Governor General of Canada visits UPEI!
Her Excellency the Right Honourable Julie Payette, Governor General of Canada, visited the UPEI campus on Monday, June 25 as part of her official visit to Prince Edward Island.
Her Excellency met with researchers and their teams from the UPEI Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering including Dr. Ali Ahmadi, assistant professor of engineering who is leading a team focusing on the 3D (bio-) printing of natural polymers such as amylum and chitin for tissue engineering and drug delivery applications, adding value to waste streams coming from PEI potato and shellfish industries.
Dr. Bishnu Acharya, assistant professor of engineering, along with his student researchers demonstrated the process they are undertaking to construct equipment that extracts tunicate cellulose in large amounts to turn the shellfish pest into something valuable to shellfish harvesters.
Dr. Nadja Johnson Bressan, assistant professor of engineering, along with Dr. Cate Creighton, assistant professor anaesthesiology, from the Atlantic Veterinary College, and their team of students are working on a project that utilizes fabric sensors to access physiological variables such as the heart rate and respiratory rate of large and small animals non-invasively. The Smart Mat is the first non-invasive physiological monitor of its kind. Dr. Bressan also demonstrated another project that assesses the accuracy of perineurial anesthesia performed using a 3D-holographic image generated by HoloLens, a mixed reality tool that performs local blocks on dogs and cats.
After touring FSDE, Her Excellency met with Dr. Adam Fenech and his research team at the UPEI Climate Lab and discussed CLIVE, the CoastaL Impacts Visualization Environment. Her Excellency completed her UPEI stop by participating in a roundtable at the Regis and Joan Duffy Research Centre with the Honourable Wade MacLauchlan, Premier of Prince Edward Island and members of the bioscience community including, chair of the PEI BioAlliance, UPEI's Dr. Russ Kerr.
