4 Mitacs Globalink (GRI) research projects for Summer 2027.
1. Bridging the Water Adaptation Gap
Bridging the Water Adaptation Gap is a six-year multi-disciplinary social science research project investigating hydro-climatic risks and adaptation pathways in targeted watersheds in Canada, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. The research is co-investigated with an inter-disciplinary research team working in concert with regional partners in each country. The goal is to identify hydro-climatic risks affecting livelihoods, primary economic activities, infrastructure and ecosystems, and co-develop options for sustainable adaptation pathways.
Research area, student roles & skills
Research area: As this is an inter-disciplinary project many disciplines are welcome and important. Social and policy sciences are essential in the project, but we coordinate with engineers in respect of infrastructure (dams, roads etc.), livelihoods (development studies), Indigenous peoples, adaptation (economics and anthropology).
Student roles:
Students can be knowledge gatherers and knowledge mobilizers of our research project. We work in four river basins in Saskatchewan, Canada and documenting the risks and climate impacts and how people are adapting to these. These impacts include drought, flood, and fire among others. Students can prepare reports, analyze information, prepare infographics, maps, and knowledge mobilization products. We are currently working on the following objectives: Assess risks and possible impacts to regional sectors; assess institutional adaptations and governance; identify narratives and value that inform current adaptive practices; model future hydro climatic and water security risks. Students can assist in advancing these goals within the project in a transdisciplinary manner. Assessing how government, policy and governance exacerbate or mitigate vulnerabilities is a key activity.
We are developing climate storylines with climatologists and social scientists and are in the midst of discussing them with agricultural producers, community members, policy stakeholders in the province in anticipation of preparing adaptation pathways into the future.
Skills required:
We have several activities for students to participate in depending on their interests and skills. Developing infographics and knowledge mobilization products of the research is a key contribution.
We work with a group of over 20 partners in water within our province in Canada. We are mapping these groups using an actor network analysis and students could develop this work.
2. Collecte et analyse de documents officiels sur l’immigration au Canada
The way immigration in Canada is understood, debated, and shaped is reflected across a wide range of textual sources. Beyond the scientific literature, three broad bodies of material are especially important: official documents produced by government (laws and regulations, ministerial instructions, program guidelines, operational manuals, parliamentary reports, statistical releases, and government communications); grey literature produced by the non-governmental and civil-society sector (reports, briefs, and position papers from NGOs, advocacy organizations, think tanks, and community groups); and media coverage (news articles, editorials, and other journalistic content). Together, these sources are essential to understanding how immigration policy is designed, contested, and represented, yet they are scattered across many institutional sources and published in heterogeneous, often non-standardized formats, which makes systematic study difficult.
This internship is part of a project that aims to develop tools to systematically collect, structure, and analyze these sources of information on immigration in Canada. Building on a corpus of scientific literature that has already been assembled, the project now focuses on extending coverage to official documents, grey literature, and media. The objective is to build reproducible pipelines and applications that can gather material from large, open-access sources — governmental (Open Government / Gouvernement ouvert, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the Justice Laws Website, Parliament of Canada, Statistics Canada), non-governmental (websites and repositories of NGOs, think tanks, and civil-society organizations), and media (news outlets, press archives, and aggregators) — organize them into structured and queryable corpora, and facilitate their exploration through extraction, synthesis, and visualization. Where relevant, artificial intelligence (AI) models, including large language models (LLMs), may be leveraged to classify, extract, and summarize information contained in these documents.
The recruited individuals will work together and contribute to the development of tools (scripts, programs, applications) designed to facilitate the automatic collection and structuring of such documents.
Research area, student roles & skills
Research area: I am a quantitative researcher specializing in migration studies (both internal and international). In my research, I employ a range of methods to explore how novel sources of data and innovative methodologies can help us better understand migration processes, their causes, and their consequences. My research is also increasingly interested in misinformation about migration. In my work, I frequently draw on methods, visualizations, and concepts borrowed from the Social Network Analysis (SNA) toolbox.
Student roles:
The two interns will work together. They may divide the work between a more technical role (programming) and a role oriented toward the prospection of sources and the synthesis of documents, although other divisions of labour are possible depending on the profiles of the recruited interns. Depending on their interests and skills, they may take part in the following activities:
• Identify and prospect the main open-access sources of documents on immigration in Canada — official, grey literature, media, and social media — along with the tools and platforms that can be mobilized, and review the methods suited to their collection, structuring, and analysis (including NLP and open-access LLMs).
• Collect, clean, and structure documents from open-access sources: governmental (Open Government, IRCC, Justice Laws Website, Parliament of Canada, Statistics Canada), non-governmental (NGOs, think tanks, civil-society organizations), and media (news outlets, press archives, aggregators, social-media platforms).
• Test, compare, and evaluate the performance of various methods and language models for the classification, extraction, and summarization of information from these documents.
• Contribute to the development of a prototype application for the automatic collection and synthesis of documents (official, grey literature, and media) on immigration in Canada.
Skills required:
The two recruited interns will work closely together, sharing complementary roles. At least one of the two interns must have solid programming skills: for this profile, familiarity with programming and data-processing tools (ex R, Python) is essential, and experience with collecting data from the web (web scraping, APIs) and with handling structured and unstructured text data is a strong asset.
The second intern may focus on tasks that do not require advanced programming, such as identifying and prospecting relevant websites, sources, tools, and platforms, reading and summarizing documents, and supporting the evaluation of results.
3. Digital Governance and Trust in Canada's Emerging Open Banking Ecosystem: The Role of Data Governance, Cybersecurity Governance, and AI Governance in FinTech Innovation
This research project examines how digital governance capabilities contribute to trust, innovation, and organizational performance within Canada's emerging open banking ecosystem. As the Canadian financial sector undergoes significant digital transformation, FinTech firms are increasingly relying on data sharing, artificial intelligence (AI), and interconnected digital platforms to develop innovative financial services. While these developments create new opportunities for efficiency and value creation, they also raise important challenges related to data protection, cybersecurity, algorithmic accountability, and stakeholder trust.
The project focuses on three key dimensions of digital governance: data governance, cybersecurity governance, and AI governance. Although prior research has examined these areas separately, little is known about how they interact to support organizational trust, facilitate participation in open banking ecosystems, and enhance innovation and performance in FinTech organizations. Furthermore, existing studies have primarily focused on consumers' adoption of financial technologies, leaving a significant gap regarding the organizational capabilities required to successfully navigate the open banking environment.
Using a mixed-methods approach, the project will develop and test an integrated framework of digital governance in the Canadian FinTech sector. The study will investigate how governance mechanisms influence digital trust, open banking readiness, innovation capability, and organizational performance. Data will be collected from senior executives and decision-makers responsible for digital transformation, cybersecurity, data management, risk, and compliance within FinTech firms and related financial organizations.
The project will generate theoretical contributions by advancing knowledge on digital governance and trust in financial ecosystems. It will also provide practical recommendations for managers, policymakers, and regulators seeking to foster secure, innovative, and trustworthy open banking environments in Canada. Ultimately, the research aims to support the development of governance practices that balance innovation, security, transparency, and public trust in an increasingly data-driven financial sector.
Research area, student roles & skills
Research area: My research focuses on governance and digital transformation in financial services, with particular emphasis on FinTechs, data governance, cybersecurity governance, artificial intelligence governance, digital trust, and open banking. My work examines how governance mechanisms influence organizational performance, innovation, and stakeholder trust in rapidly evolving digital ecosystems.
Student roles:
The student will play an active role in supporting the development of a research program focused on digital governance, trust, and innovation within Canada's emerging open banking ecosystem. Working under the supervision of the principal investigator, the student will contribute to the preparation of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant proposal and the design of a future empirical study targeting senior executives in FinTech organizations.
The student's primary responsibilities will include conducting comprehensive literature reviews on topics such as data governance, cybersecurity governance, artificial intelligence (AI) governance, digital trust, open banking, and FinTech innovation. The student will identify and analyze key academic and industry publications, synthesize existing knowledge, and help identify theoretical and empirical research gaps.
The student will also contribute to the development of the project's conceptual framework by reviewing relevant theories, defining research constructs, and supporting the formulation of research questions and hypotheses. In addition, the student will assist in mapping the Canadian open banking and FinTech ecosystem by analyzing industry reports, regulatory developments, and key stakeholders involved in the sector.
A significant component of the internship will involve supporting the design of a survey instrument intended for senior managers and executives in FinTech firms. The student will identify validated measurement scales from the literature, adapt them to the research context, and participate in the development and refinement of the questionnaire.
Throughout the internship, the student will prepare research summaries, annotated bibliographies, progress reports, and presentations for regular supervisory meetings. The student will also contribute to the preparation of sections of the SSHRC grant proposal, including the literature review, research problem, conceptual framework, methodology, and expected contributions.
This internship will provide the student with hands-on experience in academic research, grant development, literature synthesis, conceptual model building, and survey design in FinTech, open banking, digital governance, cybersecurity, and AI-related
Skills required:
The ideal student should have a strong academic background in business administration, management, finance, information systems, or a related field. The student should possess solid research skills, including literature review, academic writing, data collection, and synthesis of scientific articles. Familiarity with research methodologies, survey development, and statistical analysis is considered an asset. Strong analytical, organizational, and communication skills are essential. An interest in digital transformation, FinTech, open banking, cybersecurity, data governance, artificial intelligence, or organizational governance would be highly desirable. The student should be autonomous, rigorous, and capable of working independently while meeting project deadlines.
4. Risk, Communication, and Learning concerning Low Dose Radiation
Transdisciplinary approaches are required to advance solutions to risk where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent. Transdisciplinary science is science that includes multiple disciplines, but involves the public and stakeholders in finding possible solutions. Focusing on an preparation of a work product (artifact or boundary object that bring together multiple people, disciplines, risk perceptions and perspectives) bridges the science, public and policy gap. Working together in this research program, multiple scientists and communities create artifacts or boundary objects including: 1. programs of low dose radiation information; 2. pathways for addressing CC in the future and achieving net zero emissions by 2050 or sooner; 3. northern and rural community energy and health resilience plans and pathways.
New topics include low and intermediate level waste storage and transportation of materials destined for these potential storage sites.
Research area, student roles & skills
Research area: Complex problems confound the 21st C including climate change (CC), vulnerable health care supply chains (illuminated by COVID-19), and wavering public trust. Risk, and public attitudes surrounding risk, underpin solutions to CC (SMRs as GHG free energy), access to nuclear medicine, and advances in uranium mining. Our previous project determined Ontario and Saskatchewan residents have concerns surrounding low dose radiation exposure (including power production, mining, X rays, etc.), but also have many misconceptions. Addressing misperceptions, advancing knowledge, and solving pressing health, CC, and supply chain issues is tricky due to confirmation bias, false news, dominant vocal minorities, system one thinking.
Student roles:
Work products for public engagement on radiation risk are created through multiple methods including logic modelling, development of future sustainability imaginaries (through discourse, narrative and photovoice projects), instruments and outcome (reports) of fuzzy logic participatory planning surrounding nuclear medicine, uranium mining, and SMRs that allow people's priorities and perceptions of value to be mapped and documented, and participatory and Indigenous community action research. 2023 research utilized two infographics on Low Dose Radiation: one reviewed radiation analogies and the second, Canadian radiation protection practices. Infographics were prepared through multi-discplinary collaboration. Future research questions have been raised which will be reviewed with industry partners for the creation of future low dose radiation information products and strategies for testing the impact of these work products on science policy communication and policy.
Generally the same methodology is used: Participants are surveyed and/ or interviewed (as appropriate) before and after engagement with experts presenting the work product. In order to document results including learning, and changing opinions quantitative data through survey is analyzed.
Skills required:
Students will be preparing infographics, analyzing data, and conceiving of new dimensions and topics of analysis.