Sure. Thank you, Rob.
Thank you, Ms. Gladu, for the question. It's really a pleasure to be here at the committee tonight to talk about such a mission-critical initiative for Canada.
With respect to, in our space, strategies for attracting and retaining talent and what some of the best practices are, as Rob mentioned in his remarks, we have a track record of supporting over 6,000 trainees since Genome Canada's founding. One of the critical pieces of success that's really worked in our space is that we engage in partnered research. This means that we're very focused on working with end-users, including industry and other partners, to define their needs right at the outset of the initiatives. That leads then to building up receptor capacity for those students to then go on to be hired.
In fact, in our initiatives we have seen two-thirds of the students who have been out working on our genomics application partnership programs go on to be hired by the very projects on which they worked, so we're building receptor capacity, thanks to the partnered approach we take.
We also are very supportive, through our research programs, in our salaries and stipends for trainees, with 70% of our research programs going to supporting research trainees and researchers. Like the granting councils, we base our investments on important benefits for those students. Our salaries for trainees are indexed to inflation, so they grow with inflationary increases. We also provide parental or maternal benefits as well for those students, similar to those provided by the granting councils.
The final thing I'll say with respect to good practice is what Rob alluded to with respect to inclusive genomics. We're very conscious of the fact that we need to do more to ensure a diverse pipeline into our research programs. We recently implemented a strategy for inclusion, accessibility, diversity and equity to ensure that we're building, through intentional program design, a more systemic change to our policies and programs to promote fairer access and also to ensure that we're fully supporting the range of talent in genomics.
Those are some of the best practices that we are trying to ensure that we build and maintain in order to build the genomics pipeline in Canada.