A group of researchers including Alán Aspuru-Guzik, U of T professor and Canada 150 Research Chair in Theoretical & Quantum Chemistry, has achieved a world first in quantum chemistry.

A recent study in Physical Review X published the findings of a quantum computer used to calculate the ground-state energy of molecular hydrogen (H2) and lithium hydride (LiH). Ground state refers to the lowest possible energy level of electrons in an atom or molecule.

Although these bonds have been simulated before, this is the first time a multi-qubit — pronounced ‘cue-bit’ — system has been used. While qubits are the basic unit of quantum information, classical computing uses basic units known as bits, which are unable to solve complex computations.

Quantum chemistry is a subfield of chemistry that uses quantum mechanics to model physical systems like chemical bonds and reactions. Quantum chemistry uses ground states, transition states, and excited states to model bonds and reactions.

Where transition states signify the highest possible energy levels in a given molecule or atom, excited states include all energy levels when moving between ground and transition states.

Many advances have been made in the field of quantum chemistry in years prior. In 2010, the hydrogen atom was simulated using photonic and nuclear magnetic resonance experiments.

In 2013, another photonic experiment was used to simulate the hydrohelium cation HeH⁺. In 2015, the dissociation curve of the same cation was modelled.

We saw the first scalable quantum chemistry simulator on a superconducting platform in 2016, and in 2017, three molecules — H2, LiH, and beryllium hydride, or BeH_2, — were simulated on a superconducting qubit platform.

However, these experiments involving ion-trap implementation were limited to a single qubit.

In contrast, this experiment used the trapped-ion model, which was implemented in conjunction with the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm. This algorithm was used to calculate the molecular ground-state energies of H2 and LiH, which were then used to simulate their respective bonds.

In effect, the ions are isolated in free space using electromagnetic fields and, once stabilized, they are used to store qubits. This allows quantum information to be transferred through the motion of the ions in a shared trap.

Lasers are used to induce coupling between the internal qubit states and the external motional states for multi-qubit experiments. In other words, the ions become excited and move from a lower energy state to a higher one, which leads to an increase in ion size and allows them to start interacting. The more qubits involved, the more data is shared.

This groundbreaking study is an indication that data processing and collection through quantum computers could become faster, leading to practical applications in many areas from medicine to artificial intelligence.

Currently, even the largest supercomputers are struggling to accurately model molecules. The researchers chose to model H2 and LiH because they are easily understood molecules, and can be modelled using classical computers. Modelling simple bonds helps to pinpoint the accuracy of quantum computing and refine its applications to chemistry.

Simulations of said molecules would allow scientists to model and understand different chemical reactions with lower energy pathways. This would enable the design of new catalysts — substances that increase the rate of reactions — by reducing the amount of energy needed to start them.

The production of new catalysts could lead to the development of new fertilizers, better batteries, and organic solar cells.

The high speed afforded by quantum computing could also benefit the medical field. Masses of data produced through biomedical research on genomes could be more easily shared and handled by scientists. This, in turn, could lead to advances in personalized medicine, useful in treating diseases such as cancer.

More research is still needed to limit errors and their consequences, especially as the VQE method is vulnerable to calibration errors early on, and some errors cannot directly be recovered from.

But with developments in machine learning, scientific discoveries in fields like chemistry can be made much more quickly, and can lead to more advancements.

Why is it that we can’t completely remember events from our childhood?

Previous studies have shown that infants are unlikely to remember event-based memories. As infants, we lack the cognitive abilities to consolidate and store autobiographical memories. As we grow older and our brains develop, new neural pathways are made in the place of old ones, leading to a near-total loss of memories from the first few years of life.

A unique form of this circuit recalibration and the most impactful on childhood forgetting is hippocampal neurogenesis, or the generation of new neurons in the hippocampus, the region of the brain primarily responsible for memory consolidation.

A study published in Current Biology outlines how memory loss in infants occurs, and how scientists induced their recovery using optical stimulation — a technique that uses light to trigger neurons — in mice.

Researchers in the Frankland Lab at the Hospital for Sick Children have been studying patterns of neural activity during autobiographical memory formation. Once researchers mapped out patterns of neural ensembles during encoding, they later reactivated specific neurons in the same pattern to test whether the subject could remember the encoded memory or not.

“Successful memory retrieval occurs when some specific spatial-temporal pattern of neural firing is engaged,” wrote Axel Guskjolen, a PhD candidate in the Frankland Lab and lead author of the study, in an email to The Varsity. “If that specific pattern of neural firing fails to occur, then the animal fails to retrieve the memory, resulting in forgetting.”

In the lab, fear was encoded into mice of varying ages, both infants and adults, by exposing them to small conditioning shocks. When returned to the training context, the older mice were able to retain the memory and freeze at the times and locations that they expected the footshock days after training. However, infant mice were a different story.

“In our experiment, infant mice successfully encode a memory but fail to retrieve it when [tested] at long retention delays (i.e. infantile amnesia). Using memory-tagging and optogenetic techniques, we were able to bring the memory back by forcing the neurons that were involved with memory encoding to become active again,” wrote Guskjolen.

When their neurons were treated with light, the infant mice were more likely to remember where to freeze. The stimulation of the neurons in the hippocampus led to artificial memory expression, even 90 days after initial training.

“This finding is a bit of an enigma because we forget the earliest experiences of our lives — a phenomena known as infantile amnesia,” added Guskjolen. “The finding that the physical basis of these memories still exists in the brain in a ‘silent’ state might explain how these forgotten memories continue to influence our thoughts and behaviours as adults.”

Initially, the researchers questioned whether the loss of memory in the infant mice was due to storage failure, where there isn’t enough space in the brain to retain memories, or retrieval failure, where memories are retained but the brain isn’t able to access them. However, throughout the study, the mice who were encoded with memories and opto-stimulated were able to experience these same memories again. The memory loss was therefore a case of retrieval failure.

According to Guskjolen, the implications of these findings for human medicine are hugely significant as the many “commonalities across mammalian brains in terms of neural subtypes, structure, and function” suggest that that these results will be translatable to humans.

“Many disorders that afflict humans are at their heart disorders of forgetting. Sometimes these disorders are characterized by too much forgetting (Alzheimer’s disease) and sometimes by too little forgetting (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder),” wrote Guskjolen. “To find cures [for] these disorders, it is important that we first understand the mechanisms of forgetting under normal circumstances.”

In the summer of 1898, Frederick Du Vernet, an Anglican missionary from Toronto, left the city to travel west. Travelling by train, steamer, and canoe, Du Vernet journeyed to the grassy banks of the Rainy River. The long and slow moving river forms a part of the border between what is now northwestern Ontario and Minnesota.

Along the Canadian side of the river, Du Vernet met and spoke to the Anishinaabe — the region’s Indigenous residents — and recorded the encounters in his diary.

In doing so, Du Vernet documented a period of intense colonial expansion, as Canadians settled on Anishinaabe territory and illicitly claimed it as their own. Yet Du Vernet also recorded moments of Anishinaabe agency and resolve against the colonial order. Taken together, his diary unwittingly tells the stories of these people and their land on Manidoo Ziibi — the Rainy River.

The project

Du Vernet’s diary was stored for decades in a Toronto church archive. Today, it’s the focus of a collaborative project in digital storytelling called Story Nations. Students and faculty from the University of Toronto are working in close consultation with the Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre of the Rainy River First Nations to develop an edition of the diary that’s annotated, online, and available in text and audio format. Many members of the team have visited the Rainy River several times and continue to receive tremendous guidance and insight from Rainy River elders and community members.

I became involved with Story Nations just over a year ago, through U of T’s digital humanities Step Forward program. At the time, I knew little about Canadian history and much less about the Rainy River. To introduce me to the topic, the program director, religion professor Pamela Klassen, and its manager and web designer, doctoral student Annie Heckman, handed me a transcription of the diary with one or two supplementary readings and asked for my thoughts.

Thrust into the foreign time and place of the diary, what immediately stood out to me were the human characters that inhabited its pages. Du Vernet jotted down the stories of Anishinaabe weighing, on a daily and individual basis, the hodgepodge of Christianity and colonialism with their own traditions and faith. Many Anishinaabe protested Du Vernet’s presence as a Christian zealot on Anishinaabe land. Taken individually, these protests often amounted to seemingly little more than a woman refusing to be photographed by Du Vernet or even the slamming of a door. But stringing these moments together generates a larger mosaic of Anishinaabe opposition to the colonial order.

Those involved in the Story Nations research project visited the present Rainy River. Photo Courtesy of Keith Garrett.

Multiple spiritual worlds

The actions of other Rainy River natives defied strict categorization. Some Anishinaabe moved fluidly between Christian and Indigenous spiritual worlds. Out of frustration, Du Vernet wrote at one point that they were “facing both ways.”

Du Vernet described such a case when writing about Kitty, a young Anishinaabe woman from the Manitoban mission of Jack Head. Kitty had been baptized but later returned to Anishinaabe spiritual practices. She became fatally ill and one night prayed with Mary Johnston, the wife of a Christian missionary. “Oh God come and take me,” she prayed. She passed away the morning after. Johnston insisted on giving Kitty a Christian burial.

Du Vernet himself became a part of the spiritual interaction he observed. Returning from a walk along the river bank, Du Vernet heard “the sound of incantation” and followed it into a tent, where an Anishinaabe ceremony was taking place. Du Vernet noticed his presence was not welcome, but he nonetheless remained transfixed by the unfolding ceremony. Even though he thought “it was all such a fraud,” Du Vernet could not help but stand with an “uncovered head and a feeling of reverence.” He was both deeply moved and viscerally repulsed by the Anishinaabe spiritual world.

Collecting and telling stories, episode by episode

I found the little stories Du Vernet recorded to be the most graspable aspect of the diary. Looking at it all together, I saw the diary not as one long narrative, but as a collection of vignettes told to Du Vernet by the people around him. I proposed organizing the digital edition around this concept. Professor Klassen approved my idea, and together we grouped the diary into 20 ‘episodes.’

Each episode works like the chapter of a book, having a title and its own self-contained narrative. The episodes vary thematically, with some, like “Photographs After the Storm,” meditative and pastoral, and with others, like “The Story of Kitty,” tragic and solemn. The episodes tend to follow the rhythm of the Rainy River itself — calm in one moment, stormy and climatic in the next.

The episodic format renders the diary more digestible to the lay reader, but it is also appropriate culturally: stories figure prominently into Anishinaabe life. Elders pass down knowledge and history through oral storytelling. As the late Anishinaabe elder Basil Johnston wrote, “It is in story, fable, legend, and myth that fundamental understandings, insights, and attitudes toward life and human conduct, character, and quality in their diverse forms are embodied and passed on.”

While Du Vernet’s diary is a decidedly colonial artifact, using Anishinaabe storytelling conventions helped ‘Indigenize’ the document and its presentation. In line with this, each episode is accompanied by an oral reading. Also, Du Vernet’s stories are presented alongside videoed stories told by today’s Rainy River Anishinaabe.

Du Vernet documented examples of Indigenous Resistance in his diary. Photo Courtesy of Keith Garrett.

Continuing Story Nations

After my initial work on Story Nations, I continued to work on the project during the summer through the University of Toronto Excellence Award, and I now work on it as a research assistant. My tasks have centred around annotating the diary. Du Vernet references a slew of historical people, places, and terms that are unfamiliar to the modern reader. My job was to research these ambiguities and provide a short annotation or sometimes a longer article explaining them.

My regional and historical knowledge developed as I wrote these annotations. My work was much like exploring an unfamiliar region. The annotations served as familiar points of geography, like a raised ridge or a strange rock, and it was my job to map out everything around them.

Many of these annotations contextualize Du Vernet’s language. Sometimes, an annotation would explain what treaty money was or where the Lake of the Woods is located. Other annotations, however, contextualize Du Vernet’s language. Throughout the diary, he used derogatory terms to describe the Anishinaabe people and their ceremonies. The annotations work to explain the forces of colonialism, racism, and Christian supremacy that underlie these words and indeed much of Canada’s history.

Decolonizing ourselves

At this stage of the project, the biggest challenge is ‘decolonizing’ how I write — a concept Professor Klassen introduced me to. By this, she meant expunging artifacts of colonial thinking that linger in historical accounts. So, for example, at the start of this article, I wrote that the Rainy River is in “what is now northwestern Ontario.” A year ago, I would have been satisfied with just Ontario, but ‘Ontario’ is merely a small segment in the human history of the land. For much longer, it has been the land of Indigenous peoples and continues to be so today.

As I continue to decolonize my writing, I realize it is not out of a duty to apply, as some might think, ‘politically correct’ terminology. Rather, it is about writing history from an objective and accurate standpoint.

Still, much of the scholarship I use to research the Rainy River area, unknowingly or not, relies on colonial conventions that sanitize the real history. For instance, in researching the Cree community of York Factory — in what is now northern Manitoba along the shores of Hudson’s Bay — many histories of the site ended when it was ‘closed’ in 1957 and its people ‘relocated.’ No further explanations were offered. As I later learned, this version of the story, with a few austere sentences, left out the far uglier reality: the government forcibly moved Cree families from their homes and onto much poorer land. Some Cree today occasionally visit the old site of York Factory and their childhood.

A similar fate awaited the Anishinaabe of the Rainy River. In 1913 and 1914, just over a decade after Du Vernet’s visit, the government illegally amalgamated the seven Anishinaabe reserves along the river into one, forcing many of the people Du Vernet met to leave their homes and heritage.

Today, the Rainy River First Nations are in a long-term process to regain their land. In 2005, they agreed to a $71 million land settlement with the Canadian government that identified land for future reserve creation. Following a court order in February 2017, the governments of Ontario and Canada, together with the Rainy River First Nations, announced the creation of some 6,000 hectares of new reserve land.

As the Rainy River Anishinaabe continue to fight for a relationship of reciprocity and respect with the Canadian government, stories remain as vital as ever — for both remembering the past and for creating a better future. Du Vernet’s diary, while steeped in flaws, is nonetheless a part of those stories.

Picture the snack aisle of your local grocery store. Before you start planning your next meal, pay attention to what your eyes are doing as you bring up this mental image. You will likely notice that your eyes are moving around as you visualize different features of this scene. A new study published in Cerebral Cortex suggests that attempts to remember visual scenes benefit from the re-enactment of eye movement patterns.

Researchers from the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest tracked the eye movements and brain activity of participants as they repeatedly viewed and later recalled complex visual scenes. They found that patterns of eye movement positively correlated with more vivid memorization and recall.

Specifically, eye movement patterns during recall represented a similar but condensed version of eye movement during original observation. To put that in grocery aisle terms: when you picture the chip section of your local snack shack, your eyes replay the critical motions that occurred when you initially scanned the shelf.

The phenomenon was first proposed in 1949 by Donald Hebb, a renowned Canadian psychologist who was influential in the field of neuropsychology.

Hebb suggested that we engage with mental images the same way we engage with the objects of our perception. We use our eyes to shift attention to different features while piecing together a coherent picture.

Before you start frantically shifting your eyes in an attempt to retrieve answers on your next exam, there are two things to note.

First, it remains unclear whether these results extend to text-based memory retrieval. “[Although] our results would be expected to extend to text-based memories if the text is memorized as part of an image of the page or screen… we have no direct evidence to support this conjecture,” wrote Michael Bone, lead author and U of T PhD student, in an email to The Varsity.

Second, it is unclear whether a deliberate eye movement can facilitate memory. “The current study and most previous studies do not investigate deliberate fixation reinstatement,” said Bone. “The participants are generally unaware that they are reinstating their fixations during imagery, and they are not instructed to do so… We have a study coming up that will directly address the causal question.”

Nevertheless, these results have great practical implications for memory assessment. Because scene-specific eye movements emerge during visualization, this motion can be used as a proxy for neural activity and memory function in some contexts. Bone said that it is possible that easy-to-use and inexpensive eye-trackers could eventually replace expensive MRI machines.

“Eye tracking technology… could detect memory decline associated with the early stages of dementia based on eye-movement irregularities detected while driving, inform the user (after they have parked), and provide the option to send the relevant data directly to their physician,” wrote Bone.

With strong potential for clinical applications, this research is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) launched the Extreme Open Science Unit (EOSU) in January to encourage scientific collaboration. The initiative aims to make research transparent by fostering communication through sharing research data and notes online. Since its inception, the database has featured scientists from across the globe.

Dr. Matthieu Schapira, head of the Research Informatics group at the SGC, founder of EOSU and U of T associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, was inspired by Dr. Rachel Harding’s blog, LabScribbles. Harding, a postdoctoral fellow at the SGC, has been uploading notes to LabScribbles for the past two years, continuously updating fellow scientists on her work in determining the structure of huntingtin, a protein linked to Huntington’s disease.

Currently, 12 scientists have contributed to EOSU, and soon an additional eight will be joining.

“I think it fosters collaborations; you avoid redundancy of experiments that somebody else has probably already tried and I think it just kind of brings the science community together, which is great,” said Mandeep Mann, a master’s student in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology.

One of the consequences of research is the amount of time it takes for a study to be accepted, peer-reviewed, and published. Professor Aled Edwards, Director of the SGC, wrote that “the average time between experiment and publication… is one to two years. That’s 67 per cent of the average lifespan of an ALS patient.”

The quick turnaround owed to open access could lead to an increase in research output and accessibility.

bioRxiv, a resource available to scientists for feedback prior to journal submission, has seen an increase in the number of manuscripts uploaded to its database. Recently, bioRxiv published a study by Stanford University researchers, which found that the genome editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 could be ineffective in humans. While the research has yet to be peer-reviewed, it allows fellow scientists from around the world to also investigate the caveats of gene editing technology in light of these results.

Unlike literature published in journals, the quick processing and lack of the traditional peer-review process prior to publication may raise certain concerns over the quality of research and findings that are made available.

Harding, however, clarified that “this isn’t validated peer review data, this is an open notebook… [and it] should be read with a different hat on.”

In 2016, Dr. Dan Longo and Dr. Jeffrey Drazen raised concerns around ‘research parasites’ in an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“Obviously there’s reservations of ‘will someone see this and use this in their experiments and publish something and not credit me with that,’” said Mann. “I think that’s a risk, definitely, but it’s kind of… an experiment on its own.”

Schapira hopes that the risks associated with an ‘open notebook’ paradigm will be small because published data is still in early experimental stages. Both he and Harding see the open publishing concept as an opportunity to connect with experts in the field. Obtaining direct insight and varied opinions from a larger group of people will progress research and potential medical treatments.

“You can create these… miniature ecosystems — where you’re working with other people in the field and you can share data or resources at earlier stages, then you can move the science forward way more quickly,” said Harding.

Despite the benefits of open science and collaboration, some scientists remain wary about the movement. Schapira believes the feeling is warranted, given that it is not the normal modus operandi in the biomedical field.

“If we keep an open mind and a little bit of critical thinking, it can actually help us realize that, really, [open science] comes with real opportunities in terms of extending our network, connecting with peers, generating new collaborations, and progressing faster,” said Schapira.

Some species of hermaphroditic nematode roundworms, including Caenorhabditis briggsae, are capable of ‘selfing’ — reproducing without a mate.

A recent collaborative study led by researchers at the University of Maryland demonstrated that hermaphroditic C. briggsae roundworms have smaller genomes than worms that do not self-fertilize.

The researchers used genome-sequencing techniques to study C. briggsae and found that its genomic size was one quarter smaller than that of the closely related Caenorhabditis nigoni, a roundworm that does not self-fertilize.

The decrease in size is disadvantageous to non-selfing males because the missing genes were found to provide sperm with competitive benefits during mating.

All hermaphroditic C. briggsae worms lack male secreted short (mss) genes, which are active only in male roundworms that do not self-fertilize, such as males of the C. nigoni and Caenorhabditis remanei species.

Upon using gene-editing tool CRISPR to remove four mss genes from the sperm of male C. remanei, the researchers discovered that these roundworms could not compete effectively against the sperm of males with all genes present.

When they inserted these four mss genes into C. briggsae males, they found that the competitiveness of the sperm now exceeded that of the hermaphroditic C. briggsae roundworms and the C. briggsae males without inserted mss genes.

After analyzing both roundworm species, they found the genome of C. briggsae contained 7,000 fewer genes than that of C. nigoni.

To confirm this finding was due to the evolution of selfing in C. briggsae, the researchers also determined that the missing genes in C. briggsae were more active in C. nigoni males, which undergo selfing, than C. nigoni females, which do not.

“Our analysis showed that genes with functional activity biased toward males were more likely to be lost in species that have [hermaphrodites], but were retained in species with males,” said co-author Dr. Asher Cutter, a U of T Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

According to Cutter, “males are vanishingly rare in natural populations of nematode roundworms that have evolved hermaphroditic self-fertilization. So… the evolution of hermaphrodites disproportionately involved the loss of genes that would be primarily functional in males.”

“This is consistent with the idea that functional copies of genes that promote male function exact a cost to hermaphrodites, and so natural selection likely favored their elimination from the genome,” said Cutter.

These findings demonstrate the varying evolutionary transitions that organisms undergo in their reproductive behaviours.

“In fact, the activity of genes that promote male reproduction in those species with hermaphrodites might even impose a cost,” said Cutter.

Future experiments will be designed to elucidate the roles of all 7,000 genes missing in C. briggsae, including determining how mss genes help sperm compete.

A biotech startup co-founded by Sachdev Sidhu, a professor in U of T’s Department of Molecular Genetics, has drawn in $62 million USD following a second round of funding, bringing its total investments to $72 million USD.

Pionyr Immunotherapeutics, which is now planning to take its anti-cancer therapy to clinical trials, initially began as a research collaboration between Sidhu and Max Krummel, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. Founded in 2015, the California-based startup combined Sidhu’s expertise in antibody phage-display technology with Krummel’s immune system biology research.

This project is a collaborative effort with Toronto Recombinant Antibody Centre (TRAC), which was founded by Sidhu and Dr. Jason Moffat, who is also a Molecular Genetics professor at U of T. Housed in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, TRAC researchers are working to harness the therapeutic potential of synthetic antibodies.

Synthetic antibodies can be engineered to target a variety of molecules implicated in disease and they are key for drug development. Pionyr’s anti-cancer therapy, known as Myeloid Tuning, uses the high specificity afforded by synthetic antibodies to bolster the immune system’s defence against cancer by manipulating a tumour’s microenvironment.

The immune system uses T cells to detect foreign molecules to evoke a defensive response. Because tumours are created from existing cells in the body, they evade recognition by T cells, dampen the immune response, and proliferate uncontrollably. The key is to restore the body’s immune capacity to fight cancer — this is the premise of immunotherapy in oncology, better known as immuno-oncology.

“So the idea there is simple: you want to turn on a T cell, you simply find proteins that are inhibiting that T cell,” said Sidhu.

Myeloid Tuning achieves this by “alter the tumour microenvironment to favour immune-activating cells over immune-suppressing cells” and enhances anti-tumour defenses. “T cells are activated not by targeting them but by eliminating the inhibitory cell population,” said Sidhu.

Pionyr’s technology could also complement existing anti-tumour therapies like T cell checkpoint inhibitors. Checkpoints are regulators that mediate communication between T cells and the immune system. They are responsible for fine-tuning the body’s immunity and downregulating it when it detects native cells, which would otherwise lead to an autoimmune response. By incorporating checkpoint inhibitors, therapies can be developed to block a tumour’s ability to evade T cell detection.

Ipilimumab, commercially known as Yervoy, set the precedent by becoming the first United States Food and Drug Administration-approved therapeutic antibody against skin cancers and for ushering in a new wave of immuno-oncology. The drug, co-invented by Krummel, inhibits cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein-4, one of many checkpoints found on T cells. Similarly, pembrolizumab, or Keytruda, inhibits the checkpoint called programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1).

“Anti-PD-1 binds the T cell and… activates it that way, and then we add another antibody that eliminates inhibitory myeloid cells, so you get double [the effect],” said Sidhu.

Sidhu says there is a critical question in field: does the rest of the tumour simply not have T cells that can attack them or are there additional yet unidentified breaks? These possibilities are not mutually exclusive and are already being investigated. According to Sidhu, the future of immuno-oncology is already here.

Myeloid Tuning is a very promising method, but it is not the only immuno-oncology treatment in the works. Currently, therapeutic agents being researched involve other immune cells like macrophages and natural killer cells that can be exploited for anti-tumour therapies.

“[There is] very little that is not being explored as far as immune cell activation,” said Sidhu. “It’s exciting in that, while only a subset of cancers responds to immunotherapy, the ones that do respond often respond tremendously.”

The University of Toronto is often ranked among the best universities globally, and it is consistently ranked as one of the best research universities in Canada. We undergraduate students know these rankings are not in reference to research produced in U of T’s graduate programs. What few of us realize, however, is that U of T has many resources to support undergraduate student research, giving students a chance to apply and test their knowledge as well as prepare for further studies in graduate school.

For instance, the Undergraduate Research Fund, co-funded by the Arts & Science Students’ Union (ASSU) and the Faculty of Arts & Science (FAS), finances self-started student research that is not part of regular coursework. There are a wide variety of research opportunities for second-, third-, and fourth-year students, including research opportunity programs and upper-year independent study options. Some other funding programs include the University of Toronto Excellence Awards, the Munk School of Global Affairs’ Richard Charles Lee Insights Through Asia Challenge, and the Jackman Humanities Institute’s Scholars-In-Residence program.

It is unfortunate that students may not have not heard about such opportunities. The FAS is unique in that it organizes its students through two main structures: the program departments and the colleges. Given this, all students registered as Arts & Science students have differential access to opportunities on campus. Hence, one of the major issues is a communication gap, wherein the faculty is unable to directly and effectively reach its students — approximately 25,000 of them.

The burden to remedy this communication gap should be shared between the university and ASSU. The Arts & Science Undergraduate Research Conference (ASURC), taking place on Friday, January 19 in Sidney Smith Hall at UTSG, is the first conference at the faculty level to showcase the interdisciplinary work of undergraduate students from arts, science, and social science disciplines. I decided to take on this event as a way to test for interest in such opportunities and to gauge how much undergraduate research work is actually out there — a mini research project of my own, you could say.

What I have found is that there is a lot of undergraduate research being conducted at U of T. However, if the current opportunities are better communicated to students, then more students would take advantage of them, resulting in more undergraduate research being produced. Since we began planning ASURC in the summer of 2017, we have had hundreds of students express interest in participating in the conference in difference capacities. In total, we received over 120 research abstracts from arts, science, and social science disciplines. Given the sheer volume of interest we have received, we know that there is a need for opportunities showcasing academic student work.

The university recognizes this and has been very supportive in the production of ASURC. The FAS has served as a main co-sponsor, and President Meric Gertler and Dean of the FAS David Cameron are both delivering welcome notes to the conference’s presenters. At the same time, while the university administration has provided great symbolic and financial support, it often falls on students to self-start and dedicate time to the actual organization of projects. A variety of student-produced academic journals, colloquiums, and conferences inspired us when we were organizing ASURC, many of which were produced by ASSU course unions.

The issue with student-run initiatives is that, with changes in the executive committees of each group happening each year, the possibility of an initiative being discontinued is always a concern. Many of my fellow student leaders on campus share this fear. Despite the precedent set by all our work organizing the first ASURC, I have no formal assurance that next year’s ASSU executives will continue such a long and logistically challenging process.

On the other hand, colleges and faculties have a more continuous presence on campus, creating the potential for long-term improvement of research initiatives. Therefore, I believe the solution lies in campus administrations playing a more active role in filling the communication gap and providing more formal opportunities to showcase student work. While administrations like those of Trinity College, St. Michael’s College, and Victoria College do hold their own undergraduate conferences, they limit participation to their own students, rendering other Arts & Science students at a disadvantage simply due to their college affiliation. In comparison, the University of British Columbia and McGill University both have conferences dedicated to undergraduate research at a far broader level.

From organizing ASURC, I have come to realize the key to undergraduate research. Many times, all it takes is incentive for students to build on and rework their research from their regular FAS courses. Because our academic work is primarily submitted for grading purposes, repurposing it to contribute to research is something we do not usually consider. Funding incentives and showcasing opportunities such as the ones outlined above are incentives to getting students to work out their ideas and engage with their immediate academic communities.

This was the goal of ASURC. In processing over 120 applications, our selection committees prioritized student presenters who had not been published nor had had a chance to present at a conference before. We prioritized topics of study that were interdisciplinary and unique. Research opportunities should not be restricted to graduate students or to the few elite undergraduate students who have been fortunate to have access to them. They should be made available to students interested in developing their ideas beyond the classroom.

Priyanka Sharma is a fourth-year student at Trinity College studying Criminology and English. She is the President of the Arts & Science Students’ Union.