In this position, Gilchrist conducts research that will hopefully improve the outcomes of patients in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) where the sickest newborns are treated.

He works with an interdisciplinary team that is responsible for the development of a Clinical Data Repository (CDR) that can efficiently collect and store clinical data from multiple systems, located in different departments of the hospital, in real-time, while maintaining patient privacy. As well, the team is using more accurate models, developed from the CDR data, to estimate the risk of certain kinds of medical conditions of newborn babies.

Says Gilchrist:  “I love the fact that I get to work on research that gains valuable insight from patients who are actually there in the hospital that I can see and get feedback from in real-time. This research should lead to a practical system that can be put in place where patients can benefit from the results in real-time while there are being treated and monitored in the NICU.”

Gilchrist points out that the research he conducted at Carleton for his PhD thesis was the foundation for his future research career at CHEO. “The years I spent at CHEO working on my PhD allowed me to build working relationships with many people at the hospital which made it much easier to continue after I graduated.”

The alumnus says he chose to do his PhD at Carleton because of the opportunities to work directly with medical professionals on real problems through the research group of his PhD supervisor Dr. Monique Frize.

Gilchrist emphasizes the importance of networking for graduate students when they are looking for a job. “Many opportunities are not posted, so keep in touch with your friends and colleagues, and try to network as much as possible. Your next opportunity may be only a conversation away.  Don’t be afraid to approach organizations and let them know what you are able to offer.”

Today, Gilchrist is also an Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton, where he co-supervises two graduate students with Dr. Frize. The students are also involved in doing research at CHEO. He has also created a professional photography business.

In 2008, Gilchrist made international news as part of a team that discovered the then largest known prime number.  In January 2013, the same team discovered an even larger prime number that is currently the new record. It has 17.4 million digits.

Across from the Cultural Centre is a flat, open field. At least, that’s what most people see. Steph Bolduc, a Carleton University architecture student from Timmins, Ont., sees something else—a recreation centre containing a hockey arena, a soccer field on a flat part of the roof and, on one side, a glassed-in area shaped like a giant overturned canoe. It’s meant to house retail shops, a market for local produce and crafts, artists’ studios, offices and other tenants whose rent would help pay for maintenance of the sports facilities.

Bolduc is not alone in envisaging a recreation centre here, and his project—for his master’s degree in architecture—is an offshoot of a partnership between Carleton and the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation.

Read the full story in Carleton University Magazine.

Craig, a PhD student in software defined networking, developed a set of modules that form a mobile architecture for spectrum sensing that, because of its customizability and affordability, fills a fundamental requirement in society.

Carleton Systems and Computer Engineering professor Dr. Ioannis Lambadaris believes we need equipment of this caliber – equipment that is portable, easy-to-configure, and can do this kind of sensing.

“[The] application ranges from law enforcement to security applications and military applications in the battlefield…it’s a very broad area.”

Doing what can usually only be done in FPGA (field-programmable gate array) circuits, Craig’s mobile architecture splits aggregate digital signals into sub-bands to allow for quick processing; all in an off-the-shelf, easy-to-use package.

“The main benefit is that systems that would have previously been custom-designed expensive hardware are now just a software module that you can run on an off-the-shelf Linux server,” he explains. This makes the systems much faster to develop, more flexible, cheaper, and easier to extend.

The project came about as part of Craig’s graduate studies, where he was working one day a week at D-TA Systems, a company chaired by Carleton alumnus Dr. Dipak Roy that offers reconfigurable box level radio, radar, signals intelligence, and sonar products that can be reconfigured for any application. Roy is committed to supporting the university and the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, and promoting the area of DSP. Recently, Roy sponsored the development of an advanced sonar processing laboratory housed in Carleton’s Canal Building.

Established in November 2011 through a generous donation by Roy and his wife, also a Carleton alumna, the Dipak and Tara Roy Advanced Sensor Processing Laboratory enables students and researchers to collect and study sensor data to help focus research and develop the next generation of radio frequency and acoustic multichannel applications.

“The Advanced Sensor Processing Lab was set up to do graduate research and develop expertise and skills in the complex field of sonar, radar, communication, and test and measurements systems. The goal is to create a centre of excellence in an area of national interest with broad industry and academic participation. The lab is off to a good start, in a short time of less than three years, five students have already received their Master’s degree working on various research topics of significant relevance to the defence and security communities. There is a lot more to come as the interest in this sector of the economy is growing steadily and the Carleton lab is the only one of its kind in the country,” says Roy.

Craig worked closely with Roy on this project, and credits him for bringing him up to speed on the operations and theory of DSP.

Moving forward, this incredibly promising post-graduate student says the modules can be integrated to build a complete spectrum analyzer product. As for how this development will impact the community, Lambadaris points to cybersecurity.

“This area is so advanced…we should have equipment that will be able to immediately capture traffic and analyze it in real time in order to locate criminals and terrorists. This is a fundamental requirement in any society to have a peaceful and reliable existence.”

Bottomley, a PhD student in the Department of Chemistry,  will use his scholarship to pursue his photonics research in collaboration with Drs. Jacques Albert and Winnie Ye from the Department of Electronics.

“Most of my research is focused on the properties of silver nanocubes, which are just very tiny cubes made out of ordinary silver metal,” says Bottomley. “The special properties of these tiny metal cubes comes from the fact that they are so small they interact with visible light very strongly, essentially trapping the light in the cube. I am working with Dr. Albert to use these cubes and optic fibers to produce a powerful versatile sensing platform, and with Dr. Ye in an attempt to increase the efficiency of thin film solar cells.”

Aleali and Xiong are both members of Dr. Ye’s Micro/NanoPhotonics Group. Their silicon photonics research with Dr. Ye and collaborators at the National Research Council Canada is aimed at utilizing existing fabrication facilities to provide much faster and cheaper optical telecom devices.

Aleali, a master’s student, is working on an efficient optical modulation device that encodes digital data on a stream of light, using what’s called Pockels effect in Silicon.

Explains Aleali:  “Essentially it converts an electrical signal to an optical signal which can then travel with speed of light across the room, the city, or the world. We expect this research will be used in next generation telecom and datacom networks.”

Xiong, a PhD candidate, is focusing on designing novel photonic devices based on silicon photonic platforms. The devices can manipulate the light in the submicron scale, which is useful for sensing biomolecules.

The International Society for Optics and Photonics is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The society serves more than 235,000 constituents from approximately 155 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional networking, and patent precedent. SPIE provided over $3.2 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2012.

D’Souza’s fellowship is one of 10 Ontario post-graduate fellowships to help entrepreneurs turn their neuro-discoveries into companies and jobs. D’Souza is a 2012 graduate of Carleton’s Technology Innovation Management (TIM) program.

“Natasha joined the TIM program with a purpose – to launch and grow her company,” said Steven Muegge, her graduate project supervisor and a professor with the Sprott School of Business. “She graduated with an engineering degree in one hand and a new technology business in the other.  Her graduate project examined business models to provide technology and services for children with special needs, and her company is the commercialization of that work.”

D’Souza has more than 15 years of industry experience and advises businesses, organizations and individuals on the optimization of their business strategies. She is the founder and CEO of Virtual EyeSee.

She is in the last stages of developing an innovative therapy app for children with special needs called Zeely Adventures. Children are motivated by the engaging game-based approach to recognize and interpret facial expressions.

The TIM program is a unique master’s program for innovative engineers that focuses on creating wealth at the early stages of company or opportunity life cycles.

Etemad is working onhis doctorate in electrical and computer engineering under the supervision of Ali Arya.

“Our research is intended for character control in animated movies and video games as well as extraction of information from motion patterns,” says Etemad. “So in addition to multimedia applications, it could also have an impact on surveillance systems to help recognize and track suspects.”

Etemad says he enjoys the freedom of his program: “The Department of Systems and Computer Engineering and the School of Information Technology aren’t confined to classical definitions of computer engineering. The school is very multidisciplinary and is involved with different fields such as human-computer interaction, networks, photonics and laser.”

“Coming from a third world country with poor health care, I always wanted to improve the quality of life and care back home,” says Chaugai. “I had heard that North American schools offer a good education in the field of biomedical engineering. Carleton was my top choice because the research carried out here catered to my interests and it’s also one of the most reputed institutions in Canada.”

Chaugai, who will graduate on November 10, is researching factors that affect the treatment of irregular heartbeats in the hopes that her research could eventually help save lives.

When people are experiencing abnormal heart rhythms, they are often given an electrical shock to restore a normal rhythm. That treatment is called defibrillation. In order for this to happen, sufficient electrical current needs to reach the heart. However, tissues (especially fatty tissues) can resist the flow of the electrical current. That property, which was the main focus of Chaugai’s thesis, is called impedance.

Chaugai explains that the electrical current conduction in the human chest is like the flow of water through a hose. Chaugai explains: “You can imagine the size of a hose as impedance and flow of water as current. If the size of the hose is small, lesser flow of water is seen and vice versa. Likewise, the amount of current that is going to reach the heart is dependent on the impedance of the body tissues.”

The novelty of Chaugai’s research is that it shows how the current travels in the chest and the way the impedance affects the current flow in the heart.

Chaugai worked with other researchers from Carleton and University of Ottawa Heart Institute.

Says Chaugai: “Our results suggest that it is going to be difficult to restore normal heart rhythm in larger patients with a high content of fat tissues, since the amount of current in the heart is going to be less. We also suggest a way to solve this problem, which is by changing the position of the electrodes through which the current is given to the chest.”

“These findings can be employed to improve the success rate of the treatment process in hospitals,” points out Chaugai. She says that the Electro-Physiology group and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute have shown strong interest in implementing the results of the research.

Chaugai says her supervisors, Drs. Andy Adler, Adrian Chan, andTimothy Zakutney, “are excellent researchers and their support and guidance have been invaluable throughout my studies. My overall experience in biomed at Carleton has been a process of learning, discovering and creating and has been one of the best experiences I have ever had.”

After she graduates, Chaugai is thinking of doing a PhD but also wants to apply her knowledge to help solve problems related to the biomedical industry.

More information about the Master of Applied Science in Biomedical Engineering.

That discovery was named as one of the top 50 inventions of the year by Time Magazine and copped a prize worth $100,000 U.S.

“It has been almost four years since that discovery, so this shows prime numbers of this size are very rare and requires a lot of computation power to find,” says Gilchrist.

But fame is fleeting and Gilchrist quickly got back to his real work. As a doctoral student in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, he spent the last several years completing his dissertation and will be graduating on June 7.

Under the supervison of Dr. Monique Frize, distinguished professor of engineering at Carleton, and their physician partner Dr. Erika Bariciak, a neonatologist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), he helped to develop models that could accurately estimate the risk of mortality in babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). He was also co-supervised by Dr. Colleen M. Ennett who received her PhD in Engineering from Carleton and is now working for Philips Research North America, located in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

Explains Gilchrist: “With the entire system put together, physicians and clinical staff in the NICU can obtain a mortality risk estimation of individual patients using the most up-to-date data as it comes in from the patients and provide a result in less than a second.”

Part of his thesis involved researching new methods to collect, store, and retrieve clinical data found in a hospital environment in real-time, processing data as it is received. The Clinical Data Repository (CDR) that was developed can collect and store data from patient monitors and laboratory results using free, open-source tools. It is compatible with industry standard protocols, and will allow upgrades and the development and use of third party tools to access the CDR more easily.

Gilchrist points out that the design of the CDR protects patient privacy by automatically segregating private patient information from the raw research data before it is stored.

He says that obtaining his PhD has been a very rewarding experience.

“I have been able to work on practical research and come up with new approaches to solve some challenging medical problems that are being used right now in a hospital, analyzing real medical data from actual patients there. These types of medical challenges cannot be solved by engineers working in a research lab in isolation, so it was wonderful to work collaboratively with an interdisciplinary team of physicians, nurses, and engineers right from the beginning in order to truly understand the issues at hand.”

Gilchrist says he was originally inspired by Dr. Frize when he first took a course from her during his master’s degree at Carleton and is now delighted to continue working with her after he graduates. He will also continue to research at CHEO with Dr. Bariciak. “We hope to be able to advance our research even further and look at more medical conditions beyond the current mortality risk estimations,” says Gilchrist.

For the original news post, please click HERE! http://carleton.ca/fgpa/2012/carleton-phd-candidate-is-in-his-prime

“This program offers a unique experience which allows you to explore topics not covered in typical engineering programs,” says Riedener.

Adds Ioan: “I remember reading the brochure for the MA in Sustainable Energy and I thought: Wow! This department is serious about coming up with real-world solutions, having the courage to tackle the big questions surrounding national energy policy and to co-ordinate with engineers to improve the economics of sustainable energy. I had never heard of such a unique and innovative program.”

Like most of Carleton’s new graduate programs, the SE program is interdisciplinary. Students focus on either the policy or engineering side of sustainable energy while also learning about the other discipline and working collaboratively with students from both areas.

Riedener chose to specialize in engineering while Ioan focused on public policy.

Says Ioan: “I don’t think it’s realistic to operate in unique disciplines any longer, simply because real-world problems are increasingly complex and multi-dimensional. I feel that through the MA, I acquired not only specific skill sets, but also the ability to communicate across disciplinary boundaries – each which has its own lingo.”

Riedener also liked the interdisciplinarity of the program. “Working with people from non-technical background really emphasized the soft skills such as communication. Furthermore, it enabled me to work on some unique projects. For example, my group and I did a case study looking at optimizing energy efficiencies in northern Canada.”

Ioan pursued several research projects that ranged from studying appropriate energy systems for remote communities to researching the economics of plug-in electric vehicles and policies to introduce them into the mainstream.

She also did a co-op placement where she worked on assisting rural communities in conducting feasibility assessments for wind and solar energy, depending on the potential for such energy in their region. “I found it enabled me to test the theories I learned in the classroom and see how they work in the real world.”

The program deals with issues of the day.

“During our seminars, there was always an “expert” at the table to add to fruitful discussions that were very current,” shares Ioan. “I enjoyed this aspect of being at the edge of change, literally as the latest news stories on energy unravelled, finding out how policy advisers address new issues and opportunities – it’s a very exciting process and also very fulfilling to know you are helping many generations to come.”

Riedener is currently working as a Quality Assurance Site Representative for a mechanical contractor. “The project I am working on is a Leed-certified hospital expansion in Markham Ontario so I get to see first-hand some of the mechanical systems required for the future operation of a high performance green building.”

For more information about the master’s program in Sustainable Energy, please visit: carleton.ca/sustainable-energy/.

Fraser grew up asking questions like − ‘How do nerve cells in the human brain process information?’

“I wanted to pursue a career that would allow me to combine technology and medicine,” says Fraser. So he decided to apply to Carleton’s Master’s of Applied Science (MASc) program in Biomedical Engineering. The main objective of this degree is to enhance students’ abilities to solve biological and medical problems through the application of engineering principles.

Fraser adds: “This program gives me a perfect opportunity to develop a background in working with biological signals and signal processing. These techniques are applicable to a wide variety of problem areas and are useful in continuing research in biomedical engineering.”

His present research looks at developing software that can be used by medical professionals to analyze data associated with muscle contractions.

Electromyograph signals (sEMG) are a measure of the electrical activities associated with muscle contractions. These signals are used to aid in the diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders, to control powered prosthetic limbs, or used in fatigue studies in exercise science, for instance.

Fraser points out that there can be a large source of error unless personnel in the medical settings are specifically trained in sEMG acquisition, especially since there is no universally used software to acquire and validate sEMG.

“We are hoping that by developing our software for CleanEMG, we can remove much of the uncertainty associated with sEMG acquisition and make it easier and less costly to acquire clean, reliable sEMG signals,” says Fraser. CleanEMG is an ongoing research collaboration between Carleton University and the University of New Brunswick to develop an open-source, user-friendly software tool to quantify noise in sEMG.

Fraser’s supervisors are Adrian Chan and James Green. “Both are very down-to-earth, very approachable and extremely knowledgeable in their areas,” says Fraser. “They are great researchers and both have received awards for teaching with the latest (and perhaps most prestigious) being Adrian’s 3M teaching award.”

Carleton’s MASc degree in Biomedical Engineering is a joint program between Carleton and the University of Ottawa, offered through the Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Biomedical Engineering (OCIBME). This is one of 12 joint institutes between Carleton and the U of O. OCIBME includes relevant engineering and science programs at Carleton.

Fraser says: “Biomedical Engineering at Carleton is great in that it is diverse enough that you have the freedom to select any courses that fit your interests and/or research area. It has a weekly seminar component where you get to listen to speakers talk about their research in biomedical engineering and learn more about just what is going on in the field. This is a perfect way to develop and appreciate the breadth of research that is done.”

He also would like to encourage undergrad students who are interested in the biomedical field to look into the NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) program. “It is an excellent opportunity to work with a professor and gain research experience during the summer. They pay you for your work as well so it really is a good experience. This is what I did the summer before I started grad school and it really helped me get acquainted with the professors that I would be working with and the type of work I would be doing.”

More information about all of our Joint Institutes can be found here.

The full story and original post can be found here. http://carleton.ca/fgpa/2012/grad-student-flexes-his-research-muscles