The Compute Canada Federation Celebrates Canadian Researchers Working on COVID-19

Researchers across Canada are tackling the COVID-19 pandemic and many are harnessing the power of Canada’s advanced research computing (ARC) platform to do so. ARC accelerates the speed to discovery and helps researchers accomplish globally competitive, data-driven, transformative research.

Research like that of Dionne Aleman, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of applied science and engineering, who is building a pandemic model to show which actions are likely to slow the spread and by how much. A team of biochemistry specialists at the Université de Montréal and Université de Laval is working to develop a rapid test that would identify the disease in minutes, rather than the current time it takes, which is hours. Five research teams at the University of British Columbia are getting $2.3 million from the federal government to continue their work on detecting, neutralizing and reducing COVID-19’s transmission while researchers at the Montreal Heart Institute are recruiting 6,000 Canadians with COVID-19 to test the anti-inflammatory drug colchicine’s ability to reduce the risk of lung-related complications of COVID-19.

Clearly, there’s plenty going on in the research world to tackle COVID-19. To mark the important research being undertaken in the country’s esteemed academic institutions, the Compute Canada Federation will host a repository of stories on how Canadian researchers are working to create solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic to celebrate their efforts.

If you know of anyone whose work we should feature, please reach out to us at cwg@computecanada.ca.

Here’s how our researchers and innovators are working to fight COVID-19:

• Clearinghouse of computer models ready to play a key role in fight against Coronavirus
• FRQ to create a province-wide COVID-19 Biobank
• In a coronavirus crisis, Gairdner Awards honour eight explorers of how cells, genes and viruses work
• Manitoba researchers say they may have found a way to safely reuse N95 masks amid COVID-19 crisis
• $2.3M given to 5 B.C. groups for novel coronavirus research
• U of T at the forefront of COVID-19 research
• Nobel laureate leads push for simple made-in-Canada ventilator
• Group of University of Alberta scientists steps up with hand sanitizer
• Researchers eye a quick, functional screening test for COVID-19
• Ontario Tech researcher exploring parent-child conversations about COVID-19: Forensic Psychology expert launches pandemic-related research study
• Lack of data makes coronavirus curve hard to predict, B.C. researcher says
• Quebec researchers test potential COVID-19 treatment
• ‘Early and bold interventions are best’: U of T researcher on simulating a pandemic response
• UWindsor Researchers Team with Local Manufacturer on Hand Sanitizer Project
• R package that gives researchers access to latest COVID-19 data reported by international health organizations to perform analyses and visualizations
• Canada’s chief science officer and leading science advisors have launched a portal to allow Canadian researchers to collaborate via Slack on COVID19 projects
• Element AI Offers Free Platform to Assist COVID-19 Response Efforts
• A tool to detect COVID-19 developed at the Université de Moncton
• From research to front-line care: U of T and hospital partners work to address global COVID-19 pandemic

Canada’s national advanced research computing (ARC) platform is delivered through the Compute Canada Federation (CCF), which is a partnership of Compute Canada, regional organizations (WestGrid, Compute Ontario, Calcul Québec and ACENET) and institutions across Canada. Together, we provide computing infrastructure and expertise to a wide variety of academic disciplines from virology to astrophysics to literary analysis.