By: Kari Klassen

Dr. Chris Murray, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Lakehead University, is in his third year of the Beausoleil First Nation wind and water monitoring project. The main focus of the project is to help the Beausoleil community address climate change and the lack of information around changing weather.

“As an island community they’re isolated,” Murray said, “and they’re very susceptible to changes. The Office of Indigenous Initiatives reached out to me and what had initially interested me was an ice road that was no longer used.”

Residents of the island had previously been able to go back and forth to the mainland from Cedar Point over the ice road, but due to weather changes, they haven’t been able to use it for about a decade. “It’s a function of the unpredictable ice. It might be 20 feet thick on one side of the island, because the wind has piled it up, or it might not be there at all on the other side of the island. It’s just the way things are changing and becoming more erratic.”

Ice used to be measured by drilling a hole into it, putting a stick down and then measuring the depth on the stick, but that can only be done on the shore. It wouldn’t tell anyone how deep the ice is enroute or at the other end. “That was what intrigued me, so I helped develop an ice thickness monitor that is still a prototype, but we haven’t gotten it to a user-friendly version yet,” he said “That’s why I got involved.”

Somewhat unexpectedly, Murray ended up spending much more time on setting up weather stations. “It was a learning experience, for sure, as I am not a field scientist.”

The stations provide information to the community, in real time, about the weather in and around the island. They measure wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, air temperature, humidity, as well as the water level. The information supports the community directly with accurate weather information, but also allows them to track trends, combined in a digital file with their traditional ecological information, which is essentially oral history.

Information from the weather projects is also woven into the education of K-12 students on the island. “I take the research that we’ve been doing for two years and make that into a science outreach project. We’ve been to the elementary school, through Zoom, something like 50 times this semester. Every class has had at least seven visits from me or my students.” Not every class focuses on the weather stations, but many do.

“The teachers are amazing. Everything we’ve asked them to do is enthusiastically embraced. Hopefully this will keep going, year after year, and we’ll eventually get to a point where the community is much more aware of what we’re doing because their kids are coming home and talking about it.”

During Lakehead University’s Research and Innovation Week in 2021, Murray and Nancy Assance, Department of Education at Beausoleil First Nation, were the recipients of the Indigenous Partnership Research Award.

By: Kari Klassen

Amir Ameli, Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering department, is an early career researcher at Lakehead University, and is already demonstrating a building capacity in his field that will apply to our local economy, society and beyond.

With the ever-expanding need for more energy to run the systems of our world, cybersecurity becomes an increasingly important concern.

“Cyber-attacks against power systems are growing in their number and complexity,” Ameli said. “Given that power grids are among the most critical infrastructure that societies highly depend on, many attackers have focused their attention on these grids. Targeting power systems can result in severe consequences, such as instability of the grid, or a blackout.”

High-profile cyber-attacks, such as the 2015 BlackEnergy trojan that left about half the homes in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region (a population of 1.4 million) without power, show an urgent need for greater vigilance and protection.

“What (the cyber-attackers) do is slowly propagate into the system and gain information about at what point and at what direction they could create the maximum damage,” Ameli said. “It’s the stealthy nature of the cyber-attacks that is the most important challenge, since it makes it difficult for us, as power engineers, to detect cyber-attacks.”

While there are several layers involved in protecting power systems against cyber-attacks, Ameli’s area of research focuses on securing the cyber layer using the physical attributes of the system.

“My research builds the last line of defense to protect the system against those cyber-attacks that have already entered the system from the cyber layer, and tries to detect and mitigate them in the physical layer,” he explained. “What we do is different, but in line with what network security experts do to make power systems resilient to cyber-attacks.”

Ameli was awarded a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant valued at $152,500 for his research project and he’s hopeful that several other grant proposals to different funding agencies will award him similar success.

“Immediately after I was hired, I started writing my NSERC DG proposal, which was my first funding proposal ever,” Ameli said.  “Luckily it was accepted with very positive peer-review comments.”

Ameli’s research has also received attention locally. Lakehead and the City of Orillia have solidified a partnership that will see Ameli lead a team to determine the feasibility of Orillia becoming a cybersecurity industry hub. The City of Orillia has earmarked $25,000 toward the project, and a $25,000 NSERC Alliance Grant has also been secured.

“To use my expertise in a way that will benefit the economic development of our community is very satisfying,” he said.

Currently in the process of hiring students to assist him on his projects, Ameli has hired two master’s and one PhD student, and is planning on hiring several more master’s and PhD students.

“There are always open positions in my group for motivated and qualified students who have a background in power system cyber-security and protection. Such students are always welcome to contact me.”

BY JULIO HELENO GOMES

A Lakehead University research project focusing on illicit drug use in Thunder Bay found that people are unaware of what drugs they’re putting in their bodies — a situation that can have drastic consequences.

“That’s really concerning when we are looking at the issue of people who are having accidental overdoses,” says Dr. Abigale Sprakes. “What it tells us is that there is an unsafe drug supply, in the sense that people are getting drugs that they believe are one thing and using them unaware of what they are using, and then are not able to make informed decisions about their use.”

Sprakes, an assistant professor in Lakehead’s school of Social Work, led the study along with graduate student Brooke Raynsford. Nearly 100 individuals replied to a survey and provided urine samples to determine the drugs in their system. The results showed 69-per-cent of participants had used drugs that they were unaware of, and of those substances, 43-per-cent were unknown opiates, such as fentanyl, and 40-per-cent were unknown benzodiazepines, a type of sedative used to treat anxiety and panic attacks.

“To have unknown opiates like fentanyl and benzodiazepines in their system indicates an unsafe drug supply in Thunder Bay and an increased risk of overdose,” Sprakes says.

Along with learning what substances people were taking, the researchers also asked about a person’s history of drug overdose, of using alone, and how they utilized harm reduction services. Nearly two-thirds of participants reported using alone and 43-per-cent reported overdosing in the last six months. The combination of unsafe supply, using alone, and a history of overdose increases the risk of a future overdose, Sprakes notes.

Raynsford’s role was to input the survey results, identify trends, and break down demographic information as well as review relevant literature. This was part of her Master in social work studies and was similar to what she’s been doing with other groups.

“I was surprised by the ways in which the project would be able to guide and inform the work of the Thunder Bay Drug Strategy and other community agencies,” says Raynsford, a registered social worker. “Although not directly linked to the study results, the main conclusion I drew was the importance of representing the voices of individuals accessing services, especially in the harm reduction field.”