Connaught Global Challenge

'Dream big,' says Edil Ga'al, �鶹��Ƶ's globe-trotting new Rhodes Scholar

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 21:42:21 +0000

'Dream big,' says Edil Ga'al, �鶹��Ƶ's globe-trotting new Rhodes Scholar

geoff.vendeville Wed, 11/28/2018 - 16:42

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“Seek out the experiences you think will be enriching to you,” says Edil Ga'al. “As with anything in life, don’t disqualify yourself” (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

City & Culture

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

African Studies

�鶹��Ƶ

Awards

Connaught Global Challenge

Faculty of Arts & Science

Edil Ga’al didn’t take a calculated approach to her studies at the University of Toronto. She followed her passions wherever they led, from the classroom to East Africa and back.

“Seek out the experiences you think will be enriching to you,” she says. “As with anything in life, don’t disqualify yourself.”

Ga’al, who graduated with high distinction over the summer, was one of only 11 Canadian students to be awarded a prestigious, all-expenses-paid Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. She got the life-changing news in a phone call, while watching Bend It Like Beckham at home with her family.

Ga'al, a Manchester United fan, hopes to see her first Premier League match during her stay in England. The former African studies and political science student intends to pursue a master of science in African studies at Oxford followed by a doctor of philosophy in political science.

Ga’al grew up in Scarborough and Brampton, in a family with four kids, and chose �鶹��Ƶ partly due to the sense of community fostered by the college system. Canada's largest university could be intimidating, but at �鶹��Ƶ's Victoria University, she made friends and found supportive staff. The college endorsed Ga’al for the Rhodes.

“Her deep commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion speaks to values shared by Victoria College and its students,” says Principal Angela Esterhammer. “She is a wonderful example of the way Vic students apply their learning and research for the benefit of society.”

Ga’al’s eureka moment, one that influenced the direction of her studies, came while taking a seminar on migration, mobility and displacement in contemporary Africa. Her professor, Marieme Lo, the director of �鶹��Ƶ's African studies program, became a mentor.

“Her persistent encouragement is the only reason I applied to the Rhodes,” Ga’al says.

Lo describes Ga’al as a bright, enthusiastic student and “feisty debater,” who often stopped by during office hours to weigh in on scholarly debates and current events. The seminar – a mix of upper-year undergraduate and graduate students – was heavy on coursework since it was meant to prepare students for the rigours of grad school. Ga’al appeared to have no difficulty keeping up.

“I wasn’t just impressed with her based on her intellect and academic commitment,” Lo says, “but I was [also] so impressed with her dedication, her altruism and her intellectual curiosity.”

Ga'al says Lo isn’t the only person at �鶹��Ƶ who had a hand in her academic success. She cited staff and faculty Dickson Eyoh, Tara Goldstein, Melissa Levin, Aziza Virani and Aggrey Wasike as important influences, and also thanked Michael Burgess, her social sciences teacher at Chinguacousy Secondary School.

Some of Ga’al’s most inspirational experiences as a �鶹��Ƶ student took place thousands of kilometres away from campus, on an internship, course abroad and scholarship in East Africa.

Edil Ga'al, fourth from left, on a trip to Rwanda in 2017 for a course on African systems of thought (photo courtesy of Chinezelum Azogu)

After her first year in the global-issues-focused Munk One program, she interned at an NGO that promotes human rights in Uganda.

In the winter semester of 2017, she was part of a class that went to Rwanda to study the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, which killed more than 800,000 people according to some estimates, primarily of the minority Tutsi ethnic group. The course took her south of the capital city Kigali to Nyamata Church, the site of a massacre that is now a memorial.

“I learned about the paramountcy of survivor participation [in truth and reconciliation], about the power of restorative justice, about the capacity for human resilience and also for compassion and forgiveness,” she says.

“It was at times a very heavy experience,” she adds, “but I’m fortunate it was a component of the African studies program.”

Ga’al returned to Rwanda in the summer of 2017, this time to Gisenyi, a lakeside town in the northwest. Funded through a Queen Elizabeth scholarship, her project centred on education and disability, community development and helping with curriculum development. “My time here has forced me to realize that no person is an island,” she wrote online about her experience. “Gisenyi has taught me to re-evaluate my place in my communities.”

Ga'al joins the ranks of past Rhodes Scholars from �鶹��Ƶ, notably former Ontario Premier Bob Rae, University President Emeritus David Naylor and, more recently, Kofi Hope, who works in public policy and is a Bousfield Distinguished Visitor in Planning at �鶹��Ƶ.

“Edil has an outstanding record of academic achievement and engagement,” says �鶹��Ƶ President Meric Gertler. “She is also clearly eager to travel and learn about the world first-hand. In these ways she exemplifies the comprehensive excellence and global outlook that we seek to encourage in our students. I look forward to hearing about her accomplishments in the years ahead.”

Ga’al expects to begin her studies at Oxford in the fall of next year. Beyond that, she isn’t sure what the future holds. “I really hope that I can use my future research and experiences to contribute to larger global discussions about peace, about stability and about justice,” she says. “I know it’s a lofty goal, but you kind of have to dream big.”

As for her �鶹��Ƶ mentor, Lo, she's confident her former student will excel in whichever field she chooses.

“This is just the first chapter of a long book we’re going to write about Edil,” she says.

Education in innovation: �鶹��Ƶ grad's startup experience gives him leg up during job hunt

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 14:57:22 +0000

Education in innovation: �鶹��Ƶ grad's startup experience gives him leg up during job hunt

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 06/19/2018 - 10:57

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Anston Emmanuel says his startup experience helped him clinch a coveted engineering job at General Motors, one of several multinational companies keen to boost innovation in its ranks (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Chris Sorensen

Topic

City & Culture

Convocation 2018

Connaught Global Challenge

Convocation

Creative Destruction Lab

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship Hatchery

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Faculty of Medicine

Graduate Students

Health Innovation Hub

Impact Centre

Rotman School of Management

Startup

ThisIsThePlace

UTEST

Anston Emmanuel is about to start a coveted job as an active safety controls development engineer at automotive giant General Motors – a position he secured, strange as it sounds, thanks in part to an unsuccessful effort to launch a biomedical startup at the University of Toronto.

Though the startup in question – based around a drill attachment to improve knee surgery outcomes – would seem to have little relevance to one of the world’s biggest automakers, Emmanuel says the experience gave him a clear edge when first applying for an internship at GM’s Canadian Technical Centre in Markham, Ont.

“I was told one of the main reasons I was brought on was because they saw I could take initiative within GM,” says Emmanuel, who is graduating Tuesday with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.

“They saw that during the interview process – that I was someone who was a self-starter and could bring a sense of entrepreneurship within the company.”

Emmanuel’s experience is far from unusual. While all entrepreneurs hope to succeed, the reality is the vast majority of startups fail. However, the skills and experience gained by launching a startup – generating innovative ideas, developing new business models, bringing investors and other stakeholders on board – are increasingly in high demand by a wide variety of employers.

At GM, for example, Emmanuel says CEO Mary Barra has made it a priority to transform the 100-year-old automaker into a nimble innovation machine as it competes with not just rival car companies, but Silicon Valley tech giants eager to disrupt a $2 trillion industry with new technologies like self-driving cars.

“I see that culture shift taking place within the company,” Emmanuel says. “Innovation is highly valued. We attempt to seek IP [intellectual property] at every opportunity and reward employees for doing so. New ways of thinking are being encouraged.”

In fact, there’s even a term for what graduates like Emmanuel bring to established companies: “intrapreneurship.”

Anston Emmanuel (far left) and several of his GM colleagues at a technology demonstration (photo courtesy of Anston Emmanuel)

The shifting corporate landscape is among the reasons �鶹��Ƶ has significantly boosted its entrepreneurship offerings over the years. The university now boasts nine accelerators across its three campuses that help foster student and research startups at various stages of development and in a wide variety of areas, from artificial intelligence to health care.

There are also some 200 courses and programs available and countless entrepreneurship-related events. They range from Impact Centre’s two-week Techno boot camp to a year-long entrepreneurship program run by UTEST that seeks to support startups based on �鶹��Ƶ research. At the Rotman School of Management, meanwhile, MBA students are regularly paired with startups at Creative Destruction Lab, giving the entrepreneurs access to management expertise and the MBA students real-world problems to solve.

“[Students] are seeking entrepreneurial experiences as part of their education,” �鶹��Ƶ President Meric Gertler said in a speech earlier this year. “In fact, they have figured out that starting a firm is the quintessential form of experiential learning.

“The kinds of competencies one develops – from entrepreneurship to problem-solving, teamwork skills, and resilience – are invaluable, whether the startup succeeds or fails.”

It’s a skill set that Joseph Ferenbok sees �鶹��Ƶ students put to use on a daily basis as the director of the Faculty of Medicine’s translational research program and a co-director of the Health Innovation Hub (H2i) accelerator.

“Things in the real world aren’t perfect,” says Ferenbok. “So students have to learn how to adapt and be flexible, and how to manage risk and keep focused on their goals and what they want to achieve, despite all these other problems.

“These are very much the skills that industry wants.”

Emmanuel admits it was tough to pull the plug on his startup, which received support from The Entrepreneurship Hatchery at the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. But he says the feedback his team was getting from surgeons suggested a host of complexities that would have taken a significant time commitment to address.

“In the end it was logical choice for us given where we were with our degrees,” he says.

As for the skills he picked up along the way, Emmanuel says he’s now putting them to good use at GM, with 180,000 employees on five continents, as he works on developing the safety systems needed for the autonomous vehicles of the future.

“There’s a lot of initiative that’s often required to operate in a large company,” he says, “and many of those skills came through my hands-on experience at the Hatchery.”

Learn more about �鶹��Ƶ Entrepreneurship

Smart villages: �鶹��Ƶ, international experts on how to better the lives of people living in rural communities

Romi Levine — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 04:00:00 +0000

Smart villages: �鶹��Ƶ, international experts on how to better the lives of people living in rural communities

Romi Levine Wed, 04/18/2018 - 00:00

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Kuri village in Nepal (photo by Anup Shrestha via Unsplash)

Romi Levine

Topic

Global Lens

Connaught Global Challenge

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty of Arts & Science

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Political Science

Rotman School of Management

Vivek Goel

There's a lot of attention paid to how to transform urban centres into “smart” cities – using research and technology to improve infrastructure and the well-being of residents.

But with almost half of the world’s population, and around one in five Canadians, living in rural areas, University of Toronto experts are exploring how to use “smart” tools to address the challenges of living in smaller, often isolated communities.

Earlier this month, academics and government, industry and community leaders from around the world came together at the Conference on Smart Villages to share ideas, learn about successful rural projects and seek out opportunities for collaboration. The conference took place at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences at �鶹��Ƶ’s downtown Toronto campus

“Smart villages are going to be about much more than technology,” Vivek Goel, �鶹��Ƶ’s vice-president of research and innovation, told conference attendees. “It's going to be about engaging communities in understanding what they want to achieve and where they want to focus, and working with those communities to find the technologies that are appropriate.”

Three billion people live in rural areas, from towns close to big cities to tiny villages in remote locations, said Kumar Murty, professor of mathematics in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

But rural areas also have “the most glaring manifestation of inequality,” he said, “with 70 per cent of extreme poverty occurring in villages.”

Murty is working alongside Joseph Wong, associate vice-president and vice-provost, international student experience and professor of political science at the Munk School of Global Affairs, and Mariana Mota Prado, associate professor and associate dean in the Faculty of Law, on creating a mathematical model that will help design policy and technology in villages. Their research is funded by the Connaught Global Challenge Award.

We need to address both urban and rural poverty, said Kumar Murty (photo by Romi Levine)

“How do we reach those who are most marginalized, those who are most distant or those who are frankly invisible?” asked Wong.

It’s a challenge being addressed by student researchers with the Munk School’s Reach Project, led by Wong. Students are looking at the best ways to deliver different kinds of services to the world’s poorest communities.

How, for example, do you deliver a multi-course vaccination program to people who live in a slum with no addresses?

Wong said this kind of issue is both economic and political – it requires “smart” funding and government support.

“Smartness is about precision, reducing the cost to reach, and crafting the politically winning coalition or the politically viable program,” he said.

Villages are already victims of the negative consequences of globalization – from younger generations migrating to cities to the growing prevalence of diabetes and heart disease, said Arun Chockalingam, adjunct professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

“Aging populations remain in the villages,” he said. “That's going to be our next major challenge in the world, but particularly in the most populous countries.”

Chockalingam offered a list of “smart” solutions for healthier villages, including increasing public awareness about healthy eating and activity, finding renewable resources for waste management, and stopping the subsidization of tobacco farmers and companies to reduce the harmful effects of smoking.

While villages should have access to the world’s best ideas and technology, they should also be able to protect their identity and local practices, said Anita McGahan, Rotman chair in management and a professor at the Rotman School of Management and the Munk School of Global Affairs.

“It’s trying to find this balance between actually having access to outside ideas and outside technologies but at the same time protecting the villages from flight to urban areas or from being fractured or from losing their cultural core to some of these capabilities and technologies.” she said.

Data-driven farming: �鶹��Ƶ alumni's startup develops low-cost sensors for Nepal

noreen.rasbach — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 19:09:42 +0000

Data-driven farming: �鶹��Ƶ alumni's startup develops low-cost sensors for Nepal

noreen.rasbach Fri, 03/09/2018 - 14:09

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Alumnus Ahmed Mahmoud and Assistant Professor Amy Bilton demonstrate the soil moisture probe. Spero Analytics will begin this month a pilot project involving 30 networked probes in Nepal (photo by Tyler Irving)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Global Lens

�鶹��Ƶ

Connaught Global Challenge

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Graduate Students

Research & Innovation

Startups

Subheadline

Ahmed Mahmoud hopes that his new invention – an unassuming grey box about the size of a coffee mug, attached to a metal probe – will be the key to significant improvements in crop yields for farmers in Nepal and around the world.

“It’s actually pretty straightforward in terms of function,” says the former master’s student in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. “You stick the probe in the soil and it reads the moisture. It then makes that data available online or via text messages. You can query it on your phone.”

This weekend, Mahmoud’s collaborator and alumnus Donn Pasiliao will travel to Nepal to provide 30 of the portable, networked probes for a trial conducted by the Mexico-based agricultural research organization International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and the Himalayan knowledge-sharing network International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. The goal is to see whether this low-cost method of gathering detailed, hyperlocal information about soil moisture can be used to help improve local crop yields.

Mahmoud and Pasiliao, founders of Spero Analytics, were inspired to create the device after hearing about the Data Driven Farming Prize, an international competition that seeks to create new tools for generating data and translating it into actionable information that can help farmers. The competition is sponsored by Feed the Future, a U.S. government initiative designed to combat global hunger and poverty, and the non-profit Challenge Prize Centre.

The 2017 competition focused on Nepal, one of the least developed countries in Southeast Asia. Mahmoud was already somewhat familiar with the region, having worked with Amy Bilton, an assistant professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering, on solutions for improving the productivity of fish farms in Vietnam as part of his master’s thesis. That experience taught him the difference that technological innovation can make for farmers, and inspired him to join with his high school friend Pasiliao to enter the competition.

“Ahmed is one of my favourite students to work with, and it sounded like a great idea,” says Bilton, who also serves as associate director of the Centre for Global Engineering at �鶹��Ƶ. “We supported him and Donn with some of the technical aspects, and in developing the proposal.”

Mahmoud says that while there are a number of development agencies working with farmers in Nepal to improve their agricultural productivity, they are limited by a lack of real-time analytics. “They have made detailed maps of average rainfall, soil acidity and nutrient levels,” he says. “What they don’t have is data on soil moisture levels, temperature and other conditions that change rapidly.”

In Canada, farmers can get this information from on-site weather stations or instruments such as tensiometers, which measure soil moisture. Mahmoud’s vision is to take off-the-shelf probes and add the ability to wirelessly share data within a network.

According to Mahmoud, assembling the first prototype was relatively simple. He took an electronic soil probe and connected it to an Internet of Things controller. This controller transmits the data via 3G wireless networks, which are common in Nepal. Later versions incorporated the ability to transmit data via radio waves, reducing the reliance on external infrastructure.

The entire assembly is power-efficient, able to run for months on a simple smartphone battery. Mahmoud built the first prototype for less than $100, but with custom-made circuit boards Mahmoud estimates he could get the cost under $50.

After entering the competition, Mahmoud and Pasiliao found themselves among 13 finalist teams invited to take a trip to Nepal last May. “We met farmers, extension agencies and research organizations, all of which was really helpful,” says Mahmoud. Talking to these stakeholders also provided insight into their potential business plan. “We realized that instead of selling the boxes themselves, it would be better to give them away and instead sell the data,” he says.

Their hard work paid off in September, when they were awarded one of two $50,000 runner-up prizes in the Data Driven Farming Prize competition. That prize money funded the construction of the 30-device network that is now heading to Nepal. The results of this first trial will inform further design of the devices. Eventually, Mahmoud hopes to add sensors for temperature and humidity as well as moisture.

Bilton says that the project is a great example of the ways in which engineering can address critical problems in international development.

“Though there are a number of big companies working in the area of global development, they don’t typically have engineering staff,” she says. “With the right knowledge base and just a couple of years, it’s possible to make a real impact.”

�鶹��Ƶ startup raises US$45 million to build AI-powered drug discovery business

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 05:00:00 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ startup raises US$45 million to build AI-powered drug discovery business

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 03/09/2018 - 00:00

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�鶹��Ƶ alumnus Abraham Heifets is the co-founder and CEO of Atomwise, which uses AI to speed drug discovery (photo by Harim Ulfig)

Chris Sorensen

�鶹��Ƶ

Artificial Intelligence

Connaught Global Challenge

Creative Destruction Lab

Entrepreneurship

Impact Centre

Research & Innovation

Startups

ThisIsThePlace

A University of Toronto startup using artificial intelligence to speed drug discovery has raised US$45 million to fund growth – yet another example of how efforts to commercialize the university’s AI expertise are making waves in the business world.

San Francisco-based Atomwise, which helps screen millions of potential drug candidates in a fraction of the time of traditional methods, said this week its latest funding round was led by Monsanto Growth Ventures, Data Collective (DCVC) and B Capital Group.

That brings the total amount of capital Atomwise has raised to more than US$51 million.

“With our initial work in 2012, Atomwise became the first startup to commercialize deep neural networks for drug discovery,” Abraham Heifets, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

“It seemed to many like science fiction then, but now in 2018 Atomwise has the commercial traction with a host of customers to demonstrate our leadership in AI for drug discovery.”

This Is the Place: Read more stories about entrepreneurship at �鶹��Ƶ

Co-founded by �鶹��Ƶ alumni Heifets, Izhar Wallach and Alexander Levy, Atomwise says its AI technology has the potential to fix a key problem for the pharmaceutical industry: declining productivity as pharma companies achieve fewer breakthroughs per research dollar.

A 2016 report by consulting firm Deloitte, for example, estimated that peak sales per product have declined more than 11 per cent year-over-year since 2010 while the cost to bring drugs to market have held roughly steady over the same period.

By contrast, Atomwise says its AtomNet drug research technology can identify “active” hit compounds at a rate up to ten thousand times higher than the physical high-throughput methods it now augments.

Learn more about �鶹��Ƶ Entrepreneurship

Two Canada 150 Research Chairs coming to �鶹��Ƶ

ullahnor — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 19:18:12 +0000

Two Canada 150 Research Chairs coming to �鶹��Ƶ

ullahnor Wed, 12/13/2017 - 14:18

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Donna Rose Addis (left) and Miguel Ramalho-Santos (right) will be coming to �鶹��Ƶ as Canada 150 Research Chairs

Topic

Breaking Research

Canada 150

Canada Research Chairs

Connaught Global Challenge

Faculty of Arts & Science

Faculty of Medicine

Research & Innovation

Two researchers – one a leading psychologist studying memory and another investigating the molecular mechanisms that control early embryonic development – will be joining the University of Toronto, bringing top international talent to the country as Canada 150 Research Chairs.

Federal Science Minister Kirsty Duncan announced the first four Canada 150 Research Chairs in Ottawa on Wednesday.

The one-time, $117-million program to help universities recruit top internationally based research talent to Canada was unveiled in the 2017 federal budget in celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary. The government hopes the chairs – more than 25 to be hired eventually -- will provide an opportunity to enhance the country's reputation as a global centre for science, research and innovation excellence.

Psychology researcher Donna Rose Addis, who is of Samoan descent, has focused her work on memory, imagination, aging and depression. She earned her PhD at �鶹��Ƶ and did her post-doctoral research at Harvard before joining the University of Auckland. She returns to �鶹��Ƶ, in the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of psychology, and Baycrest Health Sciences as the Canada 150 Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging.

Miguel Ramalho-Santos, who is originally from Portugal, spent the last two decades in the U.S. studying molecular mechanisms in early embryonic development, looking at the interaction of the environment with genes. He will join �鶹��Ƶ's Faculty of Medicine and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in the Sinai Health System as the Canada 150 Research Chair in Developmental Epigenetics.

“We look forward to seeing what you do over the next seven years,” Duncan said.

Read the Canada 150 Research Chairs announcement

The two �鶹��Ƶ affiliated researchers will each receive $350,000 per year for the next seven years.

“Donna and Miguel will be pursuing important scholarly advances – their work will have impact around the world,” said Vivek Goel, �鶹��Ƶ’s vice-president of research and innovation. “Their appointments show the value of government funding in helping �鶹��Ƶ to attract some of the top scholars in the world, at a time when Canada is looking increasingly appealing to researchers.”

Interested in publicly funded research in Canada? Learn more at UofT’s #supportthereport advocacy campaign

Addis explores neuroimaging, behavioural and neuropsychological methods to investigate how the brain remembers past experiences. She’ll be using advance brain imaging technology available at Baycrest to better understand how our sense of memory, imagination and identity changes as we age and how that differs across cultures.

The recipient of New Zealand’s prestigious Prime Minister’s Emerging Scientist Prize, Addis has been a role model for Indigenous scientists in her country. At the announcement on Wednesday, she began by acknowledging her Samoan heritage.

“My people are voyagers, wayfinders and discoverers, and I carry these traditions with me into my science,” she told the audience. “I’m grateful and humbled for this opportunity to take my research in new and exciting directions, here in Canada. Thus far my research has revealed the brain networks that we use to remember our past experiences also allow us to imagine the future. In Canada, I will have access to advance brain imaging methods not available yet in New Zealand to discover the specific stages of the imagination process and how things are disrupted by memory loss, aging and depression.”

�鶹��Ƶ global death study gets support to expand from Connaught Global Challenge Award

rasbachn — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 20:29:29 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ global death study gets support to expand from Connaught Global Challenge Award

rasbachn Mon, 11/13/2017 - 15:29

Cutline

“Why study the dead?” asks Professor Prabhat Jha. “Well, the dead are interesting to help the living by understanding the patterns of disease and the major killers, and you can actually form the way forward to reduce premature mortality"

Jennifer Robinson

Topic

Global Lens

Computer Science

Connaught Global Challenge

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty of Arts & Science

How and why we die are questions that hold a lot of meaning for Prabhat Jha.

With support from this year’s Connaught Global Challenge Award, the professor in the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health is leading an interdisciplinary team to expand the collection of mortality statistics and develop innovative new tools to analyze the data for patterns.

The project – innovations to close the global mortality data divide – is one of five sharing $1.23 million from the Connaught Global Challenge.

Read about the other Connaught Global Challenge Award winners

The internal award, provided by the Connaught Fund, is designed to support new collaborations involving leading �鶹��Ƶ researchers and students from multiple disciplines, along with innovators and thought leaders from other sectors.

Every year, an estimated 60 million people die worldwide. Over 80 per cent of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries where many deaths occur at home and without medical attention. For example, only three per cent of the world’s children who died in 2010 had a medically certified death certificate.

That lack of information on deaths is itself a killer. But it’s a solvable challenge, says Jha, head of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital and the professor of global health and epidemiology at Dalla Lana.

“Why study the dead?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, the dead are interesting to help the living by understanding the patterns of disease and the major killers, and you can actually form the way forward to reduce premature mortality. That’s true in India; it’s also true in Canada.”

Interested in publicly funded research in Canada? Learn more at UofT’s #supportthereport advocacy campaign

With the $250,000 in Connaught funding, Jha said he’s going to be able to “bring different types of science to the question” of how the dead are counted, reported and their information analyzed and used to improve public health.

“It’ll help us cement the University of Toronto’s leadership in global health, in particular, mortality statistics,” said Jha.

Jha’s project is an expansion of his globally renowned Million Death Study, which has been knocking on doors in India since 2002 to collect first-hand accounts of the symptoms and circumstances leading up to a loved one’s death.

The personal narratives or “verbal autopsies” are independently reviewed and coded online by two doctors to determine cause of death. They’ve been invaluable tools for public health policy both in India and globally.

For example, the study showed how deeply flawed global estimates were for malaria and snake bite deaths. It also helped document that one million additional children have been saved as a result of reductions in specific diseases from 2005.

“There’s a simple adage in epidemiology: You don’t know, unless you look,” he said. “When you look, you often get surprised.”

Working with Graeme Hirst, a professor in �鶹��Ƶ's department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science, Jha’s Connaught-funded project is testing machine learning, specifically natural language processing (NLP), to see if it can improve and possibly replace the narrative coding by doctors.

“We also want to apply machine learning to be able to detect patterns in the data, not just the Indian data, but to about 110 million individual death records from Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil – 13 countries in all – to pick up specific patterns that help define the avoidability of death,” he said.

Preliminary results have been promising, he said, adding “this is opening up a new frontier in machine learning to use NLP to try to understand patterns of diseases so that we can improve the diagnostic capacity.”

A geospatial working group, which is part of the Connaught-funded project, is also studying the distribution of diseases to help understand risk factors. For example, Jha said in India they’re using geospatial science to document how many people are killed by air pollution and “then we can study other exposures in similar ways.”

The Connaught funding will also help �鶹��Ƶ host a global symposium on closing the mortality data in 2019, as well as create a Challenge Scholars program for graduate students.

As the Millionth Death Study team draws close to recording their millionth death – something Jha expects this year or next – researchers are preparing to turn the day-to-day operation of the study over to the Indian government.

They are also working with the Canadian government, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others to expand the study’s verbal autopsy approach to Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Mozambique.

“That system has worked beautifully in India at very low cost. It’s one of those low-cost, high-impact interventions,” he said. “It should be thought about being like GPS for global health. If you have evidence and know what the patterns are, you can map out where to go” with public health policies and interventions.

�鶹��Ƶ interdisciplinary projects receive funding from relaunched Connaught Global Challenge Award

ullahnor — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 15:41:02 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ interdisciplinary projects receive funding from relaunched Connaught Global Challenge Award

ullahnor Mon, 02/13/2017 - 10:41

Cutline

�鶹��Ƶ research teams led by David Lie, Brent Sleep and Mark Fox are winners of this year's Connaught Global Challenge Award (photo composite by Geoff Agnew)

Topic

Our Community

Connaught Fund

Connaught Global Challenge

Urban Genome

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Rotman

Faculty of Arts & Science

Three teams at the University of Toronto that are trying to resolve globally pressing issues are sharing $750,000 in funding from the recently retooled Connaught Global Challenge Award.

The relaunched internal award, funded by the Connaught Fund, is designed to support new collaborations involving leading �鶹��Ƶ researchers and students from multiple disciplines, along with innovators and thought leaders from other sectors.

This funding boost will help these programs get off the ground and help them find major new external funding to further develop solutions to the global challenge, forge important new partnerships with other internationally renowned universities and government agencies, as well as possibly create new research-oriented academic programs.

“I’d like to congratulate all of the recipients of this year’s Connaught Global Challenge Award,” said Professor Vivek Goel, �鶹��Ƶ’s vice-president of research and innovation.

“These projects all tackle immensely important and complicated global problems. The Connaught Fund understands that to find solutions, it needs to provide funding to support interdisciplinary collaboration at �鶹��Ƶ. Each of our teams is committed to expanding connections with faculty in relevant divisions across all three campuses.”

The recipients of this year’s Connaught Global Challenge Award are:

“The Information Technology, Transparency, and Transformation (IT3) Lab” led by David Lie, professor of electrical & computer engineering at the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. The team includes fellow �鶹��Ƶ researchers from the Faculty of Law and Rotman School of Management, as well as collaborators from Princeton University, Harvard University, Tel Aviv University, Google, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and more.
“Network for Engineering Education for Sustainable African Cities (NEESAC)” led by Brent Sleep, professor of civil engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. The team includes �鶹��Ƶ researchers from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), Faculty of Arts & Science, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, as well as collaborators from the University of Victoria, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, a number of African institutions and more.
“The Urban Genome Project” led by Mark Fox, �鶹��Ƶ’s distinguished professor of urban systems engineering at the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. The team includes �鶹��Ƶ researchers with expertise in history, big data and transportation from the Rotman School of Management, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, Faculty of Arts & Science and the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Connaught Global Challenge

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