A $1 million donation has enabled SFU’s Beedie School of Business to launch a program geared towards supporting Aboriginal entrepreneurs.

The First Peoples Enterprise Accelerator (FPEA) was made possible by a contribution made from the RBC foundation. It has also funded several scholarships for Aboriginal students interested in entrepreneurship.

The accelerator, which will be run out of RADIUS (RADical Ideas, Useful to Society), a business incubator within the Beedie School, will help fledgling ventures get off their feet and assist in the growth of more mature enterprises.

The FPEA was originally conceived to be part of the First Peoples House, which was proposed in 2012 as a centre for Aboriginal students, faculty, and staff on Burnaby Campus. Once the First Peoples House project is complete, the two ventures will be linked.

Donovan Woollard, ventures director at RADIUS, spoke to the origin of FPEA: “SFU and the RBC Foundation were in conversation around how to have a lasting impact and the concept of supporting entrepreneurship in First Nations communities came up as an exciting prospect.”

This winter, the Enterprise Accelerator will welcome its first cohort. Over the next six months, RADIUS will be “figuring out what do Aboriginal entrepreneurs need and what are the places where we can help them with those needs.” Woollard added, “[There] are lots of ways to waste $1 million and only a few ways to actually add some real value.”

RADIUS is currently assessing how this particular enterprise accelerator will function. “One of the key questions we’re still grappling with is, ‘are we going to work in individual geographic communities, or are we going to focus on certain sectors that serve a number of different Aboriginal communities?’” said Woollard. He suggested renewable energy as a possible sector on which to focus.

The scholarships are being offered through the Executive MBA in Aboriginal Business and Leadership program. RBC will fund $30,000 in financial awards each year to four students for the next 10 years.

Mark Selman, program director for this EMBA, explained the benefits of such financial support: “The EMBA program costs over $50,000 to take and so for most people, finding sources of support is important.”

Selman noted that since SFU launched the EMBA program forty years ago, in each cohort there has only been on average half a dozen Aboriginal students. The enrolment for the EMBA in Aboriginal Business has risen to 25 Aboriginal students out of 30 in the second cohort of the program. “It’s probably the largest number of Aboriginal students studying business together in North America.”

A large number of First Nations communities have pioneered economic development including the Stó:lō nation in the Fraser Valley and the West Bank nation in the Okanagan, the latter of which has 400 businesses located in its reserve territory. Selman commented, “Each of those areas and many other communities have programs of one sort or another, but I think it will add to the mix to be able to provide certain university level programs.”

Woollard acknowledged that an integral part of the success of the initiative as a whole will be “recognizing that, historically, Aboriginal communities in Canada have been quite purposely marginalized by the settler communities.

“A program like this is very much just one step in coming to a place where we’re starting to undo some of the very gross injustices of the past.”

New research by an SFU professor has shed light on previously overlooked links between environmental exposure and asthma in children.

In the largest study conducted of its kind, SFU’s health science department’s Timothy Takaro, along with AllerGen research centre, published the first year of data examining the pre-birth and young environmental exposures of over 3,600 babies.

The study spanned from 2008 to 2012 across four major Canadian cities, including Vancouver, to search for the link between developmental diseases like asthma and an infant’s environmental exposures.

Despite it being the most common chronic childhood disease, the causes of asthma remain unknown. Takaro’s research is driven by the question: “What about the early life environment and the interaction between the child’s genes sets up risk for [the development] of asthma?”

Takaro is a physician and scientist with degrees in epidemiology and toxicology, with a residency in internal medicine. He is part of AllerGen’s CHILD (Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development) study, which attempts to find a link between an infant’s exposure to numerous substances — including mould, dust, pollutants, and chemicals — and the development of asthma and other childhood developmental diseases.

By finding the root cause of asthma, researchers are looking for a way to eliminate the condition, thus eliminating the need for costly and emotionally draining physician visits, medication, hospitalization, and loss of work time. “If we could prevent asthma, we wouldn’t have to treat it — that’s the goal,” said Takaro.

For the CHILD study, numerous environmental exposures, ranging from cleaning products to traffic-related air pollution, were measured in the homes of the infants. Both physical samples and questionnaires were used in surveying the 3600 households. The survey asked questions regarding any potential leaks in the household, as well as when and of what material the house was built.

As the study is only in its preliminary stages, Takaro and AllerGen have not found any definitive links between the environment and these developmental diseases.

However, a paper Takaro worked on, published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives, offers data that suggests that air pollutants have an adverse effect. Household pets, long believed to be irritants of asthma and allergies, may actually prepare infants for future exposures and even make them less susceptible to asthma.

The ultimate goal of his numerous research projects, according to Takaro, is to “design a house that would be allergen free, [by using] carefully monitored moisture [and air pollution levels through filtration].”

He continued, saying that future studies “would test babies who lived in those homes, compared to babies who were born in standard homes.” This sort of “intervention trial” would bring researchers closer to developing a home that prevents asthma.

Takaro asserted, “The government needs to fund intervention trials and needs to stop subsidizing drug company trials. Big [pharmaceutical companies] receive a lot of government money to test all their drugs, but [scientists that try] to prevent disease do not.”

A study led by SFU researchers has found that sea lice infections are more common among juvenile sockeye salmon than previously thought, and infections caused by the parasites are negatively impacting the survival of the fish.

Sean Godwin, a PhD student in SFU’s department of biological sciences, explained: “Juvenile sockeye salmon that are migrating from the Fraser river, that are highly infected with sea lice, are less able to compete for food.”

Godwin explained, “sea lice are a type of parasite that attach to the outside of fish and feed on the surface tissue.” Although the species found on the sockeye during the study are native to BC, there has been rising concern over the past couple decades since the amount of lice on juvenile salmon is much higher than expected.

The study was based at the Salmon Coast Field Station in Port McNeill, and researchers collected the fish from the Johnstone Strait — a corridor along the east side of Vancouver Island used by migrating juvenile salmon to reach their winter feeding grounds as they travel from the Fraser River to the open ocean.

After collecting the juvenile sockeye, Godwin originally planned on separating the uninfected fish from the highly infected fish, but they were hard pressed to find uninfected fish. “Almost every single fish that we caught had sea lice on them,” he said.

Instead, the study focused on comparing the competitive abilities of lightly infected fish versus highly infected fish. Their results found that the highly infected fish were 20 per cent less successful at consuming food compared to the lightly infected fish. Each group was fed the same limited amount of food and contained fish of the same sizes.

Fish farms found along migratory routes seem to have played a role in the increase of sea lice found on salmon. These fish farms are “high-density environments for young Atlantic salmon in net pens, and the net pens do not have any barriers,” according to Godwin. Because of this, they serve as reservoirs for sea lice to grow and spread to wild salmon populations.

Godwin hopes that his research will help inform parasite management on fish farms, because the majority of sea lice species found on the juvenile sockeye he studied were different from the species that fish farmers treat for.

The next step is working towards forming a fuller understanding of the impact that sea-lice infection levels have on the young fish as they continue on their migratory route and age into adults.

“I hope other people can build on my results, we really need to do more research to figure out how and whether the sea lice levels will affect adult return stock,” said Godwin.