Queen’s is looking to the stars, the brain, the web, and more, with $1.2 million in new provincial research funding.
Nine Queen’s projects will be seeing new funding as a result of a $47 million local research and innovation investment announced by the provincial government on Jan. 21. The $1.2 million secured by Queen’s projects will be used to build, renovate, and acquire equipment for their projects and facilities.
The three University projects that received the most funding were “Atomic Gas in Galaxies as a Cosmological Probe,” led by Professor Kristine Spekkens; “NHP Models of Health and Disease,” led by Assistant Professor Emily Oby; and “Towards Sustainable Open-Source Software and Developer Productivity,” led by Assistant Professor Mariam Guizani.
The Journal sat down with the leaders of these three projects to learn more about their research and how this new funding will help to advance it.
Galaxy evolution and formulation
Spekkens’ project, which received $250,000, focuses on looking at the properties of galaxies in the local universe and trying to connect those properties with predictions relating to how galaxies evolve in the universe itself.
“We’re really interested in understanding how galaxies get their gas and what that tells us about how they evolve in the universe,” Spekkens said. “We’re interested in understanding what the limit is in terms of how big a galaxy has to be, or how big a dark matter halo has to be to host a galaxy, or where galaxy formation ends. And that’s important, because in our universe, big galaxies are built out of little galaxies.”
She explained that the grant money will be used to build a new lab in Stirling Hall, and to purchase a local compute cluster that will allow them to handle the large data sets that come with this area of research, including those from radio telescope data.
Neural activity relating to motor control
Oby’s research, which received $200,000 in funding, uses multi-electrode recordings to explore neural mechanisms of motor control and learning.
“They’re about 100 electrodes, kind of the size of your pinky nail, that we implant into motor cortex,” Oby said. “Sometimes we just record the neural activity that’s involved in controlling reaches [when moving], or we use that neural activity to drive a brain computer interface, so the user controls a computer cursor to play simple video games just by thinking about moving, rather than physically moving their arm.”
She explained that these brain computer interfaces can be used to help patients who have spinal cord injuries or other forms of paralysis to continue performing their daily activities.
Oby shared that the grant money she received will be used to buy neural recording equipment for the lab, including the electrodes they implant and the system that allows them to record the neural activity.
Open-source computing
Guizani, whose project received $187,741, explained that her research is focused on human centered computing and determining how we can reduce the barrier to entry for open-source systems, which are source codes that are made freely available for anyone to modify or redistribute.
“For example, women are very underrepresented in the open-source ecosystem,” Guizani said. “If we think of people where English isn’t their first language, it’s not as easy to also contribute and get into open source. So, we’re trying to leverage agentic foundation models to make things easier for people to participate in open source.”
Her project also focuses on determining how we can ensure healthy, sustained productivity for developers in the age of artificial intelligence.
Guizani shared that the funding her project received will be used to build project infrastructure, including the necessary servers and computing power, and other items such as an eye tracker, which would allow researchers to see where different individuals fixate in different codes.
The other six Queen’s projects that received funding were detailed in a recent Gazette post.
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funding, Leaders, Projects, research and innovation investment
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