Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee. My name is Graham Carr. I'm the vice-president for research and graduate studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
Thank you for the opportunity you have given me today to address you on behalf of Mitacs and the university staff, as part of the consultations on budget 2015.
Mitacs is a national not-for-profit research organization that supports Canadian innovation through collaborative research projects that link businesses or not-for-profit organizations with the talent at our universities.
At Concordia, we're making major investments to intensify and build out our research capacity. We pride ourselves on being a next-generation university, with leading-edge research strengths in areas such as preventive health, non-human genomics, synthetic biology, information security, aerospace, digital media, and the creative arts. Collaboration with companies and not-for-profit organizations to support new research endeavours and create unique training opportunities for our graduate students is a fundamental component of our institutional strategy. Our partnership with Mitacs helps to advance this goal.
For the past 15 years Mitacs has worked on behalf of the Canadian university community in partnership with governments across Canada to build programs that support skills development and training for students. These programs help highly qualified graduate students and post-doctoral fellows transition to research and development careers. They also broaden the impact of university-based research and help Canadian companies and not-for-profits become more productive and innovative.
Mitacs' flagship program, Accelerate, integrates paid research internships and professional skills development into the existing academic training that graduate students receive. Each internship relates to a peer-reviewed project supervised by a professor. It applies fundamental research to tackle an R and D challenge faced by a company or not-for-profit. The program has grown from 18 internships in 2007 to well over 2,500 internships last year alone.
At Concordia, the number of Mitacs projects has grown exponentially since 2008, when we had one intern, to this past year, when we had almost 60. Let me share with you two examples of Concordia projects that Mitacs has supported that speak to promoting health and workplace safety, which is of particular concern to your committee.
Researchers at Concordia partnered with Parker Filtration Canada, based in Laval, to model and analyze filters used by combustion engines. By improving their efficiency, our researchers aimed to reduce the level of environmental pollution caused by heavy-duty diesel engines and to limit the amount of exposure to pollution that industrial workers face on a daily basis.
A second project partnered with the Vancouver-based company Williams & White to design a robotic arm that can accurately load a saw blade into a grinding machine and deliver the finished saw. This innovation not only enhances the safety of sawmill workers but also makes the overall grinding process more efficient.
As the vice-president for research and graduate studies, I have a vested professional interest in the career prospects of Concordia's graduate students. We know that the majority, including most Ph.D.s, will not find employment within academia. Mitacs opens other avenues for students. Its projects frequently result in the creation of new positions, as companies and not-for-profits discover what their interns have to offer. In some cases, Mitacs interns may also create their own companies.
Thanks to combined funding from Industry Canada and the tri-council industrial research and development internship program, Accelerate currently supports over 2,000 internships per year. For budget 2015, Mitacs is proposing to expand Accelerate to 10,000 internships per year by 2020. Mitacs is extremely skilled at engaging companies and not-for-profits with the university community. Its pan-Canadian network of businesses and academics is unmatched. Accelerate is Canada's pre-eminent platform for multi-sectoral research training.
Concordia, like other member universities, is strongly behind the Mitacs mission and is very supportive of the proposal to expand the scope of the Accelerate program.
Thank you for your attention.