Advancing Solutions to Our Grand Challenges

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As society faces local and global challenges, we look to science for help.

Our faculty has identified four Grand Challenges that harness our current strengths, look to future opportunities, and allow us to make new discoveries.

Understanding Earth’s evolving systems

Energy in transition

Unlocking our digital future

Personalized health at the molecular level

A young man uses a telescope at the RAO.

Bringing innovation and discovery to real-world problems

Our goal is to understand as much as we can about the world around, above, and below us, and use that knowledge to help build a better future.

Here are some highlights in areas where we’re fuelling curiosity and discovery around our Grand Challenges, and joining forces to address critical issues our world faces today and in the future. These stories underscore our commitment to research, innovative learning and teaching, and integration with the community.

Including Earth as a system (from the core to magnetosphere), biodiversity and conservation, and the intersection of the natural and built worlds.

Discovery opens the door to technologies for improving canola crops, a $27-billion industry in Canada

Neil Zeller, Neil Zeller Photography

Space physicists and citizen scientists shed some light on STEVE

Jessica Theodor was part of a research team that discovered the Catopsalis kakwa, a new species.

Fossilized teeth from a newly-discovered species re-opens chapter of evolutionary history in Alberta’s fossil record

Researchers Eamon Drysdale, centre, François Therrien, right, and Darla Zelenitsky with fossil.

Rare 75-million-year-old local dinosaur fossil discovery reveals new details about its appearance

Digital bee collection launched

Chris Cahill, PhD student and lead author of the study, says resource management is about tradeoffs.

Study shows precipitous decline in population of adult rainbow trout in Bow River

Study finds natural mechanism ensures long-term biological diversity for caribou

Including lower impact energy production, environmental remediation, and renewable energies.

UCalgary researchers are developing technology that may help energy operations reduce GHG emissions.

Global Research Initiative

Researchers develop technology to calibrate and measure methane, helping reduce emissions

Capstone geoscience course encourages student creativity

Graduates awarded GreenSTEM fellowships

How many batteries would it take to power the whole world?

Including security in the digital age, privacy protection, visual computing, and quantum information.

Researchers study the ways in which humans and robots connect with each other

Grad student Teddy Seyed, left, strategizing the construction of a multimedia garment.

Kristen Blush

Graduate student’s research leads Microsoft onto the fashion runways of NYC

Can machines make us more human?

Solving the mysteries of the quantum world

Preparing students for a digital world

Including drug synthesis, delivery and diagnostics, minimizing antibiotic bacterial resistance, and understanding the role molecules play in our health.