University of Alberta: Canada Foundation for Innovation

Achievements

Canada Foundation for Innovation

Women and depression

Dr Kathleen Hegadoren began her career as a nurse specializing in child and adolescent psychiatry. An insatiable curiosity about the brain and how it works led her to a doctorate in neuropsychopharmacology (drugs that affect thought processes in the brain) and neurobiology (the basic biology of the brain). She puts her unique combined background in nursing and basic research to work in the study of depression in women.

Passionate about improving the mental health of women, Hegadoren notes that twice as many women as men are diagnosed with depression. Her research could offer valuable information to help improve therapies specifically for women. "Men and women are fundamentally, biologically different," she says. "However, most research on lab mice and rats is done on males. The results can be very different in females. We need more research with women so we can be sure drugs are just as effective and safe for women as they are for men."

Kathleen Hegadoren
Nursing
CFI New Opportunities

Sifting through the data

Our society collects tremendous amounts of data—business transactions, medical information, satellite images. The list goes on and on. Computer disk space is relatively cheap so we store all these data.

But how to find the relevant information, understand it, and then use it in decision making? That's not so easy, says Dr. Osmar Zaïane.

"With today's technology, we retrieve information quite well," he explains. "However, decision makers want to very rapidly and efficiently understand the general trends in the data. Knowledge discovery is a process that extracts implicit patterns from very large collections of data. We call this data mining and it is my main research interest."

"I enjoy the challenge of doing research because I like the personal reward of discovering new, more efficient and effective solutions knowing that they can have a significant impact on our everyday life."

Osmar Zaïane
Computing Science
CFI New Opportunities

The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), an independent corporation created by the Government of Canada in 1997 to fund research infrastructure, strengthens the capacity of Canadian universities, colleges, research hospitals, and non-profit research institutions to carry out world-class research and technology development.

What is research infrastructure? It encompasses the state-of-the-art equipment, buildings, laboratories, and databases required to conduct research.

Entrusted with $3.65 billion by the Government of Canada, CFI normally funds up to 40 percent of a project's infrastructure costs, invested in partnership with eligible institutions and their funding partners from the public, private, and voluntary sectors who provide the remainder. Based on this formula, the total capital investment by CFI, the research institutions, and their partners, will exceed $11 billion by 2010.

Support from CFI enables institutions to set their own research priorities in response to areas of importance to all Canadians, thereby allowing researchers to compete with the best from around the world. Canada is positioned in the global, knowledge-based economy and the nation's capacity for innovation is strengthened. What's more, CFI-funded research creates the necessary conditions for sustainable, long-term economic growth, including the creation of spin-off ventures and the commercialization of discoveries. Simply put, research funded by CFI supports improvements to society, quality of life, health, the environment, and public policy.

CFI support is awarded through a merit-based peer review process involving researchers, research administrators, and research users from Canada and abroad. These volunteers, selected on the basis of their expertise and reputation, review proposals and make recommendations.

CFI New Opportunities Fund

In keeping with its mandate to assist universities to attract and retain high-calibre researchers, to create innovative research training environments, and to prepare Canadians for research and other careers that will benefit Canada, CFI established the New Opportunities Fund allocations for eligible universities with a minimum average of $250,000 in sponsored research income (excluding CFI awards) over a three-year period. Although the New Opportunities Fund program no longer exists, under its umbrella, eligible universities were able to provide infrastructure for newly-recruited faculty members, thereby allowing them to undertake leading-edge research.

The following University of Alberta researchers were successful in the peer review competition for New Opportunities funds from August 1998 through 2001.

Darryl Adamko, Paediatrics
John Aitchison, Cell Biology
Declan Ali, Biological Sciences
Stephen Archer, Medicine
Christopher Backhouse, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Marie Michele Barry, Medical Microbiology and Immunology
Richard Batycky, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Christian Beaulieu, Biomedical Engineering
David Bennett, Rehabilitation Medicine
Mark Boyce, Biological Sciences
Richard Brachman, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Deborah Burshtyn, Medical Microbiology and Immunology
Shelagh Campbell, Biological Sciences
Joseph Casey, Biological Sciences
K. Ming Chan, Medicine
Rajni Chibbar, Laboratory Medicine and Pathology
Phillip Choi, Chemical and Materials Engineering
C. Peter Constabel, Biological Sciences
Sandra Davidge, Obstetrics and Gynaecology
Jonathan Dennis, Biological Sciences
Abdulhakem Elezzabi, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Janet Elliott, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Kenneth Froese, Public Health Sciences
Theresa Garvin, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Moira Glerum, Medical Genetics
J.N. Glover, Biochemistry
Gregory Goss, Biological Sciences
Martin Guay, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Joel Haber, Chemistry
Kathleen Hegadoren, Nursing
Frank Hegmann, Physics
Biao Huang, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Pean-Yue Jar, Mechanical Engineering
Andrew Knight, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Paige Lacy, Medicine
Francis Lau, Business
Subhash Lele, Mathematical Sciences
Paul Lu, Computing Science
Michael Macgregor, Computing Science
Katherine Magor, Biological Sciences
Paul Melancon, Cell Biology
Alkiviathes Meldrum, Physics
Evelyn Merrill, Biological Sciences
Evangelos Michelakis, Medicine
Stephen Moore, Agricultural Food and Nutritional Science
Petr Musilek, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mario Nascimento, Computing Science
Marcel Polikar, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Donald Raboud, Mechanical Engineering
Tracy Raivio, Biological Sciences
Robert Rankin, Physics
Pierre-Nicholas Roy, Chemistry
Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Felix Sperling, Biological Sciences
Colleen St. Clair, Biological Sciences
Vincent St. Louis, Biological Sciences
David Stuart, Biochemistry
Dwayne Tannant, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Ying Yin Tsui, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Rik Tykwinski, Chemistry
Harissios Vliagoftis, Medicine
Rachel Wevrick, Medical Genetics
Alan Wilman, Biomedical Engineering
Paul Wong, Biological Sciences
Tong Yu, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Osmar Zaïane, Computing Science