Whether you are a student or a scientist, you are no doubt familiar with the traditional funding agency for the natural sciences in Canada – NSERC. However,if your research leads you into the realm of applied research, you will inevitably begin to be exposed to a wider, more complicated world of industry-partnered R&D. Support for this kind of work can come from companies themselves (often in the form of direct technical service agreements between the company and your lab), dollar-matching programs at the federal and provincial levels (administered by the traditional agencies of NSERC, CIHR, ORF, et cetera), or more foreign (to those of us in the academy) support programs provided directly to corporations themselves (the “SR&ED” or “shread” credits have been a huge part of this for years). This latter support stream is deep, and it is also going to change in a big way. If you haven’t heard of the “Jenkins report”, you should be aware of it (see below). In the next years, we expect the entire National Research Council structure in Canada to change, as well as the detailed nature of R&D support for industry.

Panel Chair Tom Jenkins, along with Arvind Gupta, Monique F. Leroux and Nobina Robinson, present their reportInnovation Canada: A Call to Action, to the Minister of State (Science and Technology) Gary Goodyear on October 17, 2011. Not shown are panel members David Naylor and Bev Dahlby. (from the Review of Federal Support to Research and Development webpage with link listed below).

http://rd-review.ca/eic/site/033.nsf/eng/home

If this seems all very foreign or irrelevant to university researchers, consider what happened just this past week. The Ontario Research Fund (ORF) provides matching support for Ontario applications to the Canadian Fondation for Innovation (CFI), as well as funds and administers the critical Research Excellence (RE) matching grants competition.

http://www.mri.gov.on.ca/english/programs/ResearchFund.asp

This RE has supported university researchers, with industry partners, with many tens of millions of dollars over the past decade alone. Many, many research staff and students that you see at Western are supported entirely or in part by the ORF RE. This past week (late monday), the current ORF RE application round, as well as the round for next year were cancelled. The money was re-allocated to the South-Western Ontario economic development innitiative announced by Dalton McGuinty on monday (you may have heard about this).

http://www.premier.gov.on.ca/news/event.php?ItemID=19651&Lang=EN).

I’m not going to say whether I think this is good or bad (it is certainly challenging), but these sort of changes (which directly reflect early implementation of the kinds of recommendations made in the federal Jenkins Report) are something we need to react to. There is no immediate benefit to be had by complaining about this, as the changes are already on our doorstep. Criticism may affect change for the coming years, but right now, we need to position ourselves to take advantage of the new climate. This means more industry collaboration, more technical service, and much more strategic planning and effort in monitoring and reacting to the varied opportunities.

The R&D climate has been slowing changing for years now, but I think it’s clear that in the next several years, the changes will be larger and coming faster. It’s an interesting time, so let’s get ready!

(originally posted by Blaine Chronik)

If I could condense this post into one idea it would be, counter-intuitively perhpas, “Take time off.”

After finishing my undergraduate degree I decided to spend some time some time living abroad in Japan. I’ve always had a fancy for other languages, but Japanese seemed reasonably complicated. With its three “alphabets”, I decided I would need to spend considerable attention studying the language in it’s own environment if I was to learn how to read-write-and-speak it with any degree of adequacy. So, away I went, 10,563 km, from Toronto to Nagoya.

Singing in the rain on a bridge in Kyoto, Japan.

I spent considerable amounts of time huddled over books in libraries and bookstores, writing furiously over cups of coffee in cafes, and striking up conversations with anyone that would pause long enough to listen… to my horrible defacement of the language; though I did get better in time. You get to meet some incredible people when you put down your guard for the simple sake of wanting to have a conversation (a challenging feat when that conversation is in a language you’re struggling to understand): my still-good-friends, graphic designers, Takashi and his wife, Chieko, and I would go cross-country (motor)cycling through the mountains, visiting wonderfully isolated shops and restaurants in the Japanese countryside. I try to visit still, when my schedule, and pocket-book, afford.

With time away from school, you begin to build a life for yourself apart from attending classes and finishing assignments. Yet a part of me could not escape that want for knowledge. On camping trips, I would point out the planets among the stars, and tell stories of the constellations; and my friends would always encourage me, aware of my interest in physics, turning to me for explanations of topics they had heard about on the news, or read in a newspaper, wanting to know more about this-or-that discovery. Perhaps most tellingly for myself, at the end of the day I would return home and almost ritually, with a cup of coffee, browse the arXiv to learn of the latest developments being made by the physics-community.

I have thought of becoming a scientist since I was little boy. But no experience more blatently underscored that desire to me than when I took time away from that trajectory to explore something else. I realized that I didn’t just want to learn about the universe, it was something I needed to do.

Travel is certainly not for everyone, and Japan is a little too far away for many. But the lesson, and perspective, I have found to be essential to encouraging my own focus, now, as an actual graduate student: I don’t just think, but know, I would not want to be doing anything else.

‘Learning to GradSchool’ is a recurring series written by Alexander DeSouza, with posts once-per-month, of his experiences/reflections navigating graduate school/foraging for free food, and learning how to be a better scientist.

(originally posted by Alexander DeSouza)

December 1, 2011

#westernu Grad Student in Frantic Frenzy to Finish Poster by this morning

[warning: post contains graphic images, view at your own choosing]

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting is the largest worldwide conference in the geophysical sciences, attracting nearly [over] 20,000 Earth and space scientists, educators, students, and policy makers. This meeting showcases current scientific theory focused on discoveries that will benefit humanity and ensure a sustainable future for our planet.

UWO P&A’s own Crown Emily is at wits end with deep Fear and Loathing over her advisor’s insistence she get her poster to the printer by EOB yesterday for printing (see photo). Emily worked past 4 (pm) last night making crucial decisions on the poster (she decided on Times New Roman over Times) and picked up today at the crack of noon, when she decided it would be wise to do that analysis she had written about so lavishly last September for her abstract.

“Bob is such a nudge-nik on these things, he thinks just because there are 5,000 posters in the queue to be printed by Monday morning mine won’t be ready. As if, I’m at Western, not like ***** (institutional name deleted at publisher’s insistence).”

Crows Robin and Justin were not available for comment, as they had finished their posters last week and were last seen heading out to play squash.

The Old Crow has the honor (?) of being on the AGU Fall Meeting Blog Roll and intends to type up a storm down there next week (Dec 5 to 9) as he roams the poster hall. Follow @robin_wing, Emily and I via twitter (@purplecrowlidar), facebook (The Purple Crow Lidar) or directly on our blog, Scatterings.

(originally posted by Robert Sica)

In the past few years, discoveries of ice on Mars, and evidence appearing to show proof of liquid water on the planet, have raised the serious possibility of Martian (microbial) life, either now or sometime in the past. Then a little less than two weeks ago, NASA’s Curiosity rover successfully launched. Its primary goal is to dig up more evidence that suggests life, or the holy grail – evidence of life itself.

All of this raises a whole host of other issues, including, and importantly, ethical ones. If life is found on the red planet, what should we do about it? Are we obligated to abandon exploration or give up on an idea of expanding to Mars, to let it follow its own path? After all, humanity’s track record when it comes to colonizing new worlds is not impressive, so do we get the right to more? And what sort of interference with the evolutionary process (if any) might be acceptable? On Earth we experiment on single-celled life all the time. We encourage our children to do so. Would it make a difference – should it make a difference – if the life we’re looking at came from somewhere else? And if the answer’s yes, doesn’t that imply something about how we define life in the first place?

Just a few questions without answers. At the moment they’re fairly trivial, but if Curiosity finds something, or when, eventually, something somewhere is found, they’re going to be very important. Looking forward to that day.

(originally posted by LizGray)