The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada is supporting 18 projects at Lakehead University.
The organization is providing a total of $3.2 million to the projects over the next five years.
Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Dr. Jessica Metcalfe, is receiving a $468,345 Discovery Horizons Grant.
The funding is supporting research investigating how bison have altered physical and cultural landscapes in Tsattine (Beaver Dene) territory in Alberta over the last 10,000 years.
A total of only 11 of these grants are awarded across the country each year.
“Bison, North America’s largest herbivore, are typically seen as creatures of the prairies, but they also have deep connections with Indigenous communities farther north,” explains Dr. Metcalfe. “Even though wild bison no longer inhabit Tsattine territory, they are guiding our research through their bones, trails, plants, and the ways they were processed and cooked.
“Our goal is to put bison and Tsattine people back on the map in northwestern Alberta, supporting the resurgence of a cultural group that was previously declared extinct.”
Dr. Nathan Basiliko, professor in the Faculty of Natural Resources Management and Director of the Lakehead University Environmental Laboratory, is receiving a $220,000 Discovery Grant.
Dr. Basiliko and a team of student researchers will be doing hands-on fieldwork in forests, wetlands, and watersheds across northwestern Ontario.
The project will also include lab research to uncover how microorganisms, i.e., the bacteria and fungi in soil, water, and plants, affect an ecosystem’s response to climate change.
“Climate change mitigation relies on how boreal ecosystems adapt to these environmental stressors. Right now, that’s a major unknown,” said Dr. Basiliko. “Microorganisms are key players in boreal ecosystems because they break down organic matter, transform nutrients and pollutants, and produce and consume greenhouse gases.”
“Through these processes, these tiny communities impact our forest and freshwater resources and, ultimately, our planet’s future climate.”
The other projects receiving funding include:
- Further studies on stochastic dynamic stability of complex structures – $215,000 – Discovery Grant
- Next generation and self-sustainable membrane-based microalgal-bacterial processes for wastewater treatment – $215,000 – Discovery Grant
- Practical joint visible light communication and positioning: Enhancing spectrum efficiency and reliability – $202,500 – Discovery Grant
- Effects of drought frequency and severity on boreal conifers under predicted future climate conditions and different soil temperature and nutrient regimes — $195,000 — Discovery Grant
- Coding for communication-efficient and straggler-resilient heterogeneous distributed computing – $192,500 – Discovery Grant
- Advancing collaborative data-driven AI for enhanced energy management in connected electric mobility – $185,000 – Discovery Grant
- Group methods and quantum technologies – $180,000 – Discovery Grant
- Bidirectional control of affective sensation and cognitive processes – $177,500 – Discovery Grant
- Altered spatial strategies of caribou in disturbed landscapes: Adaptive or maladaptive responses? – $177,500 – Discovery Grant
- Asymptotic behaviour in probability and statistics with applications – $175,500 – Discovery Grant
- On the triple junction between PDE, material science and image processing – $160,000 – Discovery Grant
- Quantifying productivity, biodiversity and genetic novelty of fishes at lakemounts – $159,674 – Discovery Grant – Ship Time
- Advanced tool for investigating thermochemical conversion of biomass into renewable energy and high-value chemicals – $147,855 – Research Tools and Instruments Grant
- Combinatorial structures and their applications – $44,000 – Discovery Development Grant
- Classification of gradings and real structures on C-algebras* – $44,000 – Discovery Development Grant
- On-surface synthesis and characterization of molecular-based two-dimensional nanomaterials – $44,000 – Discovery Development Grant
