Research

The Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, announced the recipients of the second competition of the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) during a ceremony at the University of Waterloo today. Thirteen initiatives across Canada will share $900 million in funding.

Forests, wetlands and grasslands all provide “watershed services” by enhancing water quality and supply, biodiversity and carbon storage. They have economic value but unfortunately their market price is $0, says the executive director of the Water Institute.

Twenty-one researchers at the University of Waterloo will receive $2.3 million from the provincial government to build Ontario’s knowledge-based economy in Waterloo Region.

Kathryn McGarry, MPP for Cambridge, and Daiene Vernile, MPP for Kitchener Centre, made the announcement of 11 Early Researcher Awards (ERA) and 10 Ontario Research Fund-Research Infrastructure (ORF-RI) awards today as part of an investment in Waterloo region worth $3.6 million.

Andrew Trant, a professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, led the study in partnership with the University of Victoria and the Hakai Institute. The research combined remote-sensed, ecological and archaeological data from coastal sites where First Nations’ have lived for millennia. It shows trees growing at former habitation sites are taller, wider and healthier than those in the surrounding forest. This finding is, in large part, due to shell middens and fire.

Women living in a refugee camp in Uganda are at an increased risk of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape, early marriage and domestic abuse, says a University of Waterloo researcher

Suzan Ilcan, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, and Marcia Oliver, an assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, have conducted research in the Nakivale Refugee Settlement where they were informed by several refugees of the prevalence of such violence around the settlement.

Professor Linda Nazar and her colleagues from the Faculty of Science at Waterloo made the important discovery, which appears in the journal, Nature Energy.

A tight timeline was only fitting when engineers at the University of Waterloo took on a special project for the Canadian track cycling team headed to the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Lending their expertise in a world where winners and losers are typically decided by tiny fractions of a second, Professor John McPhee and research engineer Carin Yeghiazarian had just one week in June to produce a small but technically complex piece of hardware.

Along with the prestige, hosting the Olympic Games comes with a hefty price tag— one most cities, including Rio de Janeiro, can’t afford. But come 2024, the days of a single city footing the bill for the Olympics may be a thing of the past.

Last year, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) approved new regulations allowing multiple cities — and even countries — to partner in hosting the Games. While the arrangement would diffuse the event’s economic burden, new Waterloo research suggests the model isn’t as perfect as it appears on paper.

“When romantic partners argue over things like finances, jealousy, or other interpersonal issues, they tend to employ their current feelings as fuel for a heated argument. By envisioning their relationship in the future, people can shift the focus away from their current feelings and mitigate conflicts,” said Alex Huynh, a doctoral candidate in psychology and lead author of the study, which he published with Igor Grossmann from the University of Waterloo, and Daniel Yang from Yale University.

Two studies involving University of Waterloo researchers presented this week at the 2016 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) in Toronto highlight a new diagnostic tool that can identify Alzheimer’s disease long before the onset of symptoms as well as the increasing prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in Ontario.