UWindsor Annual Report 2007/2008

Three University of Windsor researchers were among the recipients of the Canada Research Chairs.

Dr. Aaron Fisk, of the Department of Biological Sciences, received the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Research Chair in Trophic Ecology.
Fisk’s research examines the structure, function, and flow of nutrients in aquatic food webs. According to the researcher, global change can profoundly alter the structure and links within food webs, ultimately changing the types and abundance of organisms able to survive in an ecosystem.

Fisk plans to develop tools for studying ecosystem structure and provide new information on how ecosystems function and react to environmental stress. Characterizing and understanding the influence of natural variation and man-made stress on food webs is essential for effective conservation, management and, ultimately, the health of sustainable ecosystems.

Dr. Robin Gras, of the Department of Computer Science, received the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Chair in Probabilistic Heuristics and Bioinformatics.

Gras is generating advanced artificial intelligence systems in order to develop a computational model that will sort through medical and biological information to aid researchers in everything from cancer research to mad cow disease.

Gras says that although researchers have amassed enormous amounts of information on the inner workings of the human body – from cataloguing the more than 30,000 genes that make up the human genome, to complex models that explain how humans think, walk, grow, and perform countless other tasks – the technology to sort this information has lagged. He likens it to looking for something online without a search engine, such as Google. When medical researchers lack the right search engine, it can mean the difference between a major medical breakthrough and years of wasted time and energy.

Gras’s research can help make sense of complex biological interactions by using a computerized set of rules and mathematical models that point scientists in the right direction. He says it is similar to how Google uses rules about how websites link to one another to pick those most suitable for the search request. Gras’s work not only has the potential to save time and money in the treatment of disease, it will also be useful to ecologists and others who are researching growth and change in the natural world.

Dr. Jerald Lalman, Department of Civil and Environmental engineering has received the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Biotechnology. He will receive $500,000 over the next five years for his research into a sustainable method for producing hydrogen from agriculture products and waste biomass. The Canada Foundation for Innovation also supports his work.

Lalman says he expects that biofuels from renewable crops will replace those derived from fossil fuels in the future because of dwindling fossil fuel supplies, increasing greenhouse gases, and energy security. Lalman says renewable energy sources such as hydrogen, ethanol and diesel are the wave of the future, and processes to produce them will be similar to many existing bio-refineries producing paper, vegetable oils, and sugar from agricultural products. Future products will include biofuels, such as hydrogen, as well as chemicals and animal feeds.

According to Lalman, producing hydrogen from agricultural products can be accomplished by heat treatment to control the growth of selected micro-organisms, however sustainable production has been a challenge. He intends to demonstrate that instead of heat treating mixed anaerobic microbial systems, adding vegetable oils is a sustainable method of producing hydrogen from sugars.