Canada awards $8.6M to run Industrial R&D Internship program

April 23, 2008

The Canadian government has given $8.6 million to ACCELERATE Canada to run a new national Industrial Research and Development Internship (IRDI) program. Over the next two years, the funding will help place 1,200 Canadian graduate students and post-doctoral fellows with businesses all over the country. The interns will undertake research that meets the innovation needs of the host firms.

“This government believes that to be globally competitive, Canada must develop the best educated, most skilled and most flexible workforce in the world,” said Industry Minister Jim Prentice. “The students will get valuable private sector experience, while Canadian business partners can tap into the skills, talent and creativity of our next generation of R&D superstars who will excel in our increasingly competitive world.”

The internships will consist of collaborative research projects involving graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, their supervising professors and industry partners. Companies will share the cost of hosting the internships with the IRDI program. Funding will also come from provincial, university and other partners. The program targets all academic disciplines, which include the physical, biological and mathematical sciences, engineering and health sciences.

The IRDI competition and program are administered by the secretariat of the Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) program, an initiative of the three federal granting agencies: the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

One of the students who has benefitted from the program is Scott Beatty, a University of Victoria engineering graduate student. ACCELERATE BC placed him in an internship at Pemberton, B.C.-based SyncWave Energy Inc. in early 2007, giving him an opportunity to apply his skills out of the classroom and work with the company to further develop its ocean wave energy technologies.

His internship involved investigating design improvements for the company’s prototype wave power generator. His work, coupled with the ongoing R&D carried out by the company, resulted in the wave power generator being able to capture twice as much power from the Pacific Ocean in normal conditions. SyncWave is now looking to commercialize this first-of its-kind technology.
www.mitacsinternships.ca/internship