Professor Aimy Bazylak (MIE) is among this year’s recipients of the Dorothy Killam Fellowship. 

Awarded by the National Research Council, the Dorothy Killam Fellowships enable Canadian scholars of exceptional ability to devote their time to research projects with the potential to make a significant impact in their respective fields.      

“I am tremendously honoured to receive this fellowship,” says Bazylak. “The two years of dedicated time to focus on my research is an invaluable opportunity to move our work forward at a pace that would not otherwise be possible.”  

Bazylak and her research group are advancing clean energy technologies by developing new catalyst-coated membranes to overcome cost and durability challenges of fuel cells, water electrolyzers, and CO2 electrolyzer.   

 

Technologies for electrochemical energy have many layers with costly catalyst-coated membranes or catalyst layers at their core. But currently, there are limited options for catalyst-coated membranes from commercial vendors. Moving forward, Bazylak will design and develop custom layers, accelerating their development for optimal performance and durability.   

“These clean electrochemical energy technologies have phenomenal potential to transform our energy security around the globe. However, now more than ever, the largest challenges lie at the smallest length scales,” says Bazylak, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Clean Energy.     

“If we want to make these technologies affordable and long-lasting, we need to control the design and performance of materials where the electrochemical reactions take place.”  

Bazylak has developed significant expertise aroundthe microscale transport behaviour of gases and liquids around and through the various materials that surround the catalyst-coated membrane.

Bolstered by this knowledge, her team is ready to move to the most challenging length scales and use their understanding of the surrounding materials to transform the technology. By controlling the parameters at the nanoscale, they can design a better performing, more efficient device, which can be used to alleviate greenhouse gas emissions.  

“When powered with renewable energy, polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) water electrolyzers produce hydrogen with heat as the only by-product,” she says.  

“This hydrogen can be used to fuel trucks, cars and trains powered by PEM fuel cells with zero-emissions, and CO2 electrolysis can be used to convert carbon dioxide emissions into carbon neutral fuels.”  

“A most heartfelt congratulations to Professor Bazylak on receiving the Dorothy Killam Fellowship,” says U of T Engineering Dean Christopher Yip.

“The research she is leading opens doors to new collaborations, both nationally and globally, and will bring us closer to creating sustainable and thriving global communities.”  

 

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on April 2, 2024, by Safa Jinje.

A U of T Engineering team, led by Professor Timothy Chan (MIE), won first place in the 2024 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference Research Papers Competition. The paper introduces a new framework designed to level the playing field in dart games.

“Winning this competition, at the world’s most prominent and competitive sports analytics conference, is a testament to the excellence and ingenuity of our students here at the University of Toronto,” says Chan.

With millions of players around the world, including an estimated 17 million in the U.S., according to the National Sporting Goods Association, the game of darts continues to grow in popularity.

“Darts is a great sport because almost anyone can play and it doubles as a fun mental puzzle,” says Rachael Walker (IndE 2T1 + PEY), who is a co-author of the conference paper along with Craig Fernandes (IndE 1T8 + PEY, MIE MASc 2T1, MIE PhD candidate) and Chan. Walker was the lead driver of this research project as this was the topic of her undergraduate thesis in Chan’s lab.

The research focuses on the game of 501 darts, where players start with a score of 501 and take alternating turns throwing darts at the dartboard. Points are then deducted from their total depending on where the darts land and the first player to reach zero wins.

 

“We looked at 501 darts played in recreational and professional settings,” says Fernandes.

“In a recreational setting, the game is often played amongst players that have different skill sets, and when that happens, the stronger player often wins, which can lead to unexciting matches.”

To prevent this imbalance in sports such as golf and darts, a system that gives the less-skilled players an advantage can be introduced, with the aim that all players have an equal chance at winning.

“Our research first proved that the current approach of giving the weaker player a head start doesn’t actually give all players a fair chance at victory,” says Fernandes.

“Instead, we used a Markov decision process to understand the nuances of the game and then come up with a new system that actually leads to mathematical fairness.”

The new framework first determines a player’s skill level by having them throw several darts at the center of the board before the start of a game. Players are assigned a skill level based on where their darts land — players who get most of their darts in the center are determined as higher skilled, while those whose darts are spread out across the board are deemed less-skilled players, who would benefit from an advantage.

The new system gives the lesser skilled player credits that they can cash in at any point in the game. That player can then use credit to claim the outcome of a throw — that is, the region of the board they intend the dart to land in — without actually physically throwing the dart.

The researchers found that credits can create true fairness by using a Markov decision process, a mathematical framework that models scenarios where the outcomes are partly in control of the decision maker and partly random. However, the number of possible decisions and outcomes in darts made the model difficult to implement and solve at scale.

“To accurately model a dart game that assigns an advantage to a single player, we needed to consider over half a million possible game states and hundreds of possible actions at each state,” says Walker.

“In a traditional implementation, you optimize across all states simultaneously, which may require considering billions, or even trillions, of possible outcomes.”

The researchers overcame the challenge of scale by starting simply and slowly adding complexity to the model. The first version did not consider the fact that darts is played in turns of three throws for each player; this helped build intuition and develop implementation tricks that later allowed them to solve the true model.

The first-place finish at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was affirming for the researchers.

“It was a very strong competition, featuring many major North American sports, such as football, baseball, and basketball; and a lot of research was focused on generative artificial intelligence and machine learning,” says Fernandes, who presented the research at the Sloan conference.

“Winning with our operations research and optimization approach was exciting for us.”

The team is now looking to implement the framework with collaborators, including local dart leagues, to see it work in practice.

“My lab tackles complex decision-making problems in health care and sports using techniques from operations research,” says Chan.

“The tools we develop are general, so the insights we obtain from solving a problem in darts may then be applied towards solutions in patient scheduling or medical decision making.”

 

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on March 26, 2024 by Safa Jinje.

A team of U of T Engineering researchers led by Professors Yu Zou (MSE) and Tobin Filleter (MIE) has received $2.8 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s Innovation Fund (CFI-IF) to develop the Toronto Integrated Platform for Materials under Extreme Conditions (TIME).  

This facility will house equipment to test materials in many severe conditions — from temperatures above 1,000 Celsius to a vacuum space empty of matter that replicates outer space — for use across various industries, including space exploration, critical minerals, nuclear energy, zero-emission vehicles and medicine.  

“We’re pushing the limit of material performance to design a new generation of materials and this facility will play a crucial role in achieving this goal,” says Zou, who leads U of T’s first metal additive manufacturing lab, and specializes in designing advanced metal alloys and composites for biomedical, automotive and energy applications. 

TIME will be a shared space equipped with a wide range of cutting-edge machinery that will enable researchers from diverse fields and faculties to test the performance of materials.  

Co-applicants on the CFI-IF proposal include Professors Fae Azhari (CivMin, MIE), Gisele Azimi (ChemE, MSE), Adele Changoor (Surgery, MSE), Thomas Coyle (MSE), Xinyu Liu (MIE), Chandra Singh (MSE) and Ning Yan (ChemE). 

“This facility will help us understand how materials behave and degrade in harsh environments,” says Filleter, who is the principal investigator of the Nanomechanics and Materials Lab. His research focuses on nanostructured material and tribology.  

“It’s particularly important for industries like space exploration and nuclear energy.” 

Developing materials for space applications that can withstand harsh conditions for long periods of time without needing to be serviced is a major challenge. Satellites and space stations need to deploy equipment, such as solar panels, in the vacuum of space, and the materials used in coating these mechanisms and gears need to operate flawlessly to ensure the equipment’s functionality.  

These coatings need to survive extreme temperature fluctuations — from launch conditions on Earth and the mechanical agitations during launch, before ultimately being used in space. “Oil-based lubricants don’t work in a space environment,” says Filleter, “so this facility will allow researchers to design and test solid material coatings that have low friction and low wear over a long time.”   

“Making the materials work at all stages of use is a real challenge. Service is not an option, so the equipment needs to not only work well but last for a very long time, or else you have a million-dollar piece of space junk that doesn’t work properly,” adds Filleter.   

The research conducted in this lab will also have implications in nuclear research, specifically in the construction and operation of small modular reactors (SMRs). 

There is a big push from the Canadian government for SMRs as an option to meet their clean energy goals. However, the working environment for SMRs differs significantly from traditional Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactors, as they operate in extremely corrosive and high-temperature environments.  

With SMRs representing a potential solution for clean energy in the face of climate change, researchers will need to develop and test materials that can endure the radiation, high temperatures and corrosive conditions.  

The TIME platform will also support the Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy by developing and testing new tooling materials for the exploration and recycling of critical minerals.   

“Currently, there is no such testing platform where we can verify and test various materials in these extreme conditions,” says Zou.  “Our platform will provide a new and unique capability to conduct these tests.” 

U of T is positioning itself at the centre of materials discovery, development and testing. The Acceleration Consortium is combining material science with advanced computing, artificial intelligence and robotics to rapidly design new materials. Alongside research at the TIME facility focused on testing these materials under real, extreme conditions, the university will be able to work on materials development synergistically.  

Researchers at TIME will also train the next generation of researchers in this field, with plans to support approximately 100 students over the next five years, further contributing to advancements in materials science. The TIME platform will address pressing industry challenges and holds the potential to drive innovation, create a knowledge hub for researchers and foster interdisciplinary synergies across the university. 

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on March 13, 2024 by Selah Katona.

Growing up in a family with strong ties to engineering, Taleen Kutob (Year 2 IndE) had no shortage of examples to inspire her interest in the problem-solving discipline. 

“My father is a mechanical engineer and my mother, who is an architect, has a master’s degree in industrial engineering,” she says.  

“Seeing my three older siblings study industrial engineering at the University of Toronto made me feel like I was a part of their campus community from a young age.”  

There are 14 years between Taleen and her oldest sister, Layan Kutob (IndE 1T2 + PEY, MIE MEng 1T4), who is an associate partner at McKinsey & Company in San Francisco. Despite their age difference, the two sisters are close and even co-moderated a virtual International Women’s Day panel on March 6, with support from the U of T student chapter of Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) and the Engineering Alumni Office.  

“I am fortunate that I can always turn to my sisters and brother for advice or help when it comes to my studies or career goals,” says Taleen.  

“But many of my classmates may not have such resources so close to home. This inspired our event, Ask Me Anything: Your Success, Your Way, which was an opportunity to learn about the experiences of accomplished women who graduated from U of T Engineering.  

“Hearing these stories is especially important for women in engineering spaces where they may not feel welcome. We want them to feel less alone in their journey.”   

The event also aimed to provide inspiration for students who may be struggling, adds Layan.  

“Everyone at U of T Engineering arrives as a star student, but we all stumble along the way to our degree and may even lose motivation,” she says. “We wanted to break down the boundaries and give women engineering students an opportunity to see what their careers can look like. We wanted to showcase how individuals have overcome their own setbacks and that success isn’t always linear.”  

Layan, along with brother Kazem Kutob (IndE 1T3 + PEY) and sister Dareen Kutob (IndE 1T7 + PEY, MIE MEng 2T2) have shared their experiences with their youngest sister — not to influence her choices but to provide support and guidance.  

Taleen considers her siblings to be her role models. When she was five years old, she even accompanied Layan to one of her undergraduate classes.  

“Layan was babysitting me at the time and ended up having to bring me with her,” she says. “I remember having drawing books and colouring pencils, and drawing the normal distribution curve because it was right there in front of me.”  

The first of the Kutob siblings to study engineering at university, Layan was initially on the fence between engineering and business when she began applying to schools.

“Ultimately, I choose to enroll in the TrackOne program at U of T Engineering in my first year, and I chose industrial engineering because I wanted to combine engineering with my business interests,” Layan says.

“There was never any family pressure for any of us to pursue engineering. But my siblings and I all enrolled in TrackOne in our first year because we wanted to make informed decisions about our future in engineering.” 

Still, at the end of their first year of undergrad, each of the Kutob siblings landed in industrial engineering, an area often focused on optimizing complex processes and improving the way people interact with systems. Kazem is now a self-service and online sales growth director at GitLab in Los Angeles, while Dareen is a strategy consultant at Accenture in Dubai.  

“I hadn’t planned on pursuing engineering when I was in high school, my ambition was in pharmacy. However, in Grade 12, I began to see the limitations of a pharmacy degree,” says Dareen.  

“Seeing both Layan and Kazem pursue industrial engineering, I saw the potential for broader learnings and longer-term career options. I also realized that even with this shift, there could still be opportunities to explore my interests in the health and the pharmaceutical industry.  

“I ended up doing my thesis and capstone project in the health care field, and I now working in consulting with health and public sector clients.”  

For Layan, consulting was a logical career choice that fit her personality and interests.  

Through McKinsey’s “random walks,” where employees engage in work across different industries, Layan was able to explore health care, insurance and banking, before finding her path in the energy sector — where the work and the people continue to inspire her.  

“I love rolling up my sleeves and working with people to solve complex issues in end-to-end processes and to think about innovative and creative ways to solve them,” says Layan. “I work with my energy clients on operational and digital transformations to reduce costs while increasing productivity, reliability and safety.  

“I’m a firm believer that you need to enjoy what you do. So go find it, go seek it, and that could be through the process of elimination.”  

“Pursuing industrial engineering offers you a great degree and an incredible toolkit that will set you up for success in any path you choose to pursue,” adds Dareen.   

“My advice for girls considering this area of study is to embrace and enjoy all aspects of university life, including extracurricular activities. You will meet great people, create new friendships and develop essential skills that will help you navigate any professional environment.”  

While Taleen doesn’t know where she will end up when she graduates in a few years, she knows an industrial engineering degree will open many doors.  

“The courses I am taking today are tapping into so many exciting areas that I can pursue a career in data science, artificial intelligence and human factors,” she says.   

“But being able to do this great work in a community that inspires me makes it 100 times better.” 

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on March 7, 2024 by Safa Jinje.

 

Peter Serles, who successfully defended his PhD thesis this month, was recently awarded a University of Toronto Student Leadership Award (UTSLA). This recognition honours students who, on top of their studies, provide impactful leadership and volunteerism for the betterment of the University of Toronto.

Peter received the UTLSA for his numerous contributions across multiple levels of the University, from The Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) up to the President’s Office and Governing Council. He has served as the sole graduate student representative on the President’s Advisory Committee for the appointment of Vice-President and Provost of the University, and the Provost’s Advisory Committee for the appointment of Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. He has also served on the Graduate Student Advisory Committee for the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies, and Chaired the Graduate Student Committee for MIE’s self-study in 2022. This is on top of Peter’s MASc (1T9) and PhD (2T4) research supervised by Professor Tobin Filleter in the NanoMechanics and Materials Laboratory (NanoM2).

 

 

The Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering recently sat down with Peter, who was also a Vanier Scholar, Connaught PhDs for Public Impact Fellow, and Junior Fellow of Massey College, to learn more about his broader U of T experiences.

When you began graduate studies at MIE, what inspired you to get involved in FASE and U of T initiatives?

I’m passionate about how science can create impacts beyond the lab into the policy space, and ultimately for the betterment of public life across Canada. This began over six years ago when I started volunteering with the Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) to help build relationships between scientists and policymakers at the federal level. I learned a lot about the Canadian science landscape, so I wanted to also help build my local community and shape University policies to make life better and more successful for graduate students. My graduate experience has been very positive, but I know that is not always the case for graduate students and I was excited to be involved in making structural changes so that everyone can access crucial tools and supports to succeed.

What initiative brought you the most sense of accomplishment?

At the start of my time as part of the Graduate Student Advisory Committee for the Dean of SGS, I kept pushing for how we could innovate and modernize graduate education. Many grad classes can go beyond the classroom to include modern teaching methods, but it’s not always the case and experiential learning is so valuable. After consulting with students, meeting with the Vice-Provost of Students for U of T, and Vice-Dean, Students for SGS, we created the Graduate Education Innovation Fund (GEIF) to provide seed funding for innovative teaching proposals. We realized that many professors are excited about innovation in teaching, but capacity or funding to enact their ideas is tough. In the three years since GEIF launched, we’ve funded proposals including VR surgery lessons, establishing a recording studio for student podcasts and production, and collaborations with the ROM for archive access in coursework. This project was so cool because I was able to see it all the way from a brainstorming session, to consultations, to a pilot project, and now to an established fund, that makes a tangible impact for student success across the University.

If students are interested in getting involved in these diverse initiatives, what is your advice?

Many, many things are happening across the University, and there are multiple ways to get involved – from joining Faculty Council to helping organize a local conference, we each play a role in building our local academic community. For me, I kind of stumbled into some of these initiatives, but I was captivated by how complex and intricate the decision making is in these roles, and I wanted to do everything that I could to build the community over my time here!

Along with being one of 18 U of T Engineering students who received a UTSLA Award, Peter is a PhD graduate with a research focus on nano-3D printed nanostructures and high-performance nanomaterials. He has published more than 25 peer-reviewed articles in journals including Nature and Science, was awarded 1^st Prize for his presentations at the 2023 MIE Graduate Research Symposium and U of T Engineering Research Conference, and starts his post-doc position at Caltech this upcoming July.

-Published March 5, 2024 by Kendra Hunter

Canada’s population is aging, and with that comes a host of new stressors on the health-care system — including an increasing number of hip and knee replacements. In a best-case scenario using current materials, a hip or knee replacement can last a maximum of 25 years. With average life expectancies trending upwards, the rate of subsequent surgeries to replace or fix hip and knee replacements is poised to grow as well — adding even more stress on the system. New materials are needed to help solve this problem.

Enter self-driving labs (SDLs). SDLs combine artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced computing to discover new materials and molecules for commercial, clinical and industrial use in a fraction of the usual time and cost.

Professor Yu Zou (MSE) will be using the tools SDLs offer in his quest to speed up the development of improved materials for hip and knee replacements. Zou and his team will leverage an SDL to rapidly test combinations of elements to find the alloys required for longer-lasting joint-replacements.

Zou’s work is but one example of the problems being tackled head-on by scientists who have received funding from the Acceleration Consortium’s (AC’s) Accelerate Grants. These 12 new research projects — including the one led by Zou — are either developing technologies that will support the development of SDLs or using SDL technologies to accelerate discovery. The AC is funding a diverse array of research efforts across nine departments in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, the Faculty of Arts & Science, the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and the University of Toronto Scarborough.

These research projects are made possible by the almost $200 million grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) awarded to the AC last April, the largest federal research grant ever awarded to a Canadian university. The projects being enabled by the grant promise innovative advances in fields ranging from health care and climate change to sustainable materials design and food waste-management.

“Using AI and automation to carry out more laboratory experiments in a smarter way, we’ve supercharged the process of scientific discovery,” says Professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik¸ director of the Acceleration Consortium and professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Computer Science in the Faculty of Arts & Science. “These 12 Accelerate Grants are not only an investment in science but are an investment in our future. The creativity and the diversity of thought shown by the researchers on these projects tells me that the materially different future that the Acceleration Consortium is striving for is achievable in our lifetime.”‍

The Acceleration Consortium awarded the 12 grants in three categories — Accelerate Seed, Accelerate Moonshot and Accelerate Translation:

• Accelerate Seed grants build accelerated discovery capacity at U of T by helping faculty enter the field or collaborate with those already doing accelerated discovery.
• Accelerate Moonshot grants support high-risk, high-reward grants that will make significant contributions to the development or use of SDLs.
• Accelerate Translation grants support accelerated discovery projects with clear commercialization goals and justified/demonstrated market potential, as well as the implementation or scaling of knowledge mobilization activities, training, and community engagement.

Recipients of Accelerate Seed grants include:

• Professor Eugenia Kumacheva, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Arts & Science
  “Self-Driving Lab for the Synthesis of Upconversion Nanoparticles for Bioanalytical Sensing”
• Professor Jay Werber, Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
  “Self-Driving Labs for the Development of Next-Generation Membranes for Pressure-Driven Separations”
• Professor Leo Chou, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
  “High throughput discovery of peptoid-DNA nanocarriers for antisense oligonucleotide therapies”
• Professor Nandita Vijaykumar, Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough
  “An Efficient and Versatile Software Framework for AI-based Automation of Materials Discovery”
• Professor Emily Moore, Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education & Practice (ISTEP), Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
  “Integrating environmental, social and economic factors into SDL processes”
• Professor Joseph Williams, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Arts & Science
  “Comparison of Traditional and Adaptive Experiment to Accelerate the Identification of MicroRNA in a High Through-put Acute Respiratory Disease Syndrome In Vitro Model”
• Professor Kai Huang, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
  “Automated and AI-driven Fluidic Synthesis of Lanthanide-Based Nanocrystals”

Accelerate Moonshot grants have been awarded to:

• Professor Yu Zou, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
  “Accelerated Discovery of Revolutionary Materials for Biomedical Implants”
• Professor David Sinton, Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
  “Enabling self-driving electrocatalyst discovery: From A3MDs high-throughput electrocatalysis to the inorganic SDL1”
• Professor Milica Radisic, Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
  “Self-driving platform technology for vascularized human organ mimicry”
• Professor Christopher Lawson, Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
  “Accelerated design and assembly of synthetic microbial communities for sustainable chemicals manufacturing”

‍Professor Bowen Li, at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and cross-appointed to the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, is the recipient of an Accelerate Translation grant to support his project “Self-Driving LNP Discovery Lab: An AI and Robotics-Powered Platform Facilitating mRNA Therapy Delivery.”

“This suite of Acceleration Grants is an excellent example of how the Acceleration Consortium is advancing the globally recognized strategic research mission of the University of Toronto in a way that’s critical for Canada to remain competitive on the international stage,” says Leah Cowen, U of T’s vice-president of research and innovation, and strategic initiatives.

“By enabling the next generation of scientists to use self-driving labs and fostering research collaboration and partnerships between departments and institutions, these grants will enable the recipients to conduct high-impact, interdisciplinary accelerated research to discover materials that will improve our world.

“I congratulate the principal investigators and their teams who are leading these varied investigations, and I look forward to seeing their results in the accelerated timeline now made possible in part by CFREF and the remarkable demonstration of support for their work.”

While the CFREF funding will help to further advancements made by several researchers who are recognized as leaders in their fields, most support is going to early-career scientists who are pioneering new discoveries just as SDL technology is emerging as a revolutionary approach to knowledge. Projects dedicated to the continuous improvement of SDL technology are also being funded. As an example, Vijaykumar’s project will develop software that can better manage the fast-flowing data streams SDLs create as well as the resources required to run the experiments.

“The work our grant recipients are doing will help us ensure that the Greater Toronto Area and Canada remain world leaders in AI-frontier discovery,” says Aspuru-Guzik.

“And we’re doing so with innovative contributions from people at every stage of their career, with an eye to developing the next generation of groundbreaking researchers along the way. No one is resting on their laurels; each grant recipient and member of the AC is pushing the edge of what is possible and is working towards a materially better future.”

The Acceleration Consortium opens its next funding competition in summer 2024 to welcome proposals for new research projects.

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on February 29, 2024 by Sean Bettam & Andrea Wiseman.

 

The Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies (CRAFT) has been extended to 2028 and has expanded to formally include Unity Health Toronto, an academic hospital network and leading Canadian health research institute.

A partnership between U of T, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and now Unity Health Toronto, CRAFT develops leading-edge microfluidic devices that can address many challenges in human health.

The latest agreement — which includes $21 million in new investments — will support dozens of U of T trainees who will work alongside NRC scientists and engineers and clinical scientists on exciting projects related to diagnostics bio-fabrication and organ-on-chip systems.

With the addition of Unity Health Toronto, clinicians will now join CRAFT scientists in developing new microfluidic technologies such as detection and monitoring risks of infection in intensive care unit (ICU) environments and rapid detection of arterial peripheral diseases. This will allow scientists and clinicians to directly test and validate their technologies in care settings, and develop new pathways to work with industry partners.

“CRAFT was built from the common vision that microfluidics could make a real impact on Canada’s scientific and clinical fields,” says Dr. Teodor Veres, Director of R&D at the NRC’s Medical Devices Research Centre and Co-director of CRAFT.

“Focused on providing new student generations with opportunities to forge ground-breaking scientific and technological advancements in microfluidic devices, these advancements have the potential to revolutionize disease diagnosis and treatment in Canada and globally. This vision was crucial to our initiative’s growth and our current success.”

Microfluidic technology enables fluids to be manipulated in engineered, miniaturized devices with features in the scale of microns, one thousandth of a millimetre. The ability to precisely control fluids at this scale has many important applications in engineering, medicine, biology and chemistry.

Applications of microfluidics include rapid diagnostic devices that help clinicians to reliably test for the presence of certain diseases at the patient’s bedside while avoiding the cost and time delays associated with sending samples to large testing laboratories. Microfluidics are also used in biosensors that allow patients in remote communities to send accurate data to specialists located hundreds of kilometres away.

As an example, Dr. Claudia dos Santos, Unity Health critical care physician and scientist, has pinpointed a need to quickly identify ICU patients at risk of sepsis. She is working with CRAFT researchers to develop a microfluidic instrument that can detect biomarkers for sepsis right on the ICU floor. Such an instrument will allow for faster diagnosis and treatment of sepsis, which can be deadly if left untreated.

“With Unity Health Toronto formally joining CRAFT, we are bringing the power and potential of microfluidic devices into clinical settings. This partnership will allow clinicians to merge their expertise with CRAFT scientists, and take the next major steps towards transforming patient care,” says dos Santos.

Another application of microfluidics — known as organ-on-a-chip — enables cells, tissues or even portions of working organs to be grown outside the body in microfluidic devices. These biological models can be used in high-throughput screening of large libraries of potentially therapeutic molecules for specific functions; for example, determining which ones would be most effective against a particular type of cancer. Such screens could even suggest the ideal therapies for an individual patient, opening the door to precision medicine.

CRAFT was founded in 2018 and includes three research and development facilities for microfluidic devices: the Tissue Foundry for bioprinting and device preclinical validation; the Device Foundry for microfluidic device design, prototyping and small-scale fabrication; and the NRC Device Fabrication and Scale-Up facility. The first two are located at U of T and available for use by academics, students, industry and government. The latter is located on the NRC campus in Boucherville, Quebec.

In 2023, the facilities hosted 125 unique users from across U of T as well as affiliated hospitals, including Sunnybrook, The Hospital for Sick Children, University Health Network. Since its inception, CRAFT has engaged 44 researchers and 114 trainees in a wide range of projects, leading to 69 peer-reviewed publications, 22 patent submissions and three spin-off companies.

“CRAFT has been a team effort all along. In addition to the NRC, we have been supported as an Institutional Strategic Initiative through U of T’s Division of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, and by U of T’s faculties of Engineering, Arts & Science, Medicine and Pharmacy. We all look forward to an exciting next chapter in partnering with Unity Health,” says Axel Guenther (MIE, BME), a professor of mechanical engineering at U of T and co-director of CRAFT.

“Developing the next generation of made-in-Canada microfluidic technologies and bringing them to the people who need them most — patients, health-care professionals and pharmaceutical companies — will require strong partnerships within and outside of CRAFT, with our clinical partners, U of T’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, and Canadian industry.

“We invite everyone to visit and use our open research facilities in Toronto, attend our Microfluidics Professional Course on July 17-19, or attend our research symposium in Boucherville on October 12, 2024.”

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on February 12, 2024 by Tyler Irving.

 

Professor Michael Guerzhoy (MIE, EngSci) and a team of undergraduate U of T Engineering students are researching how artificial intelligence and machine-learning can aid clinicians in treating mental health-related speech disfluency. 

Currently, when treating mental health related symptoms, clinicians often adjust medications based on expensive and sparse observations, says Guerzhoy, making it difficult to identify if a specific drug is working optimally or not. Patients respond to each medication differently, and the effects can be subtle or only visible over a long period of time. The effects of these therapies can also be difficult to differentiate from other factors affecting patient behaviours.  

Complex symptoms like speech disfluency, which is when individuals experience chronic and repeated problems with continuous speech, can be particularly challenging to treat.  

“Studies show that there is a correlation between mental health conditions like anxiety and depression and speech disfluency,” says Guerzhoy.  

 “I believe that patient care can be substantially improved in situations where low-cost frequent observations are possible through making use of reinforcement learning systems to help prescribe and adjust medications.” 

These systems would work as an advisor to clinicians, helping them predict medication outcomes based on machine-learning algorithms.  

The team’s research was published in a recent paper, presented at the Machine Learning for Cognitive and Mental Health Workshop at the Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (ML4CMH @ AAAI).

The first component features a module that detects and evaluates speech disfluency on a large data set. The second is a reinforcement learning algorithm that automatically sources and recommends medication combinations. To support the two modules, the team built a plausible patient-simulation system.  

Guerzhoy compared this system to the idea of a computer playing chess.  

“We all know that computers are excellent at playing chess. Our hope is that these computer-based reinforcement learning models will help clinicians become sort of chess grand masters in their field,” he explains. 

By exploring the potential of automating and fine-tuning medication regimes for patients, the team hopes this will provide a pathway to improving the way we treat mental health. Harnessing AI to pick up on small changes in behaviour in more frequent increments would give clinicians another tool in their toolkit, says Guerzhoy, especially since the high cost of sessions is a significant factor in a patient’s treatment.  

Guerzhoy emphasized the crucial role played by undergraduate engineering students in advancing the project. 

He recognized the dedication of the team, which included Michael Akzam (Year 3 ECE), Micol Altomare (Year 3 EngSci), Lauren Altomare (Year 2 EngSci), Nimit Amikumar Bhanshali (Computer Science), Kaison Cheung (Year 4 CivE), Carrie Chen (Cornell University), Jiacheng Chen (Year 3 EngSci), Andreas Constas (Year 3 EngSci), Pavlos Constas (Year 1 EngSci), Vhea He (Year 2 EngSci), Aditya Khan (Data Science), Asad Khan (Computer Science), Heraa Murqi (Year 2 EngSci), Matthew Honorio Oliveira (Year 3 EngSci), Youssef Rachad (Year 3 EngSci), Vikram Rawal (Year 3 EngSci), and Najma Sultani (Year 2 EngSci). 

“Having such a large team of undergraduate students involved that are passionate about the research was essential,” he says. 

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on February 15, 2024 by Selah Katona.