risk factors influencing their mental health that are specific to their community, ethnicity and genders. Importantly, by employing smartphone technologies our project will allow rapid, large-scale data collection even if future lockdowns occur.

Over 81% of Canada's deaths from COVID-19 in the first wave of the pandemic occurred in long-term care (LTC).  This represents more than twice the international average of 38% among developed nations. Beneath this trail of devastation lies several systemic issues that researchers were seeking to understand and address pre-pandemic (CIHI, 2020).  These issues include inadequately trained staff to care for increasingly complex residents and deteriorating health and safety of residents and workers due to strained working conditions. Justifiably, research in LTC largely came to an abrupt halt when COVID-19 outbreaks emerged, and restrictions were introduced.  The resumption of this research has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels and systemic issues remain.  Now, these concerns are accompanied by intense public scrutiny and urgency around identifying ways to improve the working and living conditions in LTC. 

Often considered within the context of teaching and learning, simulation offers an innovative approach to generate new knowledge and identify modifiable events in LTC. In the context of COVID-19, simulated environments will allow clinical investigations to be conducted without entering LTC and unnecessarily exposing residents to potential harm. Simulation will allow researchers to continue their efforts by reproducing real-world phenomena to answer clinical research questions. Simulation offers the potential to transform how clinical research is conducted in LTC, including how new knowledge is generated and tested during and post-pandemic. 

This research will use simulation methodology to identify the determinants of quality of care in LTC.  Objectives are: i. assess team dynamics and established patterns of communication during routine and exceptional (adverse event) simulated scenarios to identify factors that influence the sharing of information among team members; ii. test the utility of best-practice guidelines on Infection Prevention and Control, and Person and Family-Centered Care during common occurrences in LTC, including the provision of care to confused and combative residents; and iii. conduct workflow analysis to determine staff time required to provide personal care and related duties, and identify time available to address residents' psychosocial needs, and staff's own professional and safety needs. The study will be conducted in a newly constructed LTC simulation lab and will be guided by Donabedian's Model of Quality Care.    

The scientific community struggles to use scientific and Indigenous knowledge synergistically to understand biodiversity and conservation. In validating traditional knowledge, scientists de facto create a hierarchy between knowledge types. The real promise in achieving meaningful collaboration in knowledge production lies in fostering an active and sustained knowledge dialogue, combining sources of empirical information while opening possibilities for trans-epistemic, paradigm-shifting interaction of perspectives. The COVID crisis and travel ban were an exogenous shock that enabled Indigenous groups in Panama to take charge of long-term research projects, determine the nature of collaboration, goals and methods and redefine the research agenda. This case study seeks to understand, document and share a case of Indigenous autonomy over complex climate mitigation projects. It centres on AMARIE (Asociación de Mujeres Artesanas de Ipeti-Embera), an Indigenous women's organization. Using Ostrom's social-ecological systems framework (2009), we propose AMARIE as the natural bridging organization of a social-ecological system geared to protect and restore forests. While there is literature on the conditions for adoption of agroforestry and reforestation by actors and households, we know little about community-led initiatives. Here we seek to understand: (1) how and why AMARIE and the communities were successful in advancing this research without direct support from scholars; and (2) how local bridging organizations like AMARIE can be strengthened to promote Indigenous-led research. While scientists position the research with respect to carbon storage, AMARIE seeks to "make the carbon social". They hypothesize that empowering local communities can help mitigate climate change and social risk by enhancing forest protection. The proposed methodology to test this hypothesis builds on 3 pillars of action: (1) empowering Indigenous women and youth through capacity building with traditional participatory models and western science; (2) access to modern technology from data collection to analysis; and (3) developing culturally appropriate internal communication to socialize carbon as an element of cultural integrity. We anticipate the project's legacy to be a blueprint of success for empowering Indigenous, in particular women's, organizations to establish themselves sustainably as full partners in research agendas that effectively join traditional and scientific knowledge.

OBJECTIVES: Climate change increases extreme weather events (EWE) such as droughts and floods, contributing to food, water, and sanitation insecurity. These resource scarcities have worsened in the COVID-19 pandemic. Very young adolescents (VYA) aged 10-14 comprise half of the 1.2 billion adolescent population, are deeply affected by climate-related factors, yet are under-represented in pandemic research. Kenya is an exemplary context to develop new directions in research methodologies for community engagement and empowerment with VYA. Kenya is impacted by EWE, and there is widespread food, water and sanitation insecurity. Youth under 15 years comprise 39% of the population. Objectives: Work with VYA aged 10-14 in Kenya to develop a) innovative audio-visual and participatory mapping geographical information systems (GIS) methods to understand pandemic wellbeing; b) intergenerational learning between VYA and Elders to share knowledge of adaptation, coping, and emergency response; and c) community augmented reality (AR) walking experiences.

APPROACH: Working with an existing cohort of VYA aged 10-14 in 6 Kenyan climate-affected contexts (Kalobeyei refugee settlement, Kisumu, Mandera, Nairobi, Naivasha, Kilifi) this 1-year transformative multi-method study will involve two phases. Phase 1: arts-based digital methods (participatory maps, audio stories and songs) with youth (aged 10-14) (n=20/site, N=120) and elders (n=10/site, N=60). Phase 2: develop an augmented reality (AR) experience of youth and elder stories on place, pandemic stress, and coping. AR, technologies that bridge virtual and real environments, overlay the real with virtual information and interactive components. AR offers a place-based pedagogy and situated learning of real-world issues and embodied stories to generate problem solving on environmental and equity issues. We will implement community AR mobile museum walks (n=40/community, N=240) to spark community dialogue and action plans. 

NOVELTY & EXPECTED SIGNIFICANCE: 1) New directions for in-situ, placed-based research with digital tools. 2) Multi-media documentation of intergenerational climate change adaptation and disaster/pandemic coping. Compared to virtual reality, AR reduces the cost, increases the immersive nature of the experience, and increases feasibility in LMIC. Risk: AR has not been used with VYA in LMIC, including humanitarian contexts. Impact: new digital empowerment approaches; bridge digital divide in LMIC.

Breaking the Mould:  interlinking place-based knowledge, social learning, collective action, and empowerment to nurture disaster resilience

Objectives: Ecological, climate, health and disaster models can save lives and livelihoods, yet their application and use by communities is complicated. These tools are predictive to a degree, but do not fully capture the complexity of human risk of threshold events for communities threatened by disasters. Continued COVID-19 health restrictions have added further stressors to communities that were evacuated by wildfires and earthquakes.  We recognise the threat of disasters, or their management are not just technical problems but are inherently yoked to the nature(s) of community. In alignment with the research call, this community centred research aims to explore new directions in disaster resilience research methodologies that empower communities to find solutions. Research Approach: Epidemics like that of COVID-19, recurrent, intense wildfires and earthquake disasters are forcing researchers to think out of the modernist dualist logic. The use of scientific risk tools alone and messaging to account for crisis and/or ongoing climate disasters does not inform a community's response to build resilience (social, cultural, and physical). The proposed research further builds on the community resilience  to disasters research based on the Asta-Ja (Eight "Ja") framework. The Nepali letter "Ja" represents: Jal (water), Jamin (land), Jarajuri (plants), Janawar (animals), Jungle (forest), Jadibuti (medicinal herbs and aromatic plants), Jalabayu (climate), and Jansakti (manpower). By doing so we aim to further test, build, and innovate Phronetic Science research methods together with British Columbia communities impacted by wildfires and in earthquake zones in Nepal, with a goal of enhancing community resilience in the face of these disasters. Significance: Community Science is community driven and community controlled. Co-production of disaster resilience knowledge through interlinking place based knowledge, social learning, collective action, and empowerment, we build a research agenda decided by the disaster-prone communities in Canada and Nepal with whom the research insights intend to serve. This research offers practices to make ethical decisions in implementing community science, when multiple stakeholders lobby for their case backed by different and contesting objectives, claims and professional identities.

In Canada, 30% of women and 8% of men have experienced sexual assault (Statistics Canada, 2019). Several risk factors for sexual violence and recidivism have been identified, especially deviant sexual fantasies. Accordingly, deviant sexual fantasies (i.e., based on illegal themes) play a pivotal role in most etiological models of sexual aggression. These fantasies are the strongest predictors of sexual recidivism. Deviant sexual fantasies are elusive: They are difficult to document, very private and unpleasant to discuss, especially in forensic context. Face-to-face clinical interviews are strongly influenced by social desirability and shame. Offenders are afraid of the judgement of the interviewer. Best practices indicate that questionnaires are still the best way of systematically documenting and monitoring sexual fantasies through time (Allen et al., 2020) and their potential impact on acting out.  Until recently, the idea that a non-human entity, a VCA, could conduct an interview and provide treatment, (much less of a clinical nature), sounded like science-fiction. Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have paved the way for the development of VCA (a virtual 3D character driven by artificial intelligence and natural language processing capabilities) used for clinical interactions. They have proven helpful in facilitating disclosure of negatively connoted symptoms and behavior while promoting engagement and facilitating trust and acceptance. VCAs carry hopes of improving services and treatment to sex offenders, with boundaries of time and space. The objective of this study is to develop a VCA capable of conducting evidence-based assessment of sexual fantasies in sex offenders. This line of research provides ground-breaking solution to the understanding of forensic populations: it is dematerialised, systematic and asynchronous, can manage large volumes of client from any location, can generate feedbacks to users and insights to treating clinicians, but also provide new tools for gathering research data on vulnerable populations such as mentally disordered offenders, offenders with intellectual disabilities and reading limitations.  It is a first step in generating VCAs capable of providing a better understanding of high-risk offenders or underserviced populations and will complement the work of practitioners. Finally, VCA are especially valuable in (post-)pandemic contexts where face-to-face is restricted.

Climate change is adversely affecting the mental health of Canadians.1-8 Yet, climate distress is not routinely monitored, making secondary public health responses difficult. Given this gap, we piloted a survey-based Climate Distress Monitoring System (CDMS) in British Columbia (BC) that assessed levels of climate distress using self-reported measures.9 During the CDMS pilot, the Pacific Northwest experienced a record-breaking heat wave. Hundreds of BC residents died from extreme heat. Subsequent fires displaced hundreds more. The second wave of CDMS data showed that after the heat wave, BC residents were much (40%) or somewhat (18%) more worried about climate change and there was a statistically significant increase in Climate Change Anxiety Scale scores after the heat wave (ß=0.11, 95% CI = 0.003, 0.21). The proportion of respondents who felt their industry would be affected by climate change increased from 43% to 53% and those who felt their community would be devastated increased from 44% to 60%. While the CDMS pilot demonstrated the feasibility and utility of climate distress monitoring, its reliance on continuous self-reported data is limiting - especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has increased the prevalence of online surveys and resulted in survey fatigue and increased recruitment costs.10,11 Addressing these challenges, we propose the creation of an Automated version of the CDMS (A-CDMS) that leverages social media, internet search, and news data to monitor climate distress in the context of extreme weather events and other triggers. To accomplish this, we will (1) conduct focus groups with key informants to develop a search strategy for identifying social media and news content related to climate change; (2) calibrate a text classification algorithm to measure climate distress from social media data; (3) validate the algorithm against self-reported measures of climate distress collected via a repeated cross-sectional survey; and (4) develop a platform that can be used to alert knowledge users of elevated climate distress using data from Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, the Google News aggregator, the Google Trends platform. This innovative intervention will provide educators, healthcare providers, emergency responders, social workers, climate activists, and news organizations with an alert notification when climate distress is elevated, thus facilitating secondary public health responses.

Peripheral neuropathy (PN) is a neurological condition involving the gradual death of sensory and motor neurons. PN can arise from disorders such as type II diabetes and pharmacological treatments such as chemotherapy. Standard clinical assessments for PN involve arduous and often poorly controlled manual testing (e.g., monofilament or tuning fork tests), as well as the rather technical gold-standard nerve conduction test. All of these assessments require in-person visits to the neurology clinic and valuable patient and clinician time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, access to such testing is limited, while clinics ceased in-person check-ups to track the progression of PN. Compounding matters, these patients are often immunocompromised, meaning they are at a particularly high risk for viral infections. Motivated by this situation, we have developed the Vibratus smartphone application which can perform well-controlled skin sensitivity testing using vibrations delivered directly from the user's phone itself, greatly improving remote diagnostic monitoring of PN patients when access to clinical testing is limited.

The current objective of our research is to provide evidence that the Vibratus app provides valid and reliable data when compared directly to standard neurological tests performed in the clinic. We plan to collect data on healthy older adults, type II diabetics, and chemotherapy patients on these standard neurological tests of PN, as well as with the Vibratus app.  Participants will also take the Vibratus app home with them and perform periodic tests on themselves to track symptoms of PN remotely. This data will provide a strong basis for future large-scale clinical trials that will further support the use of the Vibratus app in PN patients, particularly when in-person visits are limited or unavailable.

This novel approach for remote neurological monitoring of PN patients using the Vibratus smartphone application will allow users to self-administer assessments as often as desired, empowering them as agents on their own healthcare team. It further provides their healthcare providers with an unprecedented frequency of neurological assessments in a cost-efficient manner. The app's technology enables a 'virtual neurology clinic' for patients to track and monitor their symptoms during the global pandemic, when access to a neurologist is limited. It may also be deployed in remote communities, drastically expanding their access to neurological testing.

Children are an invaluable resource and investing in their cognitive health can advance their educational achievement, independent living, later employment and support mental health outcomes. Yet, for many children in Canada access to cognitive testing is limited, which has worsened during the pandemic due to physical distancing requirements. Critical illness in infancy such as prematurity, stroke, or congenital heart disease are major causes of childhood developmental disabilities including cognitive difficulties. As part of the Canadian health care system, developmental follow-up services, that includes surveillance and screening for cognitive deficits, are offered to these high-risk children up to preschool age. However, for many children with critical illnesses, cognitive deficits will only become apparent during school age years, missing a key window in early development when therapies may be most effective. Parents and families of children with developmental disabilities have identified an urgent need to access to cognitive testing promptly in order to plan for adequate support for their child during their school-age years.

Our group has partnered with Cambridge Brain Sciences, an online platform, with a test battery to measure cognitive abilities. The validity of these tests has been established in adults after demonstrating strong associations between performance on these tasks and IQ; however, these assessments have not been validated in children. Our objective is to develop and validate online cognitive tests as a tool to screen children (4-18 years) for cognitive impairments by achieving the following aims:

1) To develop an online cognitive test battery adapted for children with limited reading skills. 

2) To evaluate the psychometric properties (validity and reliability) of the new cognitive screening tool.

3) To build a predictive model using cognitive data to detect high-risk cognitive profiles that can be used as stratification

biomarkers for early identification of deficits to guide population-based screening in the community.

Novelty & Significance:

Children with cognitive deficits have a good prognosis when interventions are received early. Developing a valid and reliable online screening tool for cognitive difficulties, that can made available to families and community-based practitioners, will aid in accessing evaluation services as well as interventions during the pandemic and beyond.

The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a blow to developmental psychologists given their reliance on recruiting local community members to participate in in-lab experiments. Though many research laboratories made modest progress by shifting to moderated testing sessions using online platforms (e.g., Zoom), this approach had significant drawbacks. Participant recruitment was reduced, and samples were limited to those segments of the community that had free time during regular working hours, access to reliable internet, and a quiet space for undistracted testing. These limitations restricted both the size and diversity of our samples, and thus the generalizability of our findings.

We propose to solve these critical issues through the development of a new application (app) for mobile computing devices (smartphones and tablets). Specifically, this app (free to families and researchers across Canada) will have 3 key features. First, it will provide a gateway to a securely housed, Canada-wide database of families who consent to be contacted for participation in studies on social and cognitive development. Second, the app will provide a platform for parents and children to complete study protocols on their own time, without making an appointment with a researcher who moderates the session. Third, the app will serve a critical outreach function by disseminating recent scientific findings to all participating families, following best practices in science communication.

Funds from the grant will support a) the creation of the app, b) the coordination of a large-scale effort to disseminate the app to interested parents from communities all over Canada, and c) research designed to test the validity of the novel platform. We will partner with a field leader, Tactica (https://tactica.ca/), to create the app and conduct basic feasibility testing. We will collect data using cognitive developmental paradigms both via traditional, moderated on-line approaches, and via the unmoderated platform provided by the app, to validate our new approach. Finally, we will partner with community organizations to facilitate uptake of the app to a broad range of families.

Our project is both high risk and high reward: unmoderated data collection may not be feasible as it may limit the quality of data collection, yet success would provide a critical avenue for the rapid, inexpensive collection of important cognitive developmental data from diverse populations across Canada.

Food prices in remote Indigenous communities of northern Canada contribute to high rates of food insecurity and poor dietary quality. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted supply chains and livelihoods, increased the prevalence of household food insecurity, inflated retail food prices, and challenged methods for monitoring retail environments across Canada. Furthermore, national statistics exclude remote northern communities, in part due to methodological and logistical challenges of research in these contexts. While retailers are required to publish quarterly food price reports, northerners have expressed concern that these lack transparency and that the voices of those affected are neither being heard nor heeded on the issue of food prices. In response, our research team initiated a participatory food costing study in partnership with an Inuit land claim organization and community researchers, which ran from 2014 to 2020 until COVID disruptions. The aim of the proposed project is to leverage this existing partnership to co-develop, implement, and evaluate a novel multi-method approach for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating high-quality, locally produced information on the retail food system in remote Indigenous communities. We aim to generate methods that will be robust to current and future research interruptions (e.g., pan(/epi)demics) and food system perturbations (e.g. shipping disruptions), while capable of making more rigorous inferences about extreme food price values and volatilities, as well as their impacts on consumers. To do so, we will integrate quantitative  (e.g., checklists, till receipts) and qualitative (e.g., photovoice) methods, and explore how state-of-the-art computational approaches (e.g., machine learning), community-based data collection (e.g., social media platforms, popularly used in such communities) can be leveraged as tools for data collection, analysis, and policy evaluation (Obj.1).  We will critically appraise the performance of the methods by evaluating the quality of the data generated (accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity), their ability to generate robust data during times of crisis (e.g, the COVID-19 pandemic, severe weather events), and their contributions to locally defined capacity development, self-determination, and governance (Obj.2). The approach will be piloted in two communities of one Arctic region in phase 1, then adapted for application in a geographically and culturally distinct region in phase 2. 

The Rethinking Clinical Trials (REaCT) platform has streamlined pragmatic trials across Canada. This highly successful program has randomised >3500 patients in 18 trials over 6 years. Because postoperative complications are not only associated with major morbidity, but also a 2 to 5fold increase in the cost of surgical care, we merged REaCT with the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) to capitalize on the patient-level quality improvement data that is already collected by NSQIP at over 100 Canadian hospitals. Pre-pandemic, the REaCT-NSQIP platform had unprecedented enrolment of >95% of eligible patients and >99% automatic data capture.

During the pandemic, the need to reduce face-to-face interactions decimated clinical trial progress. Conversely, healthcare providers adapted their practices with high-quality virtual patient contact, usually without compromising care. Post-pandemic, this shift towards virtual care will remain. As a result, and in line with Health Canada's consultation paper on `Clinical Trials Modernization', we have redesigned the REaCT-NSQIP platform to be decentralized. Consent, randomisation, data capture, prescriptions, and follow-up can be conducted remotely by the coordinating centre. This innovative approach will:

1) decrease attrition by reducing in-person visits

2) increase generalizability of results by including rural and community patients

3) expand the pool of qualified investigators by allowing participation of centres which lack research infrastructure

4) reduce costs by centralizing management

5) maintain high-quality trial conduct

As a proof of concept, we will use the REaCT-NSQIP-Remote design to address the question of whether preoperative oral antibiotics reduces surgical site infections after colon surgery. Because non-academic hospitals perform 50% of colon surgeries in Canada each year, this question is well-suited to a remote trial design. Both remote and `traditional' sites will participate. Feasibility of the remote design will be assessed by comparison of:

1) patient and investigator satisfaction

2) enrollment and attrition

3) rural engagement at the patient and hospital level, and

4) timeline of trial initiation

This trial will demonstrate the potential of a novel Canadian pragmatic trials infrastructure, based on the REaCT-NSQIP-Remote design, to answer practice-changing surgical quality improvement questions with highly generalizable results that will benefit all Canadians.

Inuit Nunangat is warming faster than regions further south due to complex global feedbacks, commonly known as Arctic amplification. It is also the homeland of the Inuit who depend on intact and resilient ecosystems to sustain their way of life. Research is also part of life in Inuit Nunangat, where groundbreaking scientific discoveries regarding environmental change have occurred along with many abuses resulting from a mostly southern-led research agenda. The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the biggest disturbances to Arctic research in modern times, keeping southern-based researchers out of the territory for almost a year. This provided a unique opportunity for Inuit to reflect on the role of research as they pursue self-determination. With many large research programs on hold or cancelled during this time, many wondered why this was occurring despite the capacity of Inuit to undertake these projects. For many, the pandemic strengthened their resolve to identify systemic barriers to pursuing an Inuit-led research agenda.  Using a participatory mixed method cased study approach, we will explore how Inuit can maintain major research programs within an Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (knowledge, way of life) worldview. Our objectives are to (1) understand the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic on environmental climate-related research in Nunavut at the territorial level, (2) study the experiences of southern-based researchers with large multi-year climate-related environmental research programs in Nunavut as a result of the pandemic, and (3) co-implement a novel Inuit-led scientific protocol to maintain one major academic or government multi-year climate-related research program in one partner community allowing for research continuity while building local capacity to shape the future of research. We will engage a team of three Inuit youth from an existing partnership in Nunavut and a graduate student assistant to achieve these objectives.  A lack of interest by researchers to engage in this process within their scientific practice will be a significant barrier to completion and an inherent risk to the project. Risks have also been identified when youth take on leadership roles regarding environmental issues within their communities because of existing hierarchical relationships.  We hope, however, to contribute to systemic change in Arctic research by understanding how Inuit community-led science can lead large, multi-year programs of global significance.

There has been enormous growth in the use of field-based randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to test the effectiveness of global health and development interventions in low resource settings. As RCTs are often considered to be the `gold standard' for establishing causality between an intervention and outcome, they have been widely adopted by governments, academia, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the global health and development sectors. However, despite the widespread uptake of RCTs, their `gold standard' status has been critiqued on both methodological and ethical grounds. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the limitations of current field-based RCTs, including how the design and implementation of these approaches may exclude intended beneficiaries.

This project will experiment with new ways of designing and implementing field-based RCTs, with a focus on centering the voices of individuals who are responsible for the `on the ground' implementation of these studies (community leaders and local field staff) to enhance intervention relevance and effectiveness. Our work builds on an established collaboration between an interdisciplinary team of Canadian researchers and a Philippines-based NGO with extensive experience running field-based RCTs.

This project is nested within a planned RCT that will test the effectiveness of different health promotion strategies to address COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among individuals experiencing extreme poverty across 12 regions in the Visayas and Mindanao, Philippines. The specific objectives of this project are:

1. To collaboratively implement a participatory process whereby community leaders and field staff co-design an RCT

2. To evaluate how community leaders and field staff participation in the design of an RCT influences the quality of RCT implementation

3. To mobilize knowledge generated through this participatory process to inform future RCTs that aim to address health and development needs identified by individuals and communities experiencing poverty

With the global use of RCTs across the global health and development sectors, and the push for evidence informed policy and action, our findings will inform the creation of new protocols that will highlight the leadership role that RCT implementers play in the design of RCTs. In this way, our project will disrupt current top-down RCT design principles for global health and development interventions across low resource settings.

Venezuela has been experiencing a severe socioeconomic crisis for several years, compounded by political turmoil and the COVID19 pandemic. With 7.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in Venezuela and another 5.6 million Venezuelans in need in other countries, it is now the world's second-largest external displacement crisis after Syria. Additionally, migration through the Darién Gap (a 96 km stretch of dangerous, roadless jungle partially controlled by armed guerillas as well as human- and drug-traffickers) has increased an estimated 10-fold this year.  There is an urgent need for research into how best to facilitate humanitarian support in this region; however, safety considerations and difficult terrain drastically limit traditional methodologies.

We propose that a smartphone app (Balcony.io) has the potential to provide significant assistance to both migrants and humanitarian relief efforts while at the same time collecting important research data to inform responsive decision making and resource allocation to better meet migrants' needs.  The app's web dashboard will allow migrants, field responders, and humanitarian staff to efficiently exchange location-based messages in real time. From the dashboard, responders can selectively alert (e.g. routes are not passable, clinics do not have oxygen or medicines) and poll migrants/field staff (e.g. what is the security situation, do you have access to food/water), to inform prompt and responsive decision-making.  Furthermore, Balcony.io does not collect personal identifying information and thus privacy is maintained.

Objectives: We will provide proof of concept to transform traditional humanitarian response using Balcony.io. This will be achieved by demonstrating: 1) that migrants/field staff are able to communicate their needs and provide frequent, rapidly accessible situation updates; and 2) humanitarian responders are able to use that real time data to inform more responsive decision-making and resource allocation to better meet migrants' needs.

Novelty and Significance: Our use of Balony.io in the Latin America's migration crisis will bring the voices and needs of migrants to the forefront, while allowing response teams to pivot in real time to adjust aid/service delivery in what are often rapidly changing situations. The real-time, location-specific data will facilitate resource allocation and proactively help to protect migrants as well as improve safety for field staff.

We combine qualitative and quantitative research designs -- with mobile phones, online platforms, and African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK) data collection approaches -- to examine the human and environmental costs of mining `green minerals' for renewable energy in the Democratic Republic of Congo in an era of COVID-19, climate change, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) challenges. These approaches are high risk because mobile phone services and internet access are unreliable, subject to slow connections with relatively high data charges, electricity shortages for phone charging, low digital literacy (especially among women), language barriers for non-French speakers, and financial hurdles to accessing devices among ordinary people. If successful, the research will be high reward because it will enable us to collect data from the remotest areas and those difficult to reach by road. Our research methodologies, dubbed `Afro-futurist PI' (phone and internet) would benefit researchers who are devising ways of conducting research during and after the pandemic. Local communities, civil societies, NGOs and policymakers will benefit from the findings that deploy AIK and modern technology to collect data. We will disseminate the findings online and by phone through text messages, webinars, a website, podcasts, tiktoks, and Instagram -- all globally accessible. The objectives of the study include: testing usage of hybrid research methods to advance theoretical, empirical and practical knowledge and policy-oriented approaches to livelihoods, the environment, human rights, development, peace and security in relation to extracting the minerals for renewable energy; illustrate how gender, ecological protection, peace and security in policy benchmarks can engender `green development' for marginalized groups; and empower communities to generate knowledge through their agency, AIK, values, and technology to promote sustainable resource governance, improved livelihoods, and environmental integrity. The project will demonstrate how mobile phones, the internet and AIK approaches can be used to conduct field research. It bridges the gap between theory and practice around renewable energy and the environmental impact of mining such minerals; responds to the federal government call for Canada to play a leadership role in implementing CSR in mining; advances the idea of community-based `green peacekeeping'; and trains students in conducting field research and data analysis.

With the confinement imposed by the pandemic, the average exposure to screens in long-term care (LTC) has significantly increased, dramatically reducing social engagement, a key to maintaining well-being in residents. Pilot work from our team shows screens can be harnessed purposefully, by identifying contents that promote engagement with family, caregivers, and persons with dementia (PWD). An intersectoral team of researchers, administrators, healthcare professionals and caregivers will work together, and, if needed, remotely, in developing an innovative, inclusive approach for conducting research within the challenging environment of LTC. A new infrastructure by our team (CFI-COVID program) will support the creation of three innovations that will sustain social engagement, and empower onsite staff to participate in research : (a) a digital and ergonomic platform (Lumière) which will include (a.1) a film clip catalogue, featuring personalized, emotionally relevant screen content to support communication, and increase social engagement, and (a.2) a library of training modules for workers to address communication deficits and behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia; (b) two ecologically valid viewing environments adapted for physical isolation; (c) a data acquisition/analysis infrastructure for coding screen content, and socio-affective responses (ex, physiological-behavioural), enabling the building of predictive models of well-being in LTC. For ethical principles, and research and sustainability reasons, studies on PWD must be carried out within their own living environment. To achieve this, research tools and procedures will be co-constructed by the team to perfectly fit the reality of LTC environments, which includes among others, limited space, and overworked, understaffed caregivers with neither sufficient training nor adapted tools to stimulate engagement in residents. This high-risk endeavour will require developing new methods for bridging epistemological and terminology gaps across sectors (humanities, health, engineering) and disciplines (cinema, communication, geriatrics, AI). The platform will offer access to users of different credentials (ex. healthcare workers and researchers) in separate physical locations, enabling the co-construction of research projects for challenging confinement contexts.The unprecedented methodology developed will drastically change the understanding and appraisal of social isolation in LTC.

The COVID-19 pandemic seemed to stalk our SSHRC-funded, transnational participatory research project, Lives of Migrant Remittances (LOMR), which engages academic and community partners in Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Completing fieldwork in Asia as flights were cancelled and borders were closing, community partners importantly prioritized the immediate needs of the migrants they serve. Plans for in-person participatory data analysis were halted, necessitating the development of innovative research strategies that still embraced the tenets of feminist participatory research. Poly-occular engagement and transnational research yearnings (POETRY) emerged from these challenges. Drawing inspiration from Indigenous/Western Two-Eyed Seeing, POETRY brings multiple epistemologies into conversation to creatively transgress boundaries and generate research that addresses our yearnings for a more just world.  

Our objectives are to: (1) Document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our research methods including challenges, opportunities, and changes in dimensions of time and space; (2) Deepen conversation amongst community-based and academic researchers across epistemic divides to develop strategies to address ongoing and emerging challenges; (3) Consolidate lessons learned and facilitate knowledge translation activities and the co-creation of resources that can inform transnational research engagement practices. 

POETRY will conduct a case study of LOMR and its response to the pandemic by: reviewing project documents, hosting focus groups and dyadic interviews, and eliciting reflections on our processes using creative expression (e.g. visual arts, music, texts, video, and voice-memos). 

POETRY's novelty and significance are reflected in our efforts to: highlight knowledge production by grassroots organizations and community-informed academic traditions from the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Indonesia; foreground relationship-building and maintenance under and after pandemic-conditions; facilitate dynamic interactions amongst diverse community and academic researchers to generate a poly-occular lens to ground future research practices; and articulate our research in context of our strivings for a more socially just world.

Since the start of the 21st century, progressive rises in the frequency, intensity, and duration of heat waves throughout Canada has resulted in dramatic increases in morbidity and mortality. For example, more than 550 heat-related mortalities, primarily among the elderly and individuals with comorbidities, occurred during recent heat waves across British Columbia (June - July 2021). Despite the development of Canadian Heat Alert Response Systems to protect the health and wellbeing of citizens during extreme heat, the surge in heat-related morbidity and mortality during heat waves persists. Further, the rise in mortality during heat waves primarily occurs at-home rather than in-hospital or medically supervised settings. This highlights the urgent need to evaluate how human behaviour and physiological responses to heat stress in personal dwellings increases the risk for heat-related complications. Unfortunately, current efforts to understand the physiological responses of vulnerable populations during extreme heat stress simulate static ambient conditions in climate chambers, which may not accurately reflect the at-home conditions experienced. This includes, but not limited to, differences in daily non-structured physical activity, hydration status and ad libitum rehydration, the bimodal temperature fluctuation throughout a day, and the frequency and duration of exposure to extreme heat. Advancements in wearable sensors, web applications, and internet connected devices offers a unique opportunity to transform traditional data collection equipment to monitor the indoor and outdoor environmental conditions alongside the behavioural and physiological responses in real-time during heat waves. Further, the transition from laboratory to an at-home data collection approach is timely as the COVID19 pandemic has resulted in limitations to patient-engaged research.  If effective, these at-home environmental and health monitoring solutions may identify the primary factors influencing heat-related complications in vulnerable populations, provide greater telemedicine diagnostic precision for individuals without immediate access to health-care services, and potentially enable early detection for heat-related complications alongside personalize heat resilience strategies during heat waves.

Men's intimate partner relationships can promote their wellbeing, and the health of partners and family. That said, the most often told stories are of men's distressed and/or disrupted partnerships (i.e., separation, divorce). The proposed research breaks with the dominant discourse about men's relationship breakdowns to offer participants opportunities to share their strategies and skills for building and sustaining intimate partner relationships. These insights will be collected and used to message and mentor other men with the overarching goal of norming masculine cultures that affirm men being relationship-ready and skilled.

The proposed participatory action research comprises online interviews, visual methods and novel knowledge sharing strategies to make accessible men's experiences and perspectives for building equitable/healthy intimate partner relationships. Beginning with a photovoice assignment 50 participants will take photographs to depict their top 10 tips for building intimate partner relationship. Participant's photographs will be narrated in individual Zoom interviews to expand on men's perspectives, and build specific examples to illustrate the application/effectiveness of each tip. The interviews and photographs will be analyzed thematically by the researchers to identify patterns in the data, and to distil the group's overall top 10 tips based on what participants most consistently highlighted. Focus group Zoom interviews will be used to re-engage participants in a discussion about the top 10 tips, with the explicit goal of narrowing the group's top 5 tips, which participants will subsequently develop and communicate through digital storytelling.

The proposed research is novel in 3 ways. First, this research will be 100% digital (consent, demographics, individual photovoice and focus group Zoom interviews and auto-transcription) and online (participant's photographic exhibits, and developing and distributing their digital stories). Second, the fit of social constructionist masculinities frameworks will be evaluated in the data collection and analyses, and in working with participant's digital storytelling to consider potential adjustments to that longstanding theory. Third, given the pressures that the COVID-19 restrictions have put on many homes and intimate partner relationships, the research will be especially timely as a means to reflect, and to learn from men's experiences and perspectives.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many forums for community discussion, particularly in rural and remote communities with careful Covid-19 protocols, were no longer available in person. In 2020/2021, one such research project, a community-based round table discussion on anti-racism and belonging had to make this shift. Initially, we conceived this happening as an online focus group and were expecting a small turnout. However, the call for participants generated broad community interest, resulting in over 175 participants registering for the discussion. In the end, the event resulted in a large-group Zoom meeting with all participants, then 13 different breakout rooms held simultaneously, each led by a faculty facilitator and a student assistant.  Although the event was a success, the methodological considerations inspired curiosity about the impacts and factors involved in shifting online. For example, unfamiliar technology or poor internet access may have created barriers for some participants, and there may have been further barriers yet unidentified. More research is necessary to understand the impacts and various factors of online methodologies, the barriers they engender, and ways they can be creatively overcome in rural and remote communities.

The proposed action research project explores three major questions: i) What are the impacts of employing online platforms such as Zoom for community-engaged research? ii) How do different factors of online groupings (size, scheduling, accessibility, technology, etc.) for community-based research impact participants?  iii) What barriers may be encountered by shifting to an online methodology, and how might these be overcome? This project will result in increased knowledge of best practices for community-engaged online research, an increased understanding of how shifts to online methodologies may impact participants in different ways, and a 'roadmap' of navigating ethical and practical issues related to online methodologies.

It is imperative to know how to leverage technological developments' benefits while ensuring that those without access are not left behind or excluded. This research aligns directly with the goals of the Innovative Approaches to Research in the Pandemic Context program, as it builds on new directions in research methodologies and supports community and field-based research in exploring ways to do this equitably in communities with geographic and technological barriers.

Many civil engineering structures are potentially subject to slope instability because of their location on or near sloping ground. Thousands of landslides occur each year in Canada and the cost of direct and indirect damage is estimated to be between $200 and $400 million per year. Therefore, geotechnical engineers frequently need to evaluate the stability of existing and proposed slopes. The traditional deterministic approaches do not account for the ubiquitous uncertainty in slope engineering explicitly and rely on conservative designs. However, it has been demonstrated that conservative designs are not always safe against failure.

The merits of probabilistic analyses have been progressively noted as quantified uncertainty is incorporated rationally into the design process. Critical geotechnical variables such as soil shear strength are usually regarded as random variables, the properties of which are determined from field sampling and lab testing.  During the COVID-19 pandemic, traffic volumes to field soil sampling have been cut down by road closures. The access to laboratories, libraries and archives has also been limited to very few personnel and very short periods of time. As a result of these harsh restrictions, only small soil samples can be obtained and soil properties can't be collected in full or non-censored domain. Conventional density-based probabilistic methodology would produce large errors and thus could not be used in slope reliability engineering.

The objective of the proposed program is to explore novel approaches in probabilistic slope stability analysis and design under small, censored samples due to the pandemic. A new fractional moment will be coined to accommodate small samples. A partial entropy principle will be developed to contain censored samples. New quantile functions will lead to accurate distribution-free parametric models. This quantile-based probabilistic methodology is a new direction in engineering risk and reliability and may continue to be used in post-pandemic, either as a standard practice or in emergency contexts.

The proposed research will contribute significantly to the advancement of knowledge and technologies associated with probabilistic slope analysis and design. Enhanced understanding of the slope failure mechanism will inform protocols and measures, by proper soil stabilization measures, to avoid slope disasters. Thus, this program will benefit the construction and excavation industries in Canada.

A number of fisheries across Canada have faced collapses due to over-fishing and the inability to manage the resource in a rapidly changing environment. These collapses have important ramifications to indigenous communities who rely on fish for sustenance, commercial anglers who rely on fish for economic means, and recreational fishers who contribute over $8 billion in direct and indirect expenditures to the Canadian economy each year.

The challenge faced by resource managers is the ability to collect and analyze data at a landscape level to address declines changes in fisheries.  In the past, managers we have been able to manage the relied on managing fishery through traditional survey methods which collected fish using standardized nets.  Due to the increases in angling pressure and rapid changes in the environment (e.g. climate and land-use), these methods are no longer sufficient as the number of samples needed to detect changes in fisheries are not economically and logistically feasible. New approaches are needed.

Citizen science provides a unique opportunity to collect data from resource users and can be useful in identifying emerging fisheries issues. Until recently there has been no mechanism to coordinate observations by resource users.  However, recently Angler's Atlas, developed the MyCatch mobile app, to work with anglers across the country collecting high resolution data on thousands of Canada's fisheries. The app not only serves as a personal log-book for anglers, but, more importantly, makes the data available to research scientists for analysis. This has the potential to revolutionize fisheries management, with demonstrated impacts ranging from facilitating COVID-safe fishing tournaments to predicting the spread of whirling disease by anglers.

Data collected from citizen scientists has its own challenges. The data that is collected is often incomplete and does not fit the traditional random sampling design.  Therefore, innovative methods from data science are needed to analyse this type of data and provide meaningful estimates of factors such as local angling pressure, angler mobility and so on.

The purpose of this proposal is to develop new methods for bringing together the new streams of fisheries data with methods from data science, such as machine learning and Bayesian Belief Networks with the goal of predicting local angler pressure, spatial connectivity, and disease spread in fisheries systems.

The Tuberculosis Program Evaluation and Research Unit works with provincial programs across jurisdictions to provide local tuberculosis (TB) surveillance data to high-incidence Indigenous communities on the Canadian Prairies. These data drive co-designed solutions to the poorly understood TB epidemic. SARS-CoV-2 disrupted this work, spreading as an acutely threatening pandemic of COVID-19 disease that, in turn, demoted responses to TB. Nevertheless, timely TB surveillance remains foundational to public health action. Now more than ever, with attention and resources diverted to the COVID-19 crisis, communities disproportionately impacted by TB have limited knowledge about the concurrent crises at their door. How to best continue sharing TB surveillance data has emerged as a central research question of our group.

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the value of active, responsive, and broadly shared surveillance data. Numerous groups present COVID-19 data to the public (Johns Hopkins, GoC, WHO, NYT, etc.) using simple and interactive dashboards with fields such as case numbers, case category, death rates, and so on. Critically, data are updated daily. These data equipped the public and health practitioners (including those outside public health) with information about COVID-19 risks. Increased public engagement has inspired significant political action and collaborative leadership across jurisdictions.

Our aim is to apply and assess this model of data sharing to the slower moving TB pandemic using Alberta as a test case. The TB program in Alberta is centralized, making data acquisition manageable. Data will be presented longitudinally, disaggregated, and in a manner that respects privacy and cultural differences. Descriptions of simple trends will be provided. Thereafter, we will survey the response to the dashboard by users and send targeted surveys to other jurisdictions for external evaluation of its utility.

Global TB elimination efforts are set back by a decade or more due to COVID-19. Significantly, though, the impact on TB prevention and care services in Canada is not known and data is lacking to benchmark and respond to acute threats. As such, sharing TB data in ways the public understands is a novel approach borne out of the COVID-19 emergency, but the utility and value of such an approach applied to slow moving communicable infectious diseases is unknown.

Electrochemiluminescence (ECL) is electrogenerated light with extremely high sensitivity. ECL is adaptable to a portable sensing device with an electrode, like a glucose meter with a test strip, combined with a voltage source and a photodetector.

Our goal is to create and develop novel ECL sensing devices that can be used by Canadian communities to test for compounds of interest or concern, for example, to test for trace amounts of certain substances in bodies of water or in the atmosphere of community environments, or to test for certain microRNA (mRNA) as self-diagnostic biomarkers of kidney disease or COVID-19 in human fluids.

Mobile phones will be adapted to our new point-of-need detection devices with our simply fabricated holders that will serve as the interface to host a strip electrode for sample sensing. The devices make use of cell phones as the voltage source to generate ECL and their cameras as the photodetector to quantify target substances.

Our team is looking to approach the design and delivery of extremely sensitive ECL devices differently, making them accessible for wide-spread community use. The design and fabrication of the new ECL accessories to cell phones will not be affected by the pandemic since the design will take into consideration the need to use simple, safe, and inexpensive fabrication methods such as simple 3D printing. These require little working space and equipment.

The advantages of our new design include its universality to point-of-need detection of many substances at low-cost, ease of use by the public and extreme sensitivity. The devices can be utilized in field trips for environment monitoring and high-efficiency disease self-testing.

Our group is a global pioneer on ECL and its instrumentation and publishes in Science, Nature Protocols and other top scientific journals. For this project, we have a diverse, interdisciplinary team to design, create, improve and demonstrate prototypes for the public.

Risk of natural and human-made disasters skyrocketed, as rare events become highly expected. This Proposal is motivated by resent critical economical and humanitarian losses, and massive failures of national and international emergency management systems due to a rare pandemic. In particular,

- The e-health care failed to contribute to local and global epidemic monitoring. 

- Management and leadership teams were not assisted by computational intelligence (CI), leading to failure to contain the epidemic outbreaks, such as in the case of USS Theodore Roosevelt.

- Privacy principles were systematically broken and emergently replaced by temporary rules, e.g. in contact tracing. 

In order to decrease the cost, most of the R&D processes are currently being simplified, by ignoring the risks of such in case of disasters. This is a source of failures of technology applications. The goal of this Proposal is to bridge these gaps in the technology R&D. We propose a conceptual counter-epidemiological framework for the R&D. It is based on the Emergency Management Cycle (EMC) doctrine, and will be implemented via machine reasoning. 

While the R&D processes of CI tools are strongly standardized  for reliability and performance, the requirements to counter extreme and rare events are barely covered by regulations. This Proposal argues that the R&D must be profiled for utility in case of rare events. This is achievable by adapting the concept and policies of the EMC. The proposed EMC-centric R&D is defined as a set of recommendations, accordingly to the four phases of EMC, i.e. mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. The high risk of this approach is in difficulty of harmonizing the all parties involved in the EMC. However, it can be applied to any CI tool R&D, and thus, the outcome is highly rewarded. The novelty of the proposal is in a methodology to translate the R&D into the EMC-centric one:

- Local and global epidemic monitoring must be included in the R&D of the CI, e.g. e-health and e-coaching. 

- Rare-event risk assessment based on machine reasoning shall be performed at each step of the EMC-centric R&D.

- 'Privacy-by-design'  principles shall be embedded in such R&D.

We will develop an EMC-centric e-health system prototype and guidelines that utilize the recent pandemic scenarios.  The proposed guidelines will help to develop specific Canada R&D strategies and technologies, and contribute to the global EMC-centric R&D strategies.

Infants born with complex health conditions have a wide variety of ongoing medical and developmental needs after hospital discharge that affect their quality of life. Timely identification of developmental delays and early interventions are critical to the future well-being of these infants. These important health care services are traditionally performed via in-person, neonatal follow-up visits, at which time important research data can also be collected. Even prior to the pandemic, a myriad of geographic, socioeconomic and provider-level factors presented significant barriers for numerous families to access the care they needed. This combined with the fact that non-urgent hospital visits and in person research studies were canceled during the COVID-19 pandemic strongly highlights the need for a novel way of providing critical neonatal health care services and performing research.

Developing a novel methodology for research and care of infants born with complex health conditions, which includes a focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion, is critical.  Our Interdisciplinary Infant Research Program at Kingston Health Sciences Centre is well poised to rise to this challenge.  We propose the creation of a novel, virtually-guided standardized tool to evaluating developmental milestones in infants with complex health conditions.  To date, no studies have been published using this research approach in neonatal follow-up. To achieve our objective, alternation of current laboratory-based measures of developmental assessments in infants for a standardized caregiver-mediated administration via a virtual platform will be undertaken. Evaluation of the tool for psychometric robustness, feasibility and satisfaction with will also take place. Successful outcome benchmarks include tool validity/reliability, practicality and acceptability to families and health care providers. The risks of caregiver apprehension to participate in a virtual approach to neonatal follow-up are high.  However, if successful our proposed, virtually-guided standardized tool for evaluating infants with complex health conditions for developmental milestones is a promising avenue that has the potential to allow for equitable health service delivery and research to all children across Canada and the world.

Over the last 10 years, health system and service improvement using a co-design approach was rapidly adopted as a stakeholder engaged process for inclusive and effective change. Relying heavily on close engagement with people with lived experience of health needs as well as health providers, close engagement was interrupted by the pandemic. Organisations and entities had been engaged in design in health pre-pandemic - design industry, health system units, health industry providers, community health groups, and design researchers in health. The pandemic led to rapid adaptations in co-design practices and techniques, and loss of and limitations to engagement - particularly for equity seeking groups. This loss has drawn attention to new vulnerabilities and provided the conditions for questioning co-location as a panacea for inclusion in co-designing healthcare. Some co-designers were able to adapt and create new ways of achieving effective health co-design with a range of stakeholders including  community groups, patients, older adults, caregivers, and healthcare practitioners, however, there have been challenges particularly with digital access and equity. Drawing on the experiences of health designers across sectors and countries, this project seeks to capture how co-design practices, adaptations, and experiences (including failures) emerged during the pandemic. The team will then identify practices that are resilient, new practices that hold promise for enabling co-design in health, and ways in which equity and inclusion can be enhanced. Learnings from this work will then contribute to recovery and change in the health sector post-pandemic through a community of practice with global reach.

Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by COVID-19, in large part due to colonialism and systemic racism that undermine local health and wellbeing. Such health inequities have been aggravated by restricted access to health data and the systemic withdrawal of research support by universities and governments during this global crisis. The pandemic has thus revealed another type of inequity, one related to access and control over data and research.

In part because of such harms and in part emerging from the tremendous local and networked resilience in the face of Covid, there is widespread community interest in reframing research in ways that give rise to data sovereignty. Mobile technology has much promise in supporting local health and environmental initiatives. However, such innovation is rarely participatory in nature much less shaped and controlled by communities. It is further undermined by the digital divide that confronts most Indigenous communities in North America. The objective of this proposal is to explore the role of a digital application (App) in enabling data sovereignty, especially as it relates to health and environment.

This work builds on an App we created to support Indigenous communities as they respond to Covid. Developed in close collaboration with northern communities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, it is available as `COVID-19 Indigenous' in iOS and Android. It is already being used by 10 First Nations communities across Canada and in Puerto Rico. Yet, this technology also has great potential for use regarding other adverse health and environmental impacts. In this proposed research, we explore the use of the App for communities in British Columbia, Manitoba, Labrador, and Quebec (n=20) as they monitor and respond to environmental and health impacts arising from hydro dams, forestry and other resource extractive industries. In addition to supporting communities that implement the App, we will evaluate the potential of and challenges for this technology through interviews and case studies.

The role of these mobile technologies and participatory technology design in facilitating data and research sovereignty and more generally community resilience in response to industry will be documented and evaluated for the first time. This technology will ultimately be made available for use by Indigenous communities regardless of an ongoing pandemic as they work for data and research sovereignty now and into the future.

The recent COVID-19 global pandemic necessitated the development of novel SARS-CoV-2 detection methods to contain the outbreak. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has proven to be a useful technique to monitor community-level infection of  SARS-CoV-2. Given this new direction in WBE, environmental surveillance of other infectious diseases in wastewater could provide an intriguing alternative for monitoring community health. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, gastric cancer affects thousands of Canadians each year. Helicobacter pylori (H. Pylori) is a bacterium that infects 50-75% of people globally, and is a leading cause of gastric cancer and primary gastric lymphoma in humans. We will expand our existing COVID-19 screening capabilities to include wastewater surveillance of health markers associated with H. pylori infection and gastrointestinal cancers.

The objectives of the proposed research are to

(1) Detect and quantify RNA and proteins from H. pylori using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and liquid-chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), respectively;

(2) Identify human microRNAs (miRNAs), which are often deregulated in individuals during an H. pylori infection. miRNAs have not previously been detected in wastewaters, but their role in gene expression makes them desirable biomarkers for disease, and their hairpin structure could provide protection from degradation; and

(3) Characterize human protein biomarkers associated with gastric cancer oncogenesis, such as pepsinogen and H. pylori antibodies, using LC-MS/MS.

To our knowledge, oncogenic microorganisms such as H. pylori, have not been previously identified in wastewater. The prevention of cancer is a primary goal of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization (WHO). We think that WBE could enable community cancer screening that could lead to a new paradigm for public health assessment. Our novel WBE approach could result in the early detection of H. pylori and oncogenic biomarkers could aid in community screening of disease in remote and/or under-served communities such as First Nations or Developing Nations, which may help with early interventions and could help remediate socio-economic links with cancer.

The spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on experimental research activities over the last 18 months. More specifically, for early career researchers and students, the implementation of social distancing measures to contain the virus has limited social interactions with other community members, which often lead to new insights and collaborations. At this time, the establishment of new collaborative research projects, especially across different institutions, generally falls outside the scope of recommended guidelines for the safe conduct of research activities due to the need for close contacts between researchers during training and the restricted access for external personnel. To address this, we propose to implement novel remote collaboration methodologies that can be leveraged moving forward to enhance the productivity of research collaborations in Canada such as 1) remote training in laboratory procedures using parallel workstations and 2) safe shipment of samples that are sensitive to cold temperature experienced in Canadian winters.

Towards this, we will implement a pilot collaborative research project between the Bujold (nanoscale nucleic acid nanostructures) and Sauvageau groups (glycan synthesis and characterization) in an entirely remote manner. As a proof-of-concept, we propose to develop nanoscale glycan-nucleic acid conjugates, which are promising for therapeutic applications. To achieve this, we will first establish parallel workstations with matching or equivalent equipment. We will then develop standard operating procedures, which we will adapt to be taught online through live sessions with the other group. This will enable both groups to access new materials and to develop conjugations strategies in both laboratories. The second part of the collaboration will evaluate methods to share sensitive samples between both groups for analysis. Nanoscale biomolecule conjugates tend to be highly temperature sensitive (e.g., gold nanoparticle conjugates aggregate if frozen and DNA nanostructures melt if heated). To overcome this, we will explore cost-effective sample preparation strategies to facilitate sample sharing and evaluate the quality of the samples post-shipping. As we move forward from the Covid-19 pandemic, we expect that these new methodologies will be of use in initiating collaborations across institutes in Canada, which tend to be distant from one another, and will expand the scope of collaborative research.

Agroecology, as a science, practice, and social movement, has been posed as a potential pathway to revitalize global food systems through a shift towards social and ecological justice. Globally diversified agroecological systems have been poorly characterized by traditional agronomic assessments that often focus narrowly on income and yield over other socioecological dimensions such as farmer and worker well-being, biocultural heritage, dietary diversity, environmental impacts and biodiversity conservation.

Farming systems assessments that aim to collect and analyze more detailed characteristics of farm-and landscape level processes and outcomes, across longer-term temporal and broader spatial scales, are also costly and time-consuming, requiring intensive logistics and travel to organize periodic in-person field and data collection campaigns involving interdisciplinary research teams, local community partners, and farmers themselves. 

To address this challenge, the Diversified Agroecosystems Cluster at the University of British Columbia has been developing a new multifunctional web app using a farmer-centred participatory design process. The "digitalization" of agriculture and the approach of human-centered design provide a potential pathway through which to ensure that farm-level data and assessments are co-created with farmers and that the results both originate and persist in the hands of the farmers themselves. Launched in 2020, LiteFarm is now the world's first community-led, not-for-profit, digital platform joining farmers and scientists together for participatory assessment of social, environmental and economic outputs of farming systems.  It is now being piloted independently by over 1000 farmers in 60 countries.

In this NFRF project responding to the call for "Innovative Approaches to Research in the Pandemic Context", we aim to test the analytical utility of this tool to investigate trade-offs among productive, sociocultural, economic, and environmental indicators. Working remotely with farmer-led research teams in six countries, we will organize and facilitate data collection campaigns along an agroecological gradient to assess farming system sustainability across diverse contexts, workshop the results, further adapt the tool, and co-design a knowledge mobilization and food system sustainability and traceability strategy that links farmers, researchers, policy-makers, and consumers.

Effective communication is critical to address the COVID-19 pandemic and other public health challenges. During the pandemic, many health experts and practitioners stepped up to become public communicators, facing an online environment rife with misinformation. The PI is conducting a pilot study of the extensive online abuse directed at these health communicators (funded by SSHRC), and its many negative consequences, especially for members of marginalized ethnic, racial, and gender groups.

We seek this grant to prototype new methods of participatory-action research to overcome several stark limitations in this research area, and to move from documenting to addressing challenges faced by health communicators. First, research in our field (including our own) has studied abuse in a few public online spaces (e.g. Twitter) and not investigated other key spaces such as messaging apps (e.g. WhatsApp) and email. Second, our field has to date provided only vague ideas for how individuals can use platform tools or communication tactics to address online abuse. Third, we know little about how racialized individuals - particularly racialized women - can best address the specific forms of abuse they encounter.

Our novel approach is to mobilize a diverse network of health communicators to act as a collaborative research entity, with assistance from ScienceUpFirst, an initiative working with Canadian science experts and communicators to address Covid-related misinformation online in English and French. Participants will identify, archive, and share examples of abuse and disinformation - including in private spaces (email, direct messages) usually inaccessible to researchers. Working with our team, they will develop and test response strategies, assessing their effectiveness as communicative interventions and as efforts to protect communicators' psychological health and wellbeing.

To conduct this innovative and participatory research we will develop: 1) new methods for documenting and sharing private digital communications; 2) new measurements to test effectiveness of response strategies; 3) an ethical framework going beyond "informed consent" to safeguard participants' security, psychological health, and agency.

In addition to two academic journal articles, this project will yield training workshops, policy recommendations for universities, public health agencies, medical associations, and related organizations, and a website to make resources publicly-available.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, animal research facilities had to reduce personnel and laboratory animal numbers, thereby increasing the costs of animal experiments. To stay within our research budget and timeline, we limited our evaluation in the efficacy of non-thermal plasma (NTP) treatment of cancer to 1 instead of 3 mouse models. We also could not evaluate the effect of adding radiotherapy (RT) to NTP, a combination that was synergistic in vitro. To maximize the information obtained from our murine experiment, we developed methods to treat tumors outside of the mouse (ex vivo) with NTP, then inserted 400 microns microdissected tumors (MDT) into microfluidic chips. MDTs were then cultured and monitored on-chip for 3 days. Extracted supernatants informed us on the health of the MDTs. Finally, the MDTs were fixed and paraffin embedded for gold standard immunohistochemical staining. Murine tumor growth delays correlated with ex vivo signals of NTP effects.

We now propose to expand and validate our methodologies of using on-chip models to replace or reduce mouse experiments. We will study the effects of RT and NTP in 3 lab-on-chip models of increasing complexities: 3D cancer spheroids, 3D cancer and fibroblast co-cultures, and syngeneic xenograft derived MDTs. On-chip models will be assessed live or fixed and paraffin embedded. Aside from live microscopy, on-chip survival of cancer models will be assessed through luminescence or fluorescence probes that are quantified from the supernatant collected at various time points over 7 days after treatments. At regular intervals, duplicate cancer models will be fixed and paraffin embedded into tissue micro-array like blocs. Immunohistochemical staining using standardized techniques will evaluate markers of cell death and proliferation.

An emerging concept proposes that RT and NTP can enhance the efficacy of immunotherapies. The unique expertise of our multidisciplinary team allows us to rationally design methods to evaluate the above factors in our models. Lymphocytic activation, infiltration and expansion within on-chip 3D models will be assessed following RT and NTP treatments in the presence of an immune checkpoint inhibitor (anti PD-1). Ultimately, on-chip cancer models may be a surrogate to murine experiments and could accelerate preclinical cancer treatment development, including immunotherapy. Translation to human derived specimen could lead to clinical predictive assays.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated youth mental health (MH) outcomes. Globally, the pandemic has also changed research methods as a result of social distancing mandates and lockdowns, limiting in-person research methods. These restrictions can especially pose a challenge for participatory arts-based methods (ABM) that heavily rely on the relationship and collaboration between researcher and participant.

Particularly in MH and youth well-being research, ABM (e.g., photovoice, drawing, body mapping) has been shown to be effective in elucidating youth's needs and MH challenges which deepens the understanding of their MH. Youth have described ABM to be empowering and useful in promoting self-confidence and dialogue, as well as an accessible and innovative way to share their lived experiences. ABM has been found to reduce the power imbalances between researchers and youth which is important given youth have been traditionally excluded in the generation of knowledge.

While there are studies reporting on how researchers have adapted their research protocols and ABM during the pandemic, lacking is work focused on the use of ABM in youth research including MH research. Youth's voices are needed with respect to the best ways to conduct research in crisis contexts. Going forward, we require a new and innovative approach that moves beyond the sole reliance of adult researchers adapting arts-based research methods. Given the lasting and disproportionate impact that COVID-19 has had, and will continue to have on youth MH, who better to lead the charge than youth themselves in the co-designing of an innovative approach to engaging youth in MH research.

The purpose of this project is to have youth co-design a new approach to arts-based research that can be applied in MH research and is transferable to other research involving youth. Over two years, youth co-researchers will co-design, implement and evaluate a new arts-based approach that promotes the active engagement of youth in MH research. This proposed work is innovative as it aims to create new ways of conducting meaningful youth MH research developed in real time by those most impacted, youth themselves. It will yield new information on research utilizing ABM with youth that can be applied virtually and used in a variety of different emergency contexts. Overall, this work will result in the development of innovative strategies to utilize ABM with youth in a post-pandemic world.

In the last 20 years, there has been increasing recognition of the importance of articulating Indigenous epistemologies, research paradigms, and knowledge translation in Indigenous health research. Despite some advances, many Indigenous communities remain skeptical about the value of health research using western scientific approaches due to the lack of meaningful community participation and effectiveness evaluation. Therefore, culturally-grounded methodologies and concepts are needed for researchers to have rigorous ways to engage communities, evaluate interventions, and support action to address Indigenous health inequities.

The pandemic poses specific stresses on Indigenous Peoples' health. Innovative research approaches are needed to collect information for meaningful community engagement and mobilization in a pandemic context. We propose to develop innovative strategies by partnering with two major studies with First Nations (FN) communities: Food, Environment, Health, and Nutrition of First Nations Children and Youth (FEHNCY), a representative survey that assesses the relationships between the environment, food access, nutrition, and health status of FN children and youth, and Community Mobilization Training (CMT) program for diabetes prevention, an intervention that builds upon community resilience and the strengths of Indigenous knowledge systems to engage community stakeholders in program development and implementation. Both studies center community engagement and mobilization approaches for health promotion by supporting health policies and programs and community action and provide opportunities to advance rigorous, culturally-safe methodologies.

While the pandemic has limited in-person strategies for building relationships in ways that are necessary for health promotion, it has also highlighted opportunities for incorporating Indigenous knowledge systems into research. The objectives of this study are to describe and advance the methodological innovations from two studies (one representative survey and one intervention), that integrate Indigenous knowledge systems across community engagement, program evaluation, and knowledge translation. This research aims to provide approaches that combine the strengths of Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems to support meaningful community engagement, culturally-grounded evaluation, and knowledge translation in epidemiologic and intervention studies.

Objectives:

i) To demonstrate the feasibility of a home-based breath test to assess `anabolic sensitivity' to dietary amino acids across the lifespan

ii) To validate a home-based breath test to detect inactivity-induced `anabolic resistance'

Approach:

Lean body (and especially muscle) mass is important for metabolic health and functionality across the lifespan. Muscle growth (e.g. youth, exercise-training) is associated with an increased sensitivity to dietary amino acids, which are used as substrates to build new proteins. However muscle loss, such as with aging and/or inactivity, is preceded by the development of `anabolic resistance', which results in fewer dietary amino acids being used for protein synthesis and a reciprocal increase in their use as energy (oxidized). Current stable isotope methods to measure anabolic sensitivity are generally invasive (e.g. intravenous administration, blood and/or muscle samples), not feasible in some populations (e.g. youth), and rely primarily on controlled laboratory settings, which has left researchers with few options during the face-to-face research restrictions of the current Covid-19 pandemic.

Our preliminary evidence has shown that an amino acid/carbohydrate beverage that is `traced' with the essential amino acid [13C]leucine can detect increased anabolic sensitivity (i.e. lower leucine oxidation) after growth-promoting resistance exercise in a lab-based setting in young adults. As leucine is preferentially metabolized within skeletal muscle, we believe this test can assess muscle anabolic sensitivity. To address the lack of available methodology to assess anabolic sensitivity noninvasively, we will deploy this breath test to remote, at-home settings to test its feasibility across a range of ages (children to older adults) as well as within a paradigm (i.e. reduced daily step counts) that elicits anabolic resistance (in the laboratory settings) and muscle loss in adults and mimics the shelter-at-home government restrictions.

Novelty and Significance

This study will be the first to develop and validate a home-based, non-invasive `breath test' to assess the anabolic sensitivity of individuals across the age- and health-span. The findings will provide unprecedented access to a range of populations and locales for researchers and clinicians to study the anabolic potential of dietary amino acids in humans and to screen for those who are risk for suboptimal lean mass growth or loss.

Flow cytometry (FCM) is the predominant technique used to characterize and quantify the widest variety of cell types, and is widely used in immunology, including for cancer diagnosis/treatment, and vaccine development. The current standard practice for data analysis involves manual inspection of a hierarchy of bivariate plots of cell types. It is extremely time consuming, the principal source of variation in the application of the technology, and incomplete due to the complexity of datasets. Many algorithms have been developed to accelerate and standardize the analysis and have shown success in many applications, but none have the performance or capabilities that have led to widespread adoption. Machine Learning approaches hold the most promise, but the lack of sufficient training data remains a major bottleneck. Following the pandemic, FCM data analysis has seen its efficiency further reduced due to the unavailability of medical personnel overwhelmed by the saturation of the healthcare system.

In response to this urgent need, we have led the development of a citizen science infrastructure for the analysis of FCM data, with a focus on the annotation of FCM data from peer-reviewed COVID-19 studies. In collaboration with the video game developer CCP and Massively Multiplayer Online Science, the team released a mini game within Eve Online, a massively online multiplayer game gathering 300k players monthly.

This initiative engaged hundreds of thousands of participants and generated 100M+ of novel FCM annotations. Our unique approach to parallelize analysis has enabled a much deeper analysis than can be done by any single lab by themselves.

Despite its success, the current framework has constraints that prevent us from re-purposing it for general FCM data analysis, and thus fully exploit its potential to contribute to the recovery of the delays and limited analysis accumulated during the pandemic. We aim to develop a mobile application to access our mini game outside Eve Online. This service will allow the participants to increase their contribution to science while maintaining their loyalty to the host game, essential to ensure the sustainability of the approach. It will also allow us to tap into the vast reservoir of mobile users currently not exploited. Further, this mobile platform will serve as an umbrella for other citizen science games we previously developed to help other fields of research (e.g., genomics) facing similar challenges due to COVID-19.

This proposed study is a continuation of an existing project. The PI has proposed `Teacher Design Knowledge' (TDK) as critical capabilities for teachers in designing and implementing innovative curriculum, pedagogy, and technology. As one of TDK dimensions, teacher data literacy (TDL), the ability to derive meaningful information from multimodal data (e.g., drawings, 3D modelling, gaze, gestures, movements, emotions) in student learning, is a relatively new concept for teachers. However, most research in data literacy has been predominantly focusing on pre-collected datasets of written texts. Further, educational researchers have increasingly called for adapting research methods to analyze real-world, ecological, and multimodal datasets from learners. However, there has been no consensus in research methods in multimodal data in educational research. To address these issues, this proposed research utilizes a topic modelling approach TowaRds Automated aNalySis of research Methods In Teacher daTa Literacy (called 'TRANSMITTAL'). Although topic modelling and data mining techniques have been used to analyze large collections of data to generate topics with the advancement of machine learning methods in many fields, only a few applications of topic modelling have been used in educational research. TRANSMITTAL serves two purposes: provide researchers with innovative research methods for TDL, and advance our understanding of TDL as teachers are learning from multimodal student data. Our research aims to develop a conceptual model based on topic modelling that maps topics of research methods in TDL. Most recently, the PI has prototyped basic functionality of topic modelling in a transparent and faster way as an early proof of concept test. The PI will guide HQPs to improve our prototype, develop the data architecture, customize machine learning solutions, and disseminate the project. Firstly, we will identify keywords and keyword vectors using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Secondly, we will identify topics and their relationship using network analysis to explore the possible links between the defined topics. Finally, we will present a model for TRANSMITTAL to understand multimodal learning data and prepare the next generation of educational research methods. Our findings will have direct pedagogical implications and the results are likely to be of considerable interest to educational researchers in innovative teaching and learning for 21st century digital learners.

Improved mobility is a desired outcome for many persons with physical disability - whether due to neurological or musculoskeletal impairments across the lifespan. During the pandemic, both research activities and service delivery programming focused on this issue were running at reduced capacity. Virtual care is an obvious solution to enhance access to these services, but these programs are often not designed to meet the various personalized needs of a broad range of persons with mobility impairments. Moreover, research and clinical programs are often condition specific, limiting the reach of these initiatives. Therefore, we propose a novel, hybrid model for mobility-focused programming involving both virtual and/or in-person activities that are personalized to best meet the needs of a large population of persons across the physical disability spectrum.

In particular, we will employ principles of co-design and integrated knowledge translation over 2 distinct phases. First, we will identify and prioritize individual preferences and program design features through engagement of content experts and persons with mobility impairments. We will target issues of access and enhancing continued participation through personalization of mobility-enhancing activities as well as using in-person and remote-monitoring assessments to inform tailoring. Phase 2 will employ a novel methodology incorporating a personalized intervention design featuring the priorities identified from Phase 1. Outcomes for phase 2 will focus on changes in mobility, participation, adherence, and satisfaction with the program.

A participatory action framework will enable diversity across the project team.  Importantly, this work will be practice-based in that the research will be conducted within a service delivery setting with emphasis on applying principles of implementation science to ensure effective implementation. Our team brings together subject matter experts in physical therapy, exercise science, data science, epidemiology, implementation science and persons with lived experience. Implementation strategies will be part of the pragmatic, adaptive approach to ensure applicability to the practice setting. This represents a paradigm shift in evidence generation applicable to this field and will ultimately lead to a better understanding of how to personalize mobility interventions with findings on preferences based on a range of demographics across persons with physical disability.

COVID-19 forced field-based researchers to reconsider possibilities for data generation. Many educational researchers paused their ethnographic studies indefinitely because it was unsafe to engage children in physical spaces. Thus, participant recruitment, retention, and distribution of educative materials to children need reimagining. Designed as a comparative multi-sited case study across three coastal communities, our study forwards alternative ways for doing place-based science education inquiries with children remotely.

We will trial two recruitment efforts: an open call for participation online and a more traditional form-inviting children from partner schools. Here, schools serve as a starting point for connecting to children rather than our primary study site.

As each season starts, grade 2-6 children will receive seasonal science kits. Kits contain sensory-focused experiences, like curiosity walks and plant-based print-making. We will deliver kits to schools and mail kits to children enrolled online.

Children who return their kit will receive a new one. This process may increase participants' motivation and, in turn, retention. Because we are `known' at schools, children recruited there may have higher retention rates than those enrolled online. Schools will have physical dropboxes for children's contributions. Like their online counterparts, they also can upload or mail their kits.

Using the kits, children will generate data by:

Cultivating relationships with their ecological community via  "interviews" with biotic beings (including, but not limited to humans) that include question-asking, answer-generating, and observation-recording.

Crafting their findings and sharing contributions via mailer, digital upload, or at school.

Communicating findings in 1) a seasonal webinar for all children, and 2) an interactive constellation of their work online. Physical exhibits in public museums, libraries, and parks across the coastal communities can also showcase the children's learnings.

Using participatory methodologies, we can elicit feedback from principals and caretakers about recruitment while systematically collecting children's feedback to optimize seasonal science kits. We will also ask how they want to communicate with their coastal peers and the world.

Alongside children, we can create:

A living archive of a tri-coastal communication,

New sensory methodologies, and

Advanced understandings of remote participatory research.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all aspects of healthcare delivery nationwide. As a result, delivery of rehabilitation has been drastically altered, suspended or reduced in many settings. To keep up with the demands for urgent care, many rehabilitation personnel were redeployed, resulting in staff shortages in necessary care delivery. Due to social distancing measures and mandated changes in regulations, several modes of virtual rehabilitation (VR) have been widely adopted (e.g., video conferencing). Current literature strongly suggests that VR can be comparable to in-person rehabilitation and better than no-rehabilitation in various populations.

VR removes several barriers of in-person rehabilitation, including geographical distance and transportation requirements. However, it does not address the understaffing in the current rehabilitation ecosystem, since a clinician must be present to supervise the patient through video conferencing. A recent study using a commercial avatar-based VR found that in comparison to in-home or clinic-based physiotherapy, there was a significant decrease in 3-month health related costs while demonstrating equivalent clinical outcomes. However, many details of the product are not publicly available. In our recent work, avatars have been successfully used as an exercise coach for older adults (using the Kinect camera).  In this project, we propose the development of a novel adaptive VR assistant (AVA) that adjusts to a patient's personalized rehabilitation program by continually monitoring their progress over a video  feed from their own laptop or smart device. The specific objectives are as follows:

1. Development of AVA using only body joint information from a patient's videos to preserve their privacy.

2. Creation  of exercise protocols for cardiac and upper-limb stroke rehab patients.

3. Development of adaptive AI algorithms to measure a patient's engagement, exercise technique and quality.

4. Perform a pilot randomized control trial of the AVA  with 50 patients each  (equal number of males and females) from cardiac and upper-limb stroke rehab population.

The AVA system can disrupt the approach and delivery of providing VR to a large segment of cardiac and upper-limb stroke patients living in the community. Moreover, AVA will support a patient's individualized journeys through their rehabilitation programs, resulting in improved clinical outcomes while easing the burden of care on clinicians.

Physical function is a key component of health status and health-related quality of life. Among patients with chronic disease, objective impairments in physical function (e.g. walking speed) are amongst the most sensitive predictors of relevant clinical outcomes including risk of hospitalization, disability or death.

Not surprisingly, physical function assessments are often used as core research measures across many research trials, sometimes as a baseline characteristic to better describe the health status of participants and other times as an outcome measure to determine whether an improvement has occurred with an intervention (e.g. exercise).

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, research groups (including our own) performed in-person assessments of physical function. During COVID-19 researchers have either delayed research or been forced to pivot to virtual testing using videoconferencing software. Videoconferencing only affords a 2-dimensional view of the participant. This results in lengthier (to capture multiple views in sequence) and more error-prone (when the view is not ideal) assessments, increasing research costs and compromising data quality.

The proposed research aims to address these challenges by developing an online solution that would allow physical function testing to be objectively and independently carried out by a patient in the convenience of their home. More specifically, our research objectives are as follows:

1) To develop 3D motion-capture software to observe and assess participants as they execute two commonly used, highly validated physical function batteries

2) To use Speech Processing techniques to develop a voice-enabled chatbot that provides personalized instructions to the participants executing the batteries.

3) To use Artificial intelligence methods to configure and personalize the batteries to the participants' body and physical ability.

4) To validate the novel assessment tool in patients with chronic disease.

If successful, researchers will have access to an automated tool that allows patients to independently capture accurate physical function assessment data while at home. This innovative, accessible virtual option would provide objective data that informs personalized care while reducing study costs and patient burden. It will not only have utility during the COVID-19 pandemic but, it also holds promise to transform the way physical function assessments are carried out in future research. 

Rationale: Sleep is a major determinant of physical and mental health. In Canada, 35,000 people experience homelessness. Compared to the general population, people experiencing homelessness (PEH) sleep less, have more fragmented sleep, have excessive fatigue, and are more likely to use substances to fall asleep at night or stay awake during the day. Also, PEH are at higher risk of having insomnia due to stress and pain, or sleep apnea, which can increase respiratory depression due to opioid overdose. However, there has been no study on the prevalence of sleep apnea in PEH, and clinical observations suggest very low rates of treatment.

A systemic barrier of sleep care for PEH is that public coverage for diagnosing sleep problems in Ontario requires overnight study in a laboratory, which is often not accessible to PEH due to mobility or trust issues. This problem has been magnified during COVID, due to social distancing and limited access to sleep laboratories.

We have developed several technologies to remotely monitor sleep apnea and sleep quality. Our interviews with shelter staff and PEH indicated potential challenges with digital technologies, including the accuracy in PEH, lack of trust, and staff workload. Our goal is to assess application of digital technologies to provide equitable and accessible models to diagnose sleep problems in PEH.

Fit to the program: We have established a user-centered multi-stakeholder translational program. Our community partners include shelters in Toronto, 4 people with lived experience of homelessness and sleep apnea, and care-providers to PEH. We propose an innovative model for diagnosing sleep problems in PEH, and to raise awareness about the consequences of undiagnosed sleep problems on quality of life of PEH, through developing accessible and equitable digital technologies.

High Risk: 1) To establish trust between the research team and participants. 2) The high prevalence of chronic physical and mental disorders that can challenge diagnosis of sleep problems.

High Reward: This is the first study to assess barriers and enablers of digital technologies to provide equitable and accessible diagnosis of sleep problems in shelter residents. This study will help to inform policy decision-makers to modify the sleep care in shelter residents. The knowledge of barriers will help to improve sleep care in other disadvantaged people in future and to implement the results on a broader basis across Canada.

Unprecedented, in current times, has been the social and media view into research and its societal implications. It has sprung an ever-flowing river of information be it factual or not. In situations of divisiveness, the hermeneutic wager offers an adept way for discordant and divergent groups to engage, learn, attempt solutions, and provide meaningful change.

Our innovative method, grounded in the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney's work on the hermeneutic wager in conjunction with the proven framework of applied philosophical hermeneutics, offers an effective approach to bring researchers, clinicians, and the general public together within a community of active research that is result oriented. Applied hermeneutics as a qualitative research method seeks to gain a deep understanding of a topic, human experience, or event. It does so through conversation with others who add perspectives to the shared investigated topic. In practice, the hermeneutic wager consists of five circular conversations: imagination, humility, commitment, discernment, and hospitality that build rapport, promote understanding, and work across difference. 

During the past 2 ½ years our team has adapted the hermeneutic wager to explore support groups for adolescents with scoliosis, social responsibility in higher education, pediatric cancer care, COVID-19 experiences of vulnerable (indigenous, rare disorders, neurodiversity, isolation) populations and healthcare professionals, and health professional education.

Our intent with our interdisciplinary team is to continue to broach encultured beliefs in a program of research that is proving to be effective, nimble, and provokes transformation in healthcare practice, process, and societal views. Looking forward these include how qualitative research is taken up in professional education and society, vulnerable populations and the covid experience in multifaceted projects, and healthcare professionals' grief.

The team consists of a diverse group of researchers, graduate students, and community members. There will be ongoing training and development opportunities for new undergraduate and graduate students. The hermeneutic wager is at its core an inclusive activity where diverse groups of people can come together to produce cohesive solutions to shared topics. This method has been adapted to the new reality of Covid-19. Interviews and analysis can be accomplished with Zoom platforms with affordability, efficacy, and high return.

In early 2020, COVID-19 exploded around the globe, overwhelming health systems and shutting down economies. Doctors tried to treat the disease, which at the time was not well understood, while policy makers worked to contain its spread and mitigate its impact. At the same time, researchers around the world turned their attention to the virus, resulting in a rapidly evolving information landscape. Science moved forward at a rapid rate. Hundreds of thousands of papers have been published since, with many more appearing as unpublished preprints.

While the rapid rate of research was needed to inform the pandemic response, it far outstripped the capacity of the traditional peer review process. Though necessary for quality control and dissemination, peer review is traditionally slow and meticulous, relying on ad hoc reviewers who are often stretched thin by their own research, to carefully evaluate the work of others before the findings are made public.

As a result, some outlets reduced the thoroughness of their reviews and many researchers started releasing their research publicly without first waiting for successful peer review. This increased concerns about the quality and reliability of some of the research findings policymakers and the public were exposed to, potentially generating confusion, distorting policy, and decreasing some people's trust in the scientific process.

Our research asks whether the traditional methods through which research is peer reviewed and published makes sense in a time of crisis. It will reimagine the way the expert communities review and release new research when there are benefits of rapid vetting and dissemination for large amounts of research output.

The initial stage of the project will incorporate a review of preprints and publications, using a survey of researchers, journal editors, and public health officials to quantify the extent of the issues in biomedicine. The second stage pilot several proposals designed to enable rapid review and quality control, including an experiment at a peer reviewed journal that has been inundated with COVID related submissions. We will pilot various incentives and measure their effect on reviewer acceptance rates, review turnaround time, and review quality.

The results of our study will inform much needed outside-the-box strategies to accelerate research dissemination during crises, increasing review capacity while maintaining quality to enable safe-but-responsive policy. 

Background: During COVID-19 and in normal times, mental health research requires the collection of sensitive personal information through questionnaires and diagnostic interviews. Questionnaire data may be collected by self-completion via paper or the internet or by researchers reading questions to participants by phone, video, or in person. Interviews require interpersonal interactions, traditionally in person, but increasingly by phone or video. Previous studies have evaluated patient-reported outcome questionnaires collected via different mechanisms but have not specifically evaluated mental health measures. No well-conducted studies have considered mental health diagnostic interviews, which requires a large number of participants and resource-intensive interview data. It is not known whether collecting sensitive mental health data using non-traditional methods may influence results.

Objectives: The objectives of our study are to (1) compare responses on self-report depression questionnaires administered by different methods and (2) evaluate whether and to what degree results from diagnostic interviews may be associated with administration method.

Methods: The DEPRESsion Screening Data (DEPRESSD) Project is a collaboration of > 350 collaborators from 59 countries that conducts individual participant data meta-analyses of depression screening questionnaire accuracy. DEPRESSD has harmonized diagnostic interview data paired with depression questionnaire scores for two commonly used questionnaires (Patient Health Questionnaire-9 [PHQ-9], 100 primary studies, 44,503 participants; Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale - Depression subscale [HADS-D], 101 primary studies, 22,574 participants). Administration methodologies for both are well-distributed across methods (e.g., face-to-face, phone, internet). For the PHQ-9 and HADS-D, separately, we will use latent variable models to assess differential item performance across more (e.g., suicide ideation) and less (e.g., fatigue) sensitive questionnaire items by administration method. Then, controlling for questionnaire score, adjusted for any differential item performance, we will evaluate the association of depression diagnosis with administration method.

Significance: The large datasets that DEPRESSD has harmonized present a unique opportunity to conduct the first robust study to inform how data collection methods used in COVID-19 may influence results when sensitive mental health data are collected.

Speaker verification is the task of verifying a person based on a set of discriminative physical/ behavioral traits which are unique to that person. Attributed to the rising concern in identity theft and cybercrimes due to the widespread deployment of smart devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets), the demand for robust person verification (i.e., biometrics) technology has grown rapidly over the past several years. Unfortunately, in real-application conditions, the uni-modal biometric solutions are not robust to domain mismatch and deepfake attacks. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to develop robust multi-modal speaker verification systems which require the confirmation of audio and visual (e.g., face) identifiers simultaneously for bagging the complementary information. Proposed multi-modal authentication system will be robust to deepfake attacks and domain shifts due to language/accent mismatch conditions. This is due to the fact that unlike voice, face modality is independent of language and accent. In this project, we propose following novel ideas:

- An ensemble end-to-end multi-modal framework comprised of three simultaneously running verification modules based on audio, visual and audio-visual identifiers using pre-trained models.

- An audio-visual biometric that employs multi-modal compact bilinear pooling to combine voice and face embeddings rather than simple concatenation of embeddings.

- A new framework for multi-modal speaker verification which directly exploits the joint information within the speech and image pair while minimizing the reliance of the multi-modal system on the pre-trained uni-modal modules.

- An audio-visual speaker diarization for handling multi-speaker test recordings.

- A hybrid architecture to capture complementarity of CNN, LSTM and DNN/TDNN networks with multi-level global-local statistics pooling to improve our core voice biometric technology.

- A multi-source domain adaptation approach for domain shifts compensation in SV task.

The expected results from this proposal will have a certain impact on biometric research and commercial communities. The knowledge - practical skills learned by graduate students/postdocs participating in this research program will be advantageous to both them and the development of reliable biometric technologies. The proposed frameworks will also be applied to other applications such as emotion recognition, diagnosis of COVID-19 infection and Alzheimer's diseases etc. 

Recent research shows that during the COVID-19 pandemic, 66% of preschool-aged children (2-5 y/o) and 70% of school-aged children (6-18 y/o) reported deterioration in their mental health, including increases in depression, anxiety, irritability, hyperactivity, and obsessions/compulsions. The treatment of mental health ailments among youth is challenging to address when traditional in-person cognitive behavioral therapies are not as available, either due to physical distancing restrictions or limited availability in remote locations.

To address this challenge, serious games designed to reduce stress is a fruitful avenue to pursue. In partnership with Shaftesbury Inc, the research team has been developing immersive (AR/VR)  digital therapy games to lower stress. Preliminary work by the group has shown the effectiveness of serious games in decreasing physiological stress among youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the clinic. However, similar to all clinic-based treatments, the utility of this treatment is currently dependent on in-person clinical visits and assessment.

The transition to home-based education has given rise to innovative measures in telehealth. The aim of the proposed project will leverage our existing work with serious games, to further develop an innovative tele-mental health framework that will enable the delivery of therapeutic gaming products remotely, while securely monitoring key mental health indicators in the comfort of the client's home. To do this, we will recruit 50 youth between the ages of 10-15 years, who report high perceived stress. We will create a comprehensive secure cloud-based platform that will support the monitoring and collection of biometric data (e.g., heart rate variability) and momentary affect (e.g., visual analogue scales rating happy/sad, calm/tense, interested/bored) in real time while the participants engages with the gaming platform. Novel neural network-based algorithms will be created to assess streaming data from the interactive biometric and affect data, which will enable real-time assessment of the program's effectiveness in reducing stress without the need of an external evaluator (e.g., the clinician). Automated delivery of mental health intervention in the form of serious games, and automated assessment of its effectiveness can pave way to an improved intervention protocol that can be scaled up quickly and efficiently, freeing up valuable healthcare resources in the process.

Prime Minister Trudeau has acknowledged that Canada's historical treatment of Indigenous Peoples "amounts to genocide." While official responses continue to be framed in terms of reconciliation, the pandemic has revealed the insufficiency of this approach. We continue to see devastating health impacts, disproportionate labour and economic hardships, and inequities in access to vaccines for Indigenous Peoples in Canada, laying bare the complex relationships between science, government, policy-making and reconciliation. Meaningful action will require innovative theoretical frameworks, research methods and tools.

To do this work we turn our gaze toward the state as perpetrator of colonial genocide. We will bring together a world-class team of legal, social science, and policy scholars with Indigenous knowledge keepers and community leaders in the development of a "community science" tool - an interactive colonial genocide database - for documentation, analysis, policy (re)formulation, and education. Specifically, we aim to:

� Develop and test a decolonized research strategy integrating legal and policy analysis with research-creation and community science, organized around the pillars of artmaking and accountability;

� Use crowdsourcing to build an interactive database of evidence, legal and policy recommendations, literatures, and artistic expressions of colonial genocide in Canada;

� Cultivate a novel approach to Indigenous-led research through a relational, reflexive and accountable data governance structure and methodology with particular attention to power relations;

� Test how colonial genocide, as an analytic frame, can facilitate accountable truth-telling, highlight potential solidarities, and chart courses of redress.

Our project is high risk/high reward as follows:

� Decolonized Research Paradigm: Using an array of art and community-based practices that foreground Indigenous, feminist, gender-diverse and decolonial epistemologies, we will open relational space in-between the perpetrator-victim/survivor dichotomy;

� Theoretical Framework: Unapologetically bold, we adopt the language of genocide used by Indigenous Peoples around the world to interrogate links between law, public policy and everyday realities;

� Innovative Methods & Research Tools: Committed to just relationships and broad-based participation, we will test and refine strategies of inclusive community science to contest and transform conventional research approaches.

Objectives: This project aims to develop podcast-making as a research method that both facilitates intergenerational connections and yields rigorous research, and to create a methodology for building a partnership leveraging the expertise of both academics and media professionals. This project is part of a larger mixed methods study investigating how children, teens and older adults experience the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada and the USA.

Approach: Creating an intergenerational podcast is one of several pandemic-appropriate research methods used in the larger study. These methods, including journaling, interviews and surveys, are designed to foreground and connect children, teens and older adults, and to communicate their voices to key institutions whose interventions affect their lives. These data collection activities will inform the development of an intergenerational podcast. Like radio, the podcast is an intimate bridging medium that enables the boundaries of knowledge and context to be crossed, can be created by individuals sited at different locations, and has been used successfully to disseminate social science research findings to Canadian audiences (eg Crackdown). In a bridging activity, participants will work together to co-create a podcast; brainstorming questions, interviewing each other about their COVID-19 experiences, reading journal excerpts, deciding which exchanges to include. Media professionals will contribute expertise in facilitating all stages of production - from identifying and answering production questions to coaching podcast participants to weaving together conversations into compelling narratives. Transcripts of the process will be used for research analyses. The 'produced' podcasts will be a research output disseminated widely to no-academic audiences.

Novelty & expected significance: Podcast creation as research method is innovative; it responds to calls to critically use methods that centre participants and facilite meaningful conversations. It brings people together in the production and distribution phases while safely maintaining physical distance - key considerations for research with potentially vulnerable populations in a pandemic. If proof of concept works, then the strategy of partnering with media professionals on a research project to create podcasts could be used to answer other questions in other parts of the world under conditions where research must be done without physical co-presence. 

Ce projet cherche à dresser un portrait des paysages linguistiques scolaires (Schoolscapes) en milieu rural au Manitoba dans les écoles offrant un programme d'immersion française (n=48). Certaines de ces écoles se situent à plus de 8 heures de la ville de Winnipeg et se retrouvent dans des régions éloignées et peu peuplées de la Province du Manitoba. Les études consacrées au paysage linguistique sont ancrées dans la recherche sur le terrain, car ils analysent qualitativement et quantitativement la manière dont les langues interagissent dans un milieu public ou semi-public, généralement à travers l'affichage. Les méthodes de recherche plus couramment utilisées consistent à prendre des photographes de l'affichage d'un lieu particulier. En raison de cela, les lieux plus fréquemment étudiés sont facilement accessibles; typiquement les grandes villes. Cette étude du paysage linguistique scolaire est novatrice dans le sens que ce sera le premier à vouloir explorer les écoles d'immersion en milieu rural au Manitoba. La majorité de ces écoles sont à doubles voies : le programme d'immersion se donne en conjonction avec le programme régulier anglais. Ces lieux sont alors propices à l'exploration de l'interaction des langues. D'ailleurs, la méthode de recherche employée sera le « tourist guide technique » (Szabó, 2015). Cette technique est utilisée afin qu'un membre de la communauté donne une tournée du lieu au chercheur qui ensuite prend des photographes à mesure que le « guide » les commente. Cette technique demande une présence physique du chercheur. L'adaptation novatrice de cette méthode serait de la faire via une plateforme de visioconférence. C'est-à-dire, le participant aura un iPad, se connectera à une rencontre virtuelle avec le chercheur qui lui demandera de donner une tournée virtuelle de son école. En se servant de la capture d'écran, le chercheur pourra prendre des photographes. Le but secondaire de cette recherche serait d'évaluer l'efficacité de cette méthode afin de promouvoir son utilisation après la pandémie pour des projets de recherche en paysage linguistique, paysage linguistique scolaire et en d'autres domaines connexes tels que l'éducation et la sociolinguistique afin d'assurer une meilleure représentation des communautés rurales au sein de la recherche. Cette étude fournira un portrait réel des espaces éducatives, valorisera la voix des participants et suscitera des recommandations qui contribueront au maintien des langues minoritaires. 

The Arctic is part of our national identity and an engine of economic growth, and we have a unique responsibility to monitor this immense ecosystem. Arctic seabirds are among the most iconic components of Arctic ecosystems, playing an important role as country food, in ecotourism and ecosystem function. The COVID-19 lockdown disrupted much of Arctic ecosystem science, but especially seabird research which is often based in cliff habitats that requires specialized knowledge to access safely. Indeed, no seabird research occurred in the Canadian Arctic in 2020-21, disrupting 45+ years of ongoing monitoring that provide special insight into Arctic marine ecosystems. We propose to develop innovative approaches to seabird field work in the Canadian Arctic that will allow safe collection of data by local community members should future research be disrupted. In particular, we propose to hire two postdoctoral fellows to develop two innovative approaches. First, using machine learning applied to drones and fixed cameras to measure the traditional metrics of seabird colony dynamics: timing of breeding, reproductive success, shift length, feeding rates and population size. The drones will be equipped with thermal imaging to record nest locations for cryptic species (eiders). We also propose the use of pit tags to record individual identity and survival. These variables can be accessed, deployed and data downloaded by community members during short visits to respond to both their own needs, and territorial, national and international policy commitments. Second, developing the world's smallest accelerometer-depth-location loggers to record behaviour remotely, year-round. These loggers will record prey capture, movement in three dimensions and energy expenditure once every seven days for up to two years, allowing data to be collected even during long absences. Together, our High Risk, High Reward projects will develop pandemic-resilient methods for recording seabird health in the Arctic. Given Canada's important responsibility to research in a rapidly changing Arctic, our system will allow Canadians to continue to use seabirds as sentinels of Arctic marine ecosystems even during future disruptions.

Research Objectives:

1. Determine the potential for virtual music theatre to support increased creativity, agency, and PERMA Well-Being;

2. Examine ways that the virtual environment supports access to the arts, and under what conditions individuals prefer this venue for participation;

3. Develop a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework for virtual music theatre engagement for older adults.

Research Approach:

The proposed research aims to accelerate findings from a SSHRC-funded project that examines accessible and inclusive music theatre (i.e. singing and dancing/ movement and acting). Due to COVID-19 restrictions, in-person gatherings ceased and activities that involved singing were deemed superspreader events, thus forcing us to pivot to an online model. Surprisingly, we found this medium provided a welcome alternative to face-to-face interactions particularly for older adults, for whom travel to a particular location, due to distance or mobility issues, was not feasible. This new virtual environment diversified and broadened our participant base thus resulting in increased research inclusiveness. The proposed research aims to accelerate the exploration of virtual music theatre to address the pressing need for virtual leisure opportunities for older adults that foster creativity, agency, and well-being. This research will also allow us to develop data collection protocols for virtual artistic spaces.

Novelty and Expected Significance:

We are unaware of studies that investigate virtual music theatre with older adults. This line of inquiry is timely and time sensitive given the growing population of older adults in Canada and around the world, and the pressing need to support their well-being in proactive ways. This study is therefore poised to explore this new direction in community-based research.  It will also contribute to the broadening of the parameters of the genre of music theatre itself, in particular its (exclusive) insistence on face-to-face and embodied collaboration and synchronous sound. Most significantly, our study is poised to develop a more inclusive understanding of the possibilities for music theatre to engage older adults, and to develop virtual programs focusing on well-being that alleviate loneliness and isolation in creative, and newly accessible ways.

COVID-19 has highlighted multiple food system vulnerabilities, revealing equity and social justice issues along the supply chain and in food system governance. These issues disproportionately impact marginalized groups (e.g. Indigenous, racialized, seniors, single parents) and are rarely centered in visions and interventions to create sustainable food futures. The issues are also not limited to pandemic-related crises; communities will experience such food systems impacts with other major socioeconomic disturbances, such as climate change. Developing resilient, equitable food systems is a critical challenge for sustainable communities, which requires rethinking approaches to how the `benefits and burdens' of local food production are distributed and how processes for decision-making navigate issues of representation and difference. Participatory approaches are needed to ensure plans are grounded in local realities, sociocultural and environmental contexts, and food justice. Such approaches are supported through frameworks and tools, such as placed-based visualizations, that enable meaningful participation of diverse groups in participatory processes.

This research will use an equity lens to develop planning and engagement tools, namely interactive visualizations (using video game software), for exploring sustainable, equitable local food futures. The project will (1) develop an equity framework for guiding food systems planning, and (2) apply the framework to create a visualization tool for examining different local food futures. Using a community-based participatory approach, researchers will work with local government and civil society to contextualize the equity framework by planning with the voices and considerations of diverse community members. It will then apply the framework in an iterative, co-development process of a visualization tool that is user-friendly (to diverse users) and accessible through multiple means (e.g., online, personal devices, public computers, etc.). The visualization will model local neighbourhoods, allowing users to virtually walk through these spaces, visualize different food strategies, and gain insight on how these strategies benefit and impact community members differently. The project will culminate in workshops with local government, community groups, and community members, who will explore the visualization and discuss ways for developing sustainable, resilient, and just local food systems for a post-COVID world.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) technology is fundamental to modern engineering product design. Every mass-produced physical product was modelled in CAD, and every undergraduate mechanical engineering student in the world learns to design with CAD. Despite this immense impact, there is little published data and an absence of research to systematically understand and then optimize the process of the engineer designing with CAD. This stands in stark contrast to rich bodies of knowledge on other stages in the engineering design process, such as concept development and selection, and prototyping.

Real CAD user data has long been unattainable for researchers because of private servers and proprietary data. Thus, CAD researchers have historically generated data via laboratory-based human subject experiments, historically inhibited by a number of challenges: 1) difficulty recruiting expert participants, 2) reliance on special equipment limiting parallelism of data collection, 3) lack of naturalistic setting, 4) limited reliable extraction of data.

Because of COVID, laboratory-based CAD experiments were halted, and professional engineering designers were forced to work from home. This proved to be an unexpected opportunity for CAD research data collection whereby, via cloud-CAD and teleconference tools, the potential to administer CAD research experiments remotely has emerged.

We propose to seize this opportunity to develop and validate a novel protocol for capturing Computer-Aided Design behaviours from distributed remote participants. This protocol will be designed to collect reliable and large-scale data via modern cloud-CAD tools. This allows the participants to design from their places of work or their homes. We will further develop an automated data extraction process, as well as a framework for reliable analysis of data, both from an industrial and an educational perspective.

The method will enable an explosion of CAD and design research, exploring tasks ranging from open-ended conceptual design to detailed prescriptive design, and from novice- to expert-focused challenges. The new knowledge will serve as a basis for theory-building. Further, experiments using our method can lead to first-ever tailored training material to scaffold along the CAD learning curve, accelerating the mastery of CAD for mechanical engineers around the world. Ultimately, this work will improve the productivity of CAD design, increasing the rate and output of engineering innovation.

La pandémie bouleverse les arts de la scène. Mais elle fournit une occasion unique de repenser les méthodologies de recherche-création pour y intégrer le développement technologique et trouver des formes de conception, de production et de diffusion plus inclusives. Notre projet de recherche, mené avec la collaboration de plusieurs facultés de l'Université de Montréal et de partenaires publics et privés-l'Opéra de Montréal, l'École nationale de théâtre, l'École de danse de Montréal, l'organisme pour les musiques autochtones Musique nomade, le studio de création immersive Normal Studio, le centre collégial de transfert technologique INEDI-a pour objectif d'explorer le potentiel de la réalité augmentée pour renouveler les méthodologies de recherche-création dans les arts de la scène et à l'opéra, développer de nouvelles formes de spectacles, plus intimes, et rejoindre de nouveaux publics, chez eux. Les technologies sont souvent considérées comme de simples moyens d'amplifier la scène ou de la diffuser et elles ont peu d'impact sur la méthodologie de création : la division du travail reste stricte et le processus linéaire, avec l'intervention successive des différents corps de métiers. Mais les reconfigurations de la scène et de la salle que permet la réalité augmentée exige une réinvention des manières de travailler pour intégrer, dès la conception des ouvres, une réflexion sur la médialité et la localisation pour d'autres espaces et d'autres publics. Les dernières technologies de réalité augmentée permettent d'introduire dans l'espace réel des personnages virtuels, avec des accessoires et des décors modélisés, parfaitement intégrés dans l'environnement. Ce dispositif pourrait trouver une application stimulante dans les arts de la scène et permettre de créer des micro-opéras pour l'espace domestique ou public, à différentes échelles, dont les gens pourraient faire l'expérience dans l'intimité de leur foyer ou ailleurs, dans une proximité unique avec les interprètes. Avec la pandémie, ces expérimentations sur les méthodologies de la recherche-création intégrées à la recherche et au développement technologiques sont devenues urgentes. Mais elles demandent des investissements, en temps, en énergie et en argent, que les institutions culturelles n'ont pas le loisir de faire. L'université est le lieu idéal pour mener à bien des telles expériences collaboratives, qui sont risquées mais qui pourraient avoir des retombées exemplaires pour tous les arts de la scène.

This project will monitor fast-changing public support, awareness, and compliance with adaptive, periodic and restrictive public health measures that Canada and other countries may need to adopt due to the emerging reality of an endemic COVID-19 that cannot be eradicated. The changing extent to which the public adheres to, and is supportive of, effective, adaptive restrictive measures can enable health system resilience and the minimization of excess morbidity and mortality. Accurately measuring public adherence and support for restrictive measures will enable public health agencies and vaccination clinics to identify location-specific, demographic-specific and culturally appropriate messaging/intervention to increase information equity for and readiness among at-risk communities and populations. We will do this by:

(a) Using mathematical models to calculate the relative readiness of different populations for adaptive restrictive policy initiatives of varying magnitude

(b) Creating a barometer of dynamic readiness for restrictions across broad populations

(c) Building a predictive forecasting model to help inform the ways in which readiness drives the effectiveness of different restrictive public health policies

d) Providing an authoritative public portal to enable knowledge translation of these models and the data for the public and key stakeholders

We will conduct a multi-country survey in a range of eleven low, middle and high-income countries, with a concentration of the respondents from Canada. Using a non-incentivized, random, and anonymous survey engagement model, we will compare regions and countries and access the broadest possible group of online respondents, including individuals who rarely, if ever, answer surveys. Readiness measures will be designed and employed that are optimized both for user experience and enhanced, long-term modeling. Readiness items will include both public perception assessment (e.g. about what percentage of people in your neighborhood trust public health recommendations?) and personal readiness assessment (e.g. about what percentage of the time do you follow local public health recommendations?). Data analysis will employ a number of techniques including clustering analysis, triangulation and dimensionality reduction. Research findings will be presented through peer-reviewed publications, an interactive map and open engagement with the live data which will be hosted using an Application Programming Interface.

This project is based on the premise that it is an ethically responsible research practice to respond to current forms of social (post)human and environmental suffering. We propose to do that developing a 'methodology' that brings together nature and (post)humans through the arts. During the pandemic, isolation has been, and still is, a disruptive experience that has given new meanings to spaces, objects, pets, and plants. The structural elements that create inequities and suffering in our communities have intensified the negative impact of the pandemic. We, scientists and partners, have been forced to re-imagine how we relate and do research. Our community-arts research with young people was stalled. We moved in-person art workshops and research interviews to online modes of delivery. These changes produced 'data' but did not facilitate the desired level of engagement. Lack of tech skills, devices, or connection, was a marginalizing social factor in research engagement, and participants referred to Zoom fatigue and isolation. To overcome these challenges, we developed a new equity focused community-based 'methodology' that aimed to improve social connections, mental health, and re-activate our on-going studies. Now, we aim to consolidate and document this research approach to finish studies with Black and Hispanic/Latinx young parents, youth experiencing gender-based violence, youth in rural locations with mental health issues, and staff working with these groups. In addition to further developing and documenting the unfolding of this inquiry, we want to create knowledge on the relationship between nature, art, practices, and research, and study the impact of community building of this 'methodology' for isolated individuals. By acknowledging social (post)human and environmental distress, our approach aims to include and empower BIPOC youth and the communities that surround them. We will put the relations between nature, devices, and the post(human) at the core of knowledge creation. Researchers, participants, and community partners will engage in a creative process through art workshops as a method of inquiry. This unconventional approach uses different data generation strategies (nature walks, visual and written reflections, textiles and creative writing workshops). It has the potential for re-thinking complex relationships between inequities, community-based post-human inquiry, nature and art practices for a (post)pandemic world.

The waiting time for triage in emergency departments (ED) is an ongoing concern across Canada?. Multiple approaches have been proposed to generate worksheets and visual reminders; predict patients' wait time and optimize waiting queue; use sensors for continuously monitoring patients' status in triage; develop new e-triage methods to address COVID situation and in-home triage to reduce visits to ED, and improving the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) through computational modeling of resource availability and patient routing in the ED. However, there are concerns about the reliability, accuracy, feasibility, security, and management of the above approaches. 

We propose Triage-Bot, a voice, video, and data driven software service, to leverage the existing triage system specifically for the pandemic situation using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. Triage-Bot would allow patients or their caregivers to show Canadian health card information to the camera, state the health situation using voice, allow the system to automatically measure vital signs (heart rate, heart rate variability, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, temperature, stress and pain levels) levels using face video, and link the information with patients' primary care and hospital data to accurately assess the criticality of a patient's health condition. Triage-Bot can be deployed with existing health care systems either at the hospital ED entrance to manage triage patient queue, or online for in-home health assessment of patients with chronic health conditions. If a patients' situation deteriorates during the waiting period, the patient can opt to be re-evaluated by Triage-Bot.

The research team has a strong track record in designing chat and voice bots, medical data analytics, data management, secured data access, health care quality, and socio-ethical aspects of AI. Despite the inherent risks of technology acceptance, and challenges in video-based measurement of vital signs, voice communication, secure data linking, and analytics of multi-stream (voice/text/image/video) data for health assessment following the CTAS, the team includes experts from multiple disciplines to address the above research challenges. Success of this pilot study would allow remote and reliable assessment of health conditions of patients with chronic diseases or COVID, reduce triage wait time, enable patients to reassess aggravating health condition in ED, and improve health care services in Canada.

Medical literature from "in person care" suggests that therapeutic relationship between patient and clinician (P/C) is a key factor in determining treatment outcomes not only for mental health but also across clinical specialties. Depression is a quintessential disorder where therapeutic relationship is key to optimal treatment outcomes. The pandemic restrictions have resulted in a sudden transition from "in person" to virtual care, particularly for mental health consultations. While the pandemic has accelerated adoption of virtual care, there is no metric (score card) to evaluate therapeutic engagement from multi-modal data streams collected during routine virtual care.

Virtual care has unique advantages and the potential for collection of digital data during routine clinical care which could inform development of an automated engagement scorecard (AES). There is existing literature examining three data streams: eye-movement, speech and facial gestures in monitoring engagement in the virtual and gaming environments. Further, each of the data streams has multiple sub-streams which are amenable to machine learning (ML) with established literature in areas such as speech with natural language processing. Virtual care with platforms such as Zoom allow for automatic recording of these features which in the presence of ML-based algorithms could generate AES.

The objective of this 2 year project is AES development from multimodal data (e.g. from Zoom) tied in with participant and their clinician (P/C) self-reports obtained from participants with depression seen at the Mental Health Program at St. Michael's Hospital. During 1st year, we will use ML-based tools to develop an AES from multi-modal data (eye movement, speech, gestures) in relation to clinical outcomes and engagement metrics among 50 P/C. During the 2nd year, we will conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial (50 P/C-with/without AES) to examine feasibility, engagement metrics and outcomes. This interdisciplinary project led by an early career clinician includes established leaders in domains including biomedical engineering, machine learning and biostatistics. There is no existing AES for mental health virtual care, the pandemic has accelerated adoption of virtual care which will continue post-pandemic. Development of AES and preliminary demonstration of utility will address a crucial unmet/unexamined need to optimize outcomes for virtual care with potential  applicability across disciplines.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the complex interdisciplinary realities of health and social services provision in Canada. Community engagement remains crucial to advancing prevention strategies and care delivery. For example, national vaccination efforts expanded the development of Mobile Health Units to bring access to the most acutely underserved neighbourhoods and achieve vital, short-term public health milestones in culturally sustaining ways. How might these principles of community-engaged services enhance social wellness in the post-COVID context?

Our research examines how mobile community-arts practices enhance, support, and sustain post-pandemic flourishing. We propose the development of a mobile arts unit capable of transporting materials, facilitators, and space-an incubator for collective creative engagement and social wellness. By emphasizing locally-defined definitions of value beyond individual (clinical) health measures, social wellness reframes "social determinants" of health to include community-strengthening practices like equity, access, belonging, intergenerativity, and justice. What aspects of mobile pandemic response can inspire community-engaged arts services to support post-COVID recovery across the lifecourse? Can we measure, appraise, and track a wellness typology associated with mobilizing community arts practices? In Canada, arts engagement's potential to address systemic barriers (race-, socioeconomic-, gender-based) to health remains underexplored. Formal arts-wellness policies have international precedent (e.g., UK, Sweden, Norway). In Ontario, a timely policy window exists with the recent pilot of social prescribing: a model of social care that connects people to local non-clinical supports (e.g., housing, food security). Collective arts engagement remains an unmapped opportunity in these overlapping contexts. Our expert team includes researchers, physicians, arts practitioners, policymakers, and non-profit partners in arts-wellness, participatory methods, social prescription, and community care. Co-constructed participatory methods (incl. virtual) will assess arts engagement as a measure of social wellness, cost-saving initiative, and method to enhance health outcomes centring social relationality. Local, provincial, and national-level policy briefings; white papers; and live demonstrations will underscore how community-based arts access facilitates social wellness as a form of post-pandemic survival and flourishing.

In many emergency conditions such as acute stroke, patients who are eligible to participate in scientifically important and potentially beneficial randomized clinical trials (RCTs) often cannot provide their own consent to participate, meaning that they may be deprived of enrollment into RCTs, or their enrollment may be delayed while researchers attempt to find a substitute decision-maker to consent on their behalf. Common practices including the use deferral of consent may lead to patients being enrolled into trials against their wishes.  Moreover, variations in regional guidelines  mean that access to trials using these mechanisms is inconsistent and potentially unfair. 

The pandemic has greatly exacerbated these existing issues.

In light of the recognized challenges surrounding consent, worsened by COVID-19, we propose to explore advance consent as a novel approach to enroll patients into acute stroke trials. Advance consent - in which patients are asked ahead of time to consent to participation in research should they ever become eligible in the future - is allowed under Canadian and American guidelines, but has never been tried in acute stroke trials. We have chosen to study advance consent in acute stroke trials because stroke is a common and serious condition with an active clinical trial community, and recent RCTs have encountered consent-related challenges.  Ultimately, we believe that advance consent is translatable to other emergency conditions and could be expanded to enhance the ethical acceptability and scientific integrity of emergency research more broadly. We see this as an issue of fairness, transparency and respect for persons, in addition to research methodology and efficiency.

In this grant, our multidisciplinary team of experts will complete:

1. a foundations phase in which we engage with the existing literature, patient partners and other stakeholders to develop an acceptable model of advance consent to trial in acute stroke situations;

2. a feasibility phase in which we trial advance consent for patients seen in stroke prevention clinics and track metrics including patient uptake, impact on clinic workflow, and the patient experience; and

3. an integrated knowledge translation process in which we work with stakeholders from project conception to completion to ensure its results are useful to knowledge users. 

Our multidisciplinary team was the first in the world to publicly report daily SARS-CoV-2 (CoV-2) RNA in community wastewaters (613covid.ca/wastewater). Used by Ottawa Public Health, this wastewater-based pathogen surveillance system can anticipate changes in community COVID-19 burden by several days and is thus a valuable adjunct to traditional clinical surveillance methods.

Despite this, day-to-day variability of the fragile viral RNA biomarker has been an issue and the low levels reported often skirt the method's limits of detection and quantitation. It also does not directly gauge daily levels of "community immunity", a metric that would be extremely valuable to public health units given the long lead times and logistical complexity of existing serology-based surveys.

To this end, using a highly sensitive, quantitative immuno-linked PCR method called Multiplex Paired-antibody Amplified Detection (MPAD), we have quantified CoV-2 protein in wastewaters at levels in far greater excess of viral RNA. The normalized CoV-2 protein data correlate well with both wastewater-based CoV-2 RNA signal and public health metrics (i.e., PCR testing and hospitalizations).  In addition, our preliminary analysis has shown the presence of secretory IgA (SIgA) in wastewater at levels suitable for detection by MPAD.

The objectives of this proposal are to:

1) Validate MPAD assays for quantification of CoV-2 proteins (Spike and Nucleocapsid) and anti-CoV-2 spike protein SIgA in wastewater.

2) Compare sensitivity and reproducibility of protein- vs. RNA-based detection of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater.

3) Establish a wastewater-derived measure of community immunity and determine any correlation with clinical seroprevalence.

Our established network enables sampling at locations that service indigenous communities and long-term care facilities. These relationships are critical for the successful completion of the objectives. At the same time, deploying these immunoassays in communities will provide actionable information to local public health units.

We believe that quantitative profiling of CoV-2 protein and antibodies from wastewater in rapid time represents a facile and sensitive epidemiological tool to follow community prevalence of fecally-shed pathogens and immunological correlates of protection. As such, the deliverables represent an entirely new epidemiological methodology and tools that can be applied to other infectious diseases, in addition to COVID-19.

PhoneMe project is a public digital platform featuring place-based poetry recorded on mobile phones. It was launched in 2017 as a community literacy research initiative and a digital map showcasing diverse site-specific poetic practices. In 2019, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person work was stopped, shifting research activities online. In 2021, the research team has launched a free PhoneMe mobile app that makes poetic data generation a user-driven autonomous process. This study will evaluate the effectiveness of such mobile applications in the research of community connectedness in the time of social isolation and distancing. It will train diverse participant groups in generating multimodal data via the PhoneMe app to express their values related to places and spaces in their communities. Thus, it will address the disruptive effect of COVID-19 on active community-engaged research and will explore potential applications of mobile technology in qualitative research.

Objectives

1. To devise novel research protocols that employ PhoneMe app in community contexts

2. To test and evaluate the effectiveness of PhoneMe app as a participant/user data generating tool

3. To understand how mobile technology can increase our understanding of community place-based values

By creating opportunities for the community to draw on their own literacy practices, record poems in-situ and share them on an interactive digital map, PhoneMe project addresses issues of self-representation in connection to the community spaces. In its first iteration, the project was carried out through holding researcher-led workshops and integrating the data into an interactive digital map. In its current stage, the PhoneMe app places emphasis on user-generated content. It blurs the researcher/research participant divide and creates a unique inclusive space of digital dialogue and knowledge exchange in times of social isolation.

To bridge multiple lines of difference, PhoneMe app has protocols to increase user engagement with the data and each other. The project will create inclusive research protocols that deepen community leadership in this process and will effectively transform research into a process of community self-determination. As a free mobile app, PhoneMe can be used by anyone, anywhere, in any language. The multimodal user-generated data could be accessed by interdisciplinary groups researchers and research participants, thus expanding this research across disciplines.

Background: Research using live SARS-CoV-2 virus requires costly level 3 biocontainment facilities and equipment. It also poses risk to trained personnel handling the virus. This represents a barrier to both research on pathobiology of COVID-19 acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and the development of novel therapies. Therefore, there is great need for an accessible animal model of COVID-19 ARDS. We have generated a pseudotyped version of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) bearing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (VSV-CoV2-S). The interaction between the COVID-19 spike protein and the ACE2 receptor on host cells is thought to underlie the severe pulmonary inflammation that is often present in patients with COVID-19. Our pilot results demonstrate that intratracheal administration of VSV-CoV2-S to transgenic mice expressing human ACE2 results in a severe acute lung injury phenotype with features of ARDS. We propose to build on our preliminary findings by further characterizing this novel model, testing different pseudotyped versions of VSV using variant strains, and assessing novel therapies.

Hypothesis: Intratracheal delivery of VSV-CoV2-S to transgenic (K18) mice expressing the human ACE2 gene will produce:  1) lung injury features that mirror those seen in human patients with COVD-19 ARDS; 2) more severe injury with variants of concern (e.g. delta variant) compared to our initial pseudotyped virus; 3) different phenotypes with male versus female mice, and young versus old mice.

Methods:  We will intratracheally inoculate K18 human ACE2 transgenic mice with VSV-CoV2-S to induce acute lung injury. Features of lung injury will be assessed, with a particular focus on vascular inflammation and intravascular coagulation. We will develop new pseudotyped viruses expressing variant spike proteins and compare the lung injury phenotype to our initial model. Effects will be assessed in young and old mice, as well as male and female mice. Finally, we will explore novel therapies to reduce lung information or enhance lung repair.

Novelty:  This innovative animal model of COVID-19 ARDS will provide a valuable tool to accelerate our understanding of COVID-19. It will be widely accessible and safer as the model will not require expensive and restrictive level 3 biocontainment facilities. This will enhance our understanding of COVID-19 pathobiology and help develop new therapeutic approaches.

Studies show that the COVID-19 crisis has brought about alarming rates of insomnia, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress in healthcare workers. The percentage of healthcare workers on atypical work schedules, normally around 30%, increased since the beginning of the pandemic due to organizational changes and sanitary procedures. Atypical work schedules have been associated with shift work disorder (SWD) involving insomnia and sleepiness during work shifts. SWD affects usually around 30% of shift workers, increases anxiety and depression, decreases productivity, and enhances absenteeism at work. Disrupted sleep is a cornerstone for the development of mental difficulties which in turn exacerbates insomnia, anxiety and depression. Improving the sleep of healthcare workers is crucial for protecting their mental health and increasing their resilience to face future waves of the pandemic. The main challenge to helping these healthcare workers is `access to' and `time for' treatment. We therefore propose an innovative cognitive behavior therapy targeting sleep difficulties to improve the mental health of healthcare workers with SWD delivered in a mobile health format to tackle these challenges.

This grant will allow the transformation of a proven face-to-face cognitive behavioral treatment for SWD (Cognitive-BT-SWD) specifically tailored to the needs of healthcare workers working on atypical work schedules into a mobile health treatment modality capable of delivering treatment to a great number of patients by few psychologists in a short amount of time and at the convenience of the patients. It will be beta-tested in participants on atypical schedules by psychologists via an adapted version of the digital mobile health platform (COAST by NOCTEM Health) to optimize flexibility and efficacy for healthcare workers. Focus groups will be conducted after treatment to verify ease of use and acceptability of the treatment delivery method. Local knowledge appropriation committees composed of local experts (management, unions representatives, knowledge users) will support the scientific process allowing efforts to be focused on developing evidence-based solutions rapidly applicable in the workplace.

Healthcare workers are suffering and urgently need help. This innovative new treatment delivery platform, easily scalable, will render possible the deployment of this new form of treatment to other provincial CIUSSS and regions in Canada.

Les espaces publics jouent un rôle central dans le fonctionnement économique, social et écologique des villes. Par définition, ils doivent pouvoir accueillir tous les acteurs d'une société de manière égale. Plusieurs facteurs contribuent ainsi à rendre les espaces publics équitables, divers et inclusifs. Parmi ceux-ci, l'expression formelle et l'aménagement des espaces publics affectent largement la manière avec laquelle ceux-ci sont perçus et vécus par différents groupes de la population. Ainsi, un espace public qui semble accueillant pour certains peut en repousser d'autres. Cet forme d'injustice est amplifiée par des aménagements conçus et programmés par les groupes culturellement dominants.

Au Canada, la majorité des municipalités ont noté une forte augmentation de la fréquentation de leurs espaces publics depuis 2020. La pandémie, qui explique cette hausse d'usage, a entraîné plusieurs conflits entre les utilisateurs des espaces publics, rendant ceux-ci moins accessibles pour les groupes dominés. Afin de répondre au besoin urgent de concevoir la ville post-pandémie et de rendre celle-ci plus accueillante pour tous, nous nous penchons sur l'équité, la diversité et l'inclusion de l'espace public. Au centre de notre démarche se situe une analyse participante des qualités des espaces publics pour différents groupes de la population porteurs de marqueurs de diversité. Or, dû à la crise sanitaire mondiale, nos efforts ont été limités par la difficulté de collecter des données visuelles sur les espaces publics canadiens.

De manière de palier aux restrictions de déplacement entre les villes et les provinces et de poursuivre son travail d'analyse du degré d'équité, de diversité et d'inclusion des espaces publics, la Chaire UNESCO en paysage urbain sollicite un soutien financier du programme Recherches novatrices en contexte de pandémie 2021 des Fonds Nouvelles frontières en recherche pour développer un logiciel de collecte automatique de photographies d'espaces publics à partir de Google Street View. Cet outil numérique permettra entre autres de créer une base de données visuelle d'espaces publics au Canada, mais aussi dans plusieurs autres pays au monde. Ensemble, l'outil de collecte de données et la base de données permettront d'offrir une réponse aux besoins de la ville post-pandémie et de mettre un terme aux problèmes d'exclusion et d'inégalité de l'espace public pour les groupes de populations dominés.

The rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic is caused by infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), a newly emergent virus affecting >230 million & killing >4.7 million individuals worldwide. The nature and effectiveness of immunity controlling SARS-CoV-2 infection remains incompletely understood. There are currently 4 vaccines against COVID-19 approved, but the correlates of immune protection (COP) as well as their durability are poorly defined. Epidemiological studies have shown that in up to 80% of infected individuals, disease symptoms are  mild, highlighting that key immunological mechanisms are at work that protect a large part of the infected population, while failing to exert immune protection in others.

Accumulating evidence points to the presence of pre-existing, cross-reactive B cells to SARS-CoV-2, which originate from previous exposure to the four distinct circulating endemic seasonal human corona viruses (hCoVs). Hence, distinct levels of memory B cells are present in individuals that have not been exposed to SARS-CoV2.

Our recent studies have identified B cell epitopes of antibodies that are cross-reactive to SARS-CoV2 and endemic hCoVs. This suggest that immunity established by previous endemic seasonal hCoV infection can confer partial immune protection to SARS-CoV2 and serves as a predictor of COVID-19 disease severity and vaccine efficacy. Moreover, these insights suggest that cross-reactive antibodies can be identified and their in-depth molecular and functional characterization could pave the way for a pan-Corona virus vaccine.

The proposed studies aim to develop novel methodologies to define structural and linear B cell epitopes of antibodies specific to SARS-CoV2 and seasonal hCoVs, and generate a workflow to determine the molecular, structural and functional features of these novel antibodies.

The expected insights will:

(i) will pinpoint of whether variants of concern (VOC) escape pre-existing immunity by seasonal hCoVs,

(ii) define of whether pre-existing immunity serves as COP upon vaccination, allowing stratification of vulnerable individuals that require booster immunizations,

(iii) provide details of the antigenic hotspots that confer immune protection, information key for second-generation SARS-CoV2 vaccines and basis for a pan-coronavirus vaccine.

The outcomes of the proposed research may be used beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and their positive impacts will be long lasting.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality in industrialized countries, accounting annually for more than 20,500 deaths in Canada only. In Canada, the majority (85-90%) of lung cancer cases are due to long-term tobacco use, while 10-15% of cases occur in people who have never smoked. The typical age at diagnosis is 70, with slightly more men being diagnosed than women. The five-year survival rate of lung cancer patients is just 19%, largely due to the fact that most of the patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage. In this regard, low-dose chest CT screening has been shown to have a crucial impact on the early diagnosis of lung cancer. With the emergence of a new virus, COVID-19, the World Health Organization declared it as a global pandemic that has impacted all aspects of lung cancer care. Furthermore, the incidence of lung cancer is found to be higher in older populations, and this becomes more pertinent to protect these vulnerable sub-populations from COVID-19 as well as identifying the high-risk individuals who will need timely diagnostic assessment for lung cancer. To improve the accuracy and speed of lung cancer detection as well as to identify high-risk individuals who will develop lung cancer, it is imperative to take advantage of emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). The overall objective of our project is to build robust and reproducible AI-based imaging biomarkers to predict lung cancer risk, thereby identifying high-risk individuals who will require diagnostic follow-ups. To achieve this, we will build AI-based model utilizing a cohort of 5,000 patients that underwent lung cancer resection and has pre-operative chest-CT scan readily available at our institution. The model will be validated in the context of a lung cancer screening program by leveraging a clinical pilot-study initiated in 2021 by the Ministry of Health of Quebec. Through the development of diagnostic AI-tools, we could potentially avoid unnecessary follow-up visits of low-risk individuals to clinics. With the subsequent second wave of COVID-19, this work will pave a way to overcome barriers posed by the pandemic on lung cancer diagnosis and follow-ups, leading to better healthcare outcomes.

In the face of COVID-19, tenant researchers, community organizers and academics in the Right to Remain Collective have had to reimagine what community-based research in the congregate housing environment of SRO hotels can look like. When the pandemic arrived, our collective joined forces with other frontline community groups and mutual aid networks to assist in distributing necessary digital resources (ie: cellphones, wifi, tablets) so those at risk could maintain the social connections needed for livelihoods and survival. Those resources have enabled our tenant researchers, most with significant digital literacy and access barriers, to steadily build a small yet crucial peer-to-peer digital network within and across their hotels. Only one year in the making, that network now provides new possibilities for accessible and independent community-based research methods for residents that would otherwise be dangerously cut off from social life. In this project, we will build on this early emergency network to widen and deepen digital access and literacy for more SRO tenant leaders. At a time of heightened isolation, we will connect tenants both within and across their buildings to safely facilitate their organizing, advocacy, and arts-based practice, while meaningfully exploring the methodological potential present for policy learning and rights-based leadership through digital networking. As a majority low-income, multi-racial, urban Indigenous community, where all residents face complex and intersecting health crises of precarious housing, poisoned drugs and mental illness, meaningful digital access and literacy in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside has historically been a significant barrier to both research participation and the social connections crucial to community cohesion and health. Our purpose in pursuing digital access as a methodology is not only to demonstrate its importance for engaged research in low-income communities, but our findings have great potential to shift the status quo and redefine digital justice as a utility, rather than a luxury, for a post-pandemic Downtown Eastside.     

Social and health indicators suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted some communities more than others, and in profoundly different ways. For many communities, pandemic responses, such as stay-at-home orders, social distancing and isolation requirements, and altered business and employment opportunities, have accentuated pre-existing differentials in vulnerability and have exposed novel dimensions of community resilience. In particular, the pandemic has shed new light on the importance of public places and digital places as loci of social interactions, information, recreation, and economic activity, and community members' wellbeing and resilience.

Drawing on seven years of academic collaboration, SCERN (Smart Citizens Enabling Resilient Neighbourhoods) will create timely methods for leveraging and integrating active and passive forms of citizen expression and participation to build knowledge of community- and individual-level stress and resilience related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The main goals of SCERN are to understand the interactive contributions of public and digital places to stress and resilience experienced by vulnerable communities' during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. With this information, we will envision ways of improving post-pandemic resilience through public and digital space interventions. In this project, we focus on methodological developments needed to achieve these goals. 

The project goals will be addressed through the following main objectives: (1) transform our methods for measuring and mapping stress and resilience at an intra-urban scale in geo-located social media expressions to identify vulnerable communities in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic by radically expanding our ability to leverage digital social platforms (DSPs); (2) create new methods for participatory mapping practices to create a platform that enables vulnerable community members to directly record personal and collective geographies about peri- and post-pandemic stress and resilience; and (3) test the application of these new methods to identify and investigate neighbourhood hotspots of chronic stress and plan for post-pandemic resilience in partnership with the City of Hamilton.

By the end of SCERN, we will translate novel methods into tools for citizen-focused equity and resilience planning that can be directly applied and adapted to urban resilience planning globally and beyond the scope of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ecologists have made amazing strides toward understanding ecological communities using increasingly creative, well-designed experiments in nature. However, much of this understanding has been heavily biased toward temperate ecosystems, reflecting the high concentration of universities and research funding. 

Temperate bias in ecology stands in the way of identifying general principles and predictive frameworks that apply across existing ecosystems and will translate to new ones.  Accelerating climate change, species invasions, and wildlife exploitation are rapidly creating a world of novel species assemblages living in no-analogue climates.  Ecological predictions for these new ecosystems will be impossible without a robust understanding of general ecological principles built on data from across latitudes. 

A promising emerging approach to combat temperate bias is the distributed experiment, where a network of collaborators uses a consistent experimental protocol and combine their data into a unified analysis. Distributed experiments combine the power of field experiments with the generality of global syntheses, enabling data collection at an otherwise-impossible scale. They were also the only type of international field work possible during the travel restrictions of the global pandemic. However, there are limitations to the common model where one person designs and organizes the project, and others  `volunteer' their time, taking a few days out of normal fieldwork to participate in exchange for authorship: this model excludes some places without researchers and some researchers without funding, and is limited to very short and simple experiments.

This project's objectives are to transform the distributed experiment approach above to:

- build a collaborative network of academic & nonacademic partners from the high arctic to Equator, to

- conduct in-depth standardized experiments testing fundamental principles in ecology and evolution, to

- combat temperate bias in ecological data and research, to

- generate a robust understanding of ecological patterns across latitudes

We focus on interactions between species-the threads that bind ecosystems together that are increasingly frayed by global change.

The potential reward is the type of detailed, large-scale data that can transform our understanding of ecology, and a much needed step toward equitable, global science driven collaboratively by diverse participants.

Understanding how urbanization impacts biodiversity is essential for the sustainability of healthy human and wildlife communities, but studies conducted in economically advantaged neighborhoods, cities, and nations dominate the urban ecology literature. In effect, this literature has ignored some of the most rapidly expanding, populous, and biodiverse urban areas across the globe, calling into question the applicability of research findings to these important regions. When studies do consider economically disadvantaged urban areas, they often produce findings that differ from those of studies conducted in wealthier areas. Indeed, we found an impact of socioeconomics on the outcome of competitive interactions among bird species, showing that economic development intensifies competition-related limits on biodiversity in cities. During the pandemic, we, along with many other researchers, shifted to using community science (or citizen science) data to continue our work that previously relied on field studies of birds. Community science datasets can be invaluable for urban ecology research, encompassing more species and cities than any one field study possibly could. Yet, community science data suffer the same biases as other ecological research, with disproportionate representation of economically advantaged regions and participation by members of the public in developed nations. To address this bias, we will develop a novel, community science method to survey bird populations in cities in developing nations, implementing rigorous sampling design with audio recordings collected by trained participants at predetermined survey points and transcribed in partnership with local experts. By partnering with and empowering local experts, we expect to be able to overcome the challenges associated with work in urban centers in developing nations, including pandemic-related travel restrictions. We will develop the method in one urban area and test it in multiple cities in Asia, Africa, and South America. Urban areas are essential for the sustainability of both human and wildlife populations, as acknowledged by the United Nations' goal of Sustainable Cities and Communities, a component of the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all UN Member States in 2015. This community science method will allow important advances in urban ecology while also beginning to address the historical neglect of economically disadvantaged regions in ecological research.