Simon Fraser University is one of six institutions in British Columbia that received grants from the 2017 Innovation Fund, sponsored by the federal government.
Canada’s Foundation for Innovation (CFI), recently awarded five SFU researchers with more than $15.8 million in funding for their research projects. This amount grows to $21.3 million when combined with three other collaboration projects with which SFU is affiliated.
The SFU researchers who received the CFI funds are Drs. Carlo Menon, Jeff Sonier, Michael Thewalt, Rodney Vaughan, and Michel Vetterli.
From a provincial perspective, BC has acquired $98.4 million in funding from CFI for the 2017 fiscal year, according to a financial report by CFI.
The Innovation Fund’s purpose is to “support promising and innovative research or technology development in areas where Canada currently is, or has the potential to be, competitive on the global stage,” as stated by CFI’s website.
When compared to UBC, the amount of funding SFU has received from CFI is considerably lower. According to the CFI’s report, UBC received a total of $67.5 million in funding to support 26 of its research projects, whereas SFU’s eight research projects only received $21.3 million in support funds.
The reason for this is because each university is given a quota for its applications, which is based on the size of the existing research budget at that university. Since SFU is a smaller institution than UBC — in particular it does not have a medical faculty which receives huge funding — it has a much smaller quota to begin with. As a result, there is a discrepancy in the amount of fundings the two institutions received.
“Of more relevance to how successful a university was in the competition is the fraction of their quota that they received. SFU got the majority of what it requested, which is remarkable,” said Vetterli, an SFU physics professor.
Receiving this fund will help researchers like Sonier, the chair of the physics department, advance his project. Sonier is looking into providing Canadian and international users of TRIUMF’s Centre for Molecular and Materials Science with new muon beams (a stream of subatomic particles moving near the speed of light) that have unmatched capabilities for the study of quantum systems under normal and extreme conditions.
According to Sonier, quantum systems “provide a description of the microscopic world of atoms and their constituents, [which] is fundamental to materials being developed for transformational technologies.”
Moreover, Vetterli will use the 2017 Innovation Fund to expand the Canadian high-performance computing centre for the ATLAS experiment. The ATLAS experiment studies proton-to-proton collisions at the highest energy level, and the goal is to identify the fundamental blocks of matter and determine how they interact.
“Making new discoveries at the energy frontier requires an enormous amount of data to ensure that the very rare collisions sought are found . . . The latest CFI grant [will] help refresh the ageing equipment at the [Canadian high-performance computing] centre to ensure continued excellent performance, as well as to expand the system to deal with the ongoing data collection,” explained Vetterli.
The Peak reached out to the other grant winners but did not receive a reply by our print deadline. However, they will be researching and developing tools within the field of physics and engineering, according to a press release by the university.
The researchers will use this opportunity to not only advance their research project in their respective fields, but also establish Canada’s image as a forefront researching nation.
