CFI president starts his tenure with a visit to UVic
October 23, 2024
Sylvain Charbonneau, president and CEO of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, put UVic research under a microscope during a campus visit on October 22. Charbonneau shared that he was keen to hear about core facilities, training and engagement beyond the university. Above all, he was interested in learning more about the people.
“Talent is the great currency coming out of our universities,” agreed Pierre Normand, vice-president of external relations and communications for CFI. “It’s important we hear the success stories at the institution.”
UVic researchers delivered.
Charbonneau, whose background is in physics in academia and industry, spoke at length with Arthur Blackburn, co-director of UVic’s Advanced Microscopy Facility and the Hitachi High-Technologies Canada Research Chair in Advanced Electron Microscopy. In front of the Hitachi HF-3300V scanning transmission electron holography microscope (STEHM) that Blackburn and CFI were instrumental in bringing to UVic, they chatted about some of the unique features of this microscope, one of only a handful in the world.
Then Associate Vice-President Research Fraser Hof introduced Charbonneau and Normand to UVic’s Health Core. A network of four open-access Biosafety Level 2 labs, these on-campus facilities are available to all UVic researchers, students, industrial partners and early-stage entrepreneurs for academic or commercial purposes.
Charbonneau is enthusiastic about core facilities in which equipment is shared, innovation fostered and prosperity stimulated — and, especially, training occurs. In UVic’s facilities, he saw first-hand, life sciences startups and established companies share instruments and space with students, engineers, scientists and more. Health Core Laboratory Manager Charmaine Wetherell described some of the companies, ranging from the well-established national firm Starfish Medical to a Vancouver-based cancer researcher to undergraduates for local Phillips Brewing.
Wetherell added that she and her staff — currently a UVic co-op student on an eight-month work term — will train any user on any of the instruments and equipment.
Charbonneau and Normand met Allison Selinger, a chemistry PhD student designing novel sensors to detect and identify illicit drugs. In another node of the Health Core, civil engineering post-doctoral fellow Luiz Da Silva Correa explained how his research aims to upscale safe and green anti-biofouling agents for advancing water conservation through desalination technologies.
Fraser Hof summed up the facilities — and the visit.
“I love,” he said, “how much rubbing elbows happens here.”
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Rachel Goldsworthy