Meet your selected CAN-RGX 2020 teams!
uO Rocketry, University of Ottawa
Does our medicine work in space? What will astronauts do if they get sick on their way to the Moon or Mars? Partnering with McMaster University’s Brown Lab, uORocketry’s CAN-RGX’s team is poised to discover whether our last line of defence antibiotics will be as effective in space as they are on Earth. To boot, we’re partnering with @LetsTalkScience to visit local high schools to teach tomorrow’s scientists and engineers about working in STEM fields.
Team members include:
Andrew Zavorotny, Tamjeed Elahee, Olivier Dumas, Magdalena Richardson
UAlberta Space Design Group, University of Alberta
Did you know that approximately 1/6 of people on Earth are affected by knee osteoarthritis? For this year’s CAN-RGX campaign, the UASDG team of University of Alberta Engineering and Medical students are excited to investigate gene expression of bio-engineered cartilage tissue in micro-gravity. UASDG will be tracking changes in precise gene expression and metabolites, as well as comparing male and female tissues. Not only is the experiment pertinent to astronauts returning to the ground, their our findings could contribute to improving the health outcomes of knee osteoarhritis patients on earth.
Team members include:
Kirtan Dhunnoo, Amira Aissiou, Evans Frandsen, Kinston Wong, Shankar Jha, Sherry Gao
Phi-Six Society, Thompson Rivers University
Have you ever been in a car with blasting subwoofers and felt the acoustic power resonate through you? From the dulcet tones of Mozart to a sonic-boom bustin’ up windows, sound waves are incredibly versatile. In an experiment done by Kundt in 1866, particles in a closed tube seemed to dance in reaction to sound waves. Team Phi-Six will take this experiment to a new level on Canada’s zero-gravity platform, the Falcon 20. In the absence of gravity, crystalline particles like salt and sugar are known to weakly bond together, a process known as agglomeration. Using a Kundt’s apparatus in a zero-gravity environment, Phi-Six’s goal is to measure inter-particle forces which govern agglomeration.
Team members include:
Jonathan Gilchrist, Donavin White, Damian Halvorsen, Josephine Brewster, Cooper Wendland
UBC Rocket, University of British Columbia
UBC Rocket’s experiment will study the behaviour of microbial fuel cells in both micro- and hyper-gravity conditions. Microbial fuel cells are likely to play an important role in the future of space travel due to their ability to produce electricity while simultaneously doing useful work such as waste-water treatment in extreme conditions or methane production. UBC Rocket intends to measure the current and voltage of two microbial fuel cells throughout a parabolic flight, which will yield information about the behaviour of multiple types of bacteria in various gravitational environments.
Team members include:
Paul Juralowicz, Ekansh Roy, Eric Grant, Justin Lawrence, Kassandra Hawes, Maddie Elder, Michael Villanueva, Noah Charleson-Sterritt, Peter Voznyuk, Robert Beda, Samuel Young, Sean Ghaeli, Vaibhave Kulshreshtha, Veronica Nguyen, Zhibo Zhao
See the official press release here.
Associate Professor
