REGINA — University of Regina researchers received close to $3 million in funding for 14 projects through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council’s (NSERC) Discovery Grants program, which supports long-term, curiosity-driven research. This funding supports a variety of U of R projects, including research focused on environmental protection and scientific discovery.
Biology professor Dr. Britt Hall’s work begins in Prairie wetlands, which offers incredibly valuable ecological services. They are also drying out.
Hall, who received $220,0000 over five years, explains that wetlands store water during droughts and reduce flooding during wet periods. They also provide food and other resources to large numbers of migrating birds and other animals, and, importantly, store carbon and other nutrients, making them important in maintaining water quality.
But wetland ponds also contain mercury, a toxic metal released into the atmosphere primarily through coal burning.
“My team is examining what happens to various forms of mercury as wetlands dry out because of climate change or human removal,” says Hall. “My team hypothesizes that as they dry, mercury stored in the sediments changes form and is released into the atmosphere, causing a shift that could turn wetlands from places where mercury is stored into sources of mercury pollution.”
At a very different scale, U of R physics professor Dr. Garth Huber is working to understand the building blocks of the atomic nucleus, one of the central problems in modern physics.
“Protons and neutrons, known collectively as nucleons, are made up of even more fundamental constituents called quarks and gluons. While scientists know a great deal about these particles, important gaps remain,” says Huber, who received an $850,000 Subatomic Physics Discovery Grant over five years.
One gap that Huber’s team is addressing is to better understand how quarks and gluons interact to produce the matter we see around us. His team is conducting their experiments at the Jefferson Lab in the United States where Huber co-leads the ongoing PionLT and KaonLT experiments.
This work addresses key questions in modern physics, including the origin of hadronic mass, spin, and baryon number. Hadronic mass refers to the mass of particles, such as protons and neutrons, that are made of quarks and gluons.
Huber says this work is collaborative and unique in the world context, and that the team’s research will yield a wealth of relevant new data that will provide deeper insight into the origin of visible mass in the universe.
Dr. Chris Yost, Vice-President (Research), says that all the U of R’s funded research projects show the breadth of research underway at the University. “Our research addresses urgent environmental questions on the Prairies, explores the foundations of the physical universe, and many other project in between. Not only is this work helping to create learning opportunities for the next generation of researchers, it’s making an impact here in Saskatchewan and beyond.”
Below is a list of the other University of Regina researchers who received funding as part of the NSERC Discovery Grants Program:
- Dr. Ifran Al-Anbagi received $235,000 over five years for his project, Intelligent zero-trust blockchain architectures for securing mission-critical IoT systems
- Dr. Mohan Babu received $325,000 over five years for his project, Investigating uncharacterized Escherichia coli proteins implicated in cell division
- Dr. Andrew Cameron received $240,000 over five years for his project, Integration into host networks: Transcriptional controls of plasmid persistence and dissemination
- Dr. Martin Frankland received $70,000 over five years for his project, Homotopical and homological structures in topology
- Dr. Allen Herman received $185,000 over for five years for his project, Algebras and association schemes
- Dr. Golam Kabir received $215,000 over for five years for his project, Integrated assessment and optimization of the Canadian CCUS supply chain: A techno-economic, environmental, and risk-resilient approach.
- Dr. Dabanjana Kundu received $185,000 over for five years, plus $12,500 Early Career Researcher supplemental funding, for her project, Arithmetic of elliptic curves via Iwasawa theory
- Dr. Malek Mouhoub received $235,000 over five years for his project, Preference-centric multiple objective optimization for multi-criteria decision making
- Dr. Donald Stanley received $170,000 over for five years for his project, Realization of cohomology
- Dr. Paitoon Tontiwachwuthikul received $215,000 over five years for his project, Creating the new generation of CO2 capture processes using novel solvent regeneration techniques with designer solvents for Canada's Energy Transition to a Lower Carbon Energy Future
- Dr. Mark Vanderwel received $195,000 over five years for his project, Climate- and fire-driven biomass change across Canada's western boreal forest
- Dr. Sandra Zilles received $300,000 over five years for her project, Theory of sample-efficient interactive learning
Dr. Britt Hall and Dr. Garth Huber are available for interviews and have varying availability throughout this week and next. Please email Mindy.Ellis@uregina.ca if you would like to arrange an interview.
