"The 2019-2020 academic year will certainly be a memorable one, especially its last few months. The COVID-19 pandemic had major impacts on all of us and research in the Faculty of Science was no exception. Fortunately, the entire team at the Faculty rose to the occasion, which allowed us to restart research, gradually, as soon as it became safe to do so. Meanwhile, many of our researchers provided essential efforts with incredible speed to develop tools to monitor and fight the COVID-19 virus. Thus, a group in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics produced models of COVID-19 to help develop clear guidance on the conditions required to end a lockdown. A team in the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences obtained funding to design a diagnostic tool that would provide a positive or negative test result in under 10 minutes with an accuracy rate of 90 percent. Finally, collaboration took place between a laboratory in the Department of Biology and the University of Saskatchewan to develop an edible vaccine against the COVID-19 virus.
This timely new research is only a subset of the main achievements for 2019-2020. Others include the characterization of a new type of earthquake — the slow earthquakes — by a group in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the discovery of a new sex hormone that could play an important role in the control of reproduction by a research team in the Department of Biology, in collaboration with a group from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A research team in the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences successfully discovered new materials that will allow for an effective and affordable way to capture CO2 and thus potentially help reduce greenhouse effects caused by man-made emissions.
Despite the challenges that the last year brought to us, researchers in the Faculty of Science have once again proven how their endeavors can lead to novel and original solutions to the problems faced by society."
- Marc Ekker, Vice-Dean, Research
