Now Innovating

Dr. Angelique Jenney, PhD, shares details of a project she is leading that intends to educate students from the faculties of Law, Social Work and Nursing on how to address childhood exposure to domestic violence. The project aims to develop a virtual gaming platform for use by these students to practice and improve their client-interaction skills in a low risk environment. The project represents an innovative collaboration between professors from the faculties of Law, Social Work and nursing at the University of Calgary.

Dr. John Conly and Dr. Herman Barkema share details of the collaborative effort their UCalgary teams led to develop a smartphone app that helps veterinarians combat antimicrobial resistance in a a variety of animal species. The novel tool aims to promote and assist the optimal use of antibiotics with the hope of reducing antimicrobial resistance.

Season 1 of [now innovating] wraps up with a conversation with Dr. Stephen Larter, PhD, and Jeff Ryzner. Stephen Larter is an Associate Vice-President (Research and Innovation) in the office of the Vice-President (Research) and a Professor of Petroleum Geology. Jeff Ryzner serves as the Innovation Program Specialist alongside Stephen. Dr. Larter says impact-related outcomes should be an important metric for universities. He also stresses the importance of researchers and innovators sharing their stories of failure. Jeff Ryzner echoes this sentiment, suggesting researchers and innovators should not fear being associated with failure. Jeff offers solutions for normalizing failure.

Dr. Stephen Larter has been a cofounder of numerous technology startup companies, including Gushor Inc. (now part of Schlumberger), and he currently advises several university-based student, postdoctoral, and faculty startups. A recipient of numerous academic and civil awards, Professor Larter is a fellow of the Royal Society, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Jeff Ryzner supports the Innovation portfolio in the Vice President (Research) office, working closely with Stephen Larter. His work contributes to growing innovation levels and achieving UCalgary's vision of becoming Canada's most entrepreneurial university.

In this episode we speak with Dr. Aleem Bharwani, Director for Public Policy and Strategic Partnerships with the Cumming School of Medicine, and the lead for Public Policy at the O'Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary. Dr. Bharwani shares his insights into bridging difference toward positive change in our community. He is interested in solving ways of bringing people back together in a world where community trust is declining.

Dr. Bharwani is a specialist in internal medicine with graduate training from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in public policy and public administration. He also actively serves as the Scientific Director for the Office of Leadership Development at the Cumming School of Medicine. He was a recent resident of the Venture Incubation Program at the Harvard Innovation Lab. In addition to annually winning teaching awards, he has been recognized for his leadership by two international societies (American College of Physicians and Society of General Internal Medicine). Dr. Bharwani remains an active community citizen, serving on a variety of community and corporate boards.

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Shelly Russell-Mayhew, a registered psychologist and professor at the Werklund School of Education. She calls herself an accidental innovator and shares her perspective on innovation as being an action that transcends entrepreneurship. Dr. Russell-Mayhew is focused on having an impact on community by reshaping the language used in health and nutrition messaging.

Dr. Russell-Mayhew's work in the Body Image Lab has become a national standard in mental health research and translation, bridging the gap between the eating disorder and obesity fields to find integrative and preventative interventions. Recently, she addressed parents in Alberta about concerns regarding a proposed Kindergarten to Grade 6 school curriculum that was viewed to pose harm to children's relationship with their bodies. Many school boards have since rejected the curriculum in part because of Shelly's work.

In episode 7, we speak with Dr. Aaron Phillips who is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Physiology and Pharmacology, as well as Clinical Neurosciences at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and Cardiac Science at the Libin Cardiovascular Institute at the University of Calgary. Aaron shares his approach to ensuring forward progress in ongoing projects. Dr. Phillips also speaks to the opportunity available to investors in Canada when it comes to funding early research.

Dr. Aaron Phillips was trained in Experimental Medicine, Biosciences and Mathematics. His appreciation of the elegant interactions between the nervous and cardiovascular systems, and his understanding how these systems are disrupted in the presence clinical conditions, has driven his research into the development of novel therapies for people with neurological health issues. He has received the Brain Canada Future Leader Award and The Arthur Guyton Award in Excellence in Physiology from the American Physiological Society.

We speak with Dr. Ian Lewis in episode 6. He is the Principal Investigator with the Lewis Research Group and an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary. Dr. Lewis acknowledges that struggling through work and failure is part of the human condition, but credits his support systems for the success he has found. He discusses the evolving barriers his team has faced throughout years of lab work while explaining how the collaborative Alberta Precision Exchange Program (APEX) grew from overcoming many of those early barriers.

The emergence of diverse drug resistant pathogens has made finding new antimicrobial therapies both a Canadian and global health priority. Dr. Lewis's laboratory investigates the connection between metabolic adaptation and virulence of human pathogens. The ultimate goal of his research is to develop new diagnostic methods to identify high risk patients and novel antimicrobial therapies to control infections.

In episode 5, we speak with Dr. Karen Benzies who has recently been appointed the Director of Social Innovation in the Office of the Vice President (Research). Karen is also a professor in the Faculty of Nursing and adjunct research professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Calgary. Karen shares details of her new role in leading the Social Innovation Initiative at UCalgary.

The Social Innovation Initiative (SII) was developed to enable faculty to engage in social innovation by scaling existing academic experience, disciplines, and expertise to advance their efforts. The SII complements existing structures and processes by linking with social innovation-based activities, programs, support services, resources, and funding providers, including the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking, Innovate Calgary, Knowledge Engagement, the Office of Sustainability, Trico Foundation Social Entrepreneurship Centre, W21C, and the broader UCalgary community.

View the SII website: https://research.ucalgary.ca/innovation/social-innovation

We welcome Dr. Lawrence Korngut in episode 4. He is the Director of Innovation and Commercialization at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and Associate Professor of Neurology at the Cumming School of Medicine. Dr. Korngut is honest in admitting he spends a lot of time in the burnout zone, but stresses the importance of taking a step back often to see the bigger picture in your work. Dr. Korngut shares his approach of serendipity surface area, whereby helping others comes back to you exponentially.

Dr. Korngut's research has focused on accelerating new medical therapies in hopes of shortening the temporal gap between research and development. His start-up Lumiio (previously Dataffinity) specializes in real-world data collection services that help patient organizations, academic research groups, and pharmaceutical companies design world-class digital health programs. Some of Dr. Korngut's other work is focused on treating acute asthma by identifying new neurological pathways of the disease.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Kristina Rinker, a professor in both the Shulich School of Engineering and the Cumming School of Medicine. Dr. Rinker is also the lead on the Early Cancer Detection Initiative at the University of Calgary. Dr. Rinker explains how collaborative research led to a breakthrough method of detecting breast cancer. She describes how prioritizing the next critical step in any path toward innovation can help keep momentum within a research team.

Dr. Rinker is actively involved in technology development and commercialization through university spin‐off companies and industrial and governmental partnerships in the areas of cardiovascular and cancer detection and treatment. Her research is highly collaborative locally and internationally and focuses on how fluid flow affects cell and nanoparticle behavior with relevance to cardiovascular disease and cancer.