Parex Innovation Fellowships Award Celebration
This year, we’re taking our celebration of the Parex Fellowship winners to the next level with a reception and networking event at the Hunter Student Commons!
Event Details
On June 25, join colleagues from all faculties across campus, as well as partners and collaborators from leading Calgary businesses, for a celebration of our entrepreneurial spirit.
Date: June 25, 2024
Location: 4th floor, Hunter Student Commons
Time: 1:30 - 4 p.m. (MT)
Reception starts at 1:30 p.m. and will include speaking remarks, announcement of award winners, a panel discussion, and a catered networking event.
Meet our Panelists
Colin Dalton
- Associate Professor and Associate Head (Graduate Studies), Department of Electrical and Software Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering
- Scientific Director, Microsystems Hub
Dr. Colin Dalton (PhD, P.Eng) is a biomedical engineer specializing in advanced micro/nano manufacturing technologies for biomedical applications. His research outcomes often include opportunities to develop customized medical micro-devices for commercial use. Furthermore, his extensive background in knowledge translation, supports his collaborative and interdisciplinary research approach to advancing healthcare solutions.
Dr. Dalton’s academic career showcases the importance he places on connecting innovation to finding solutions to real-world problems. His research on brain machine interfaces helped him develop microelectrodes used for sensing action potentials of individual and groups of neurons in-vitro. In 2017, he co-founded a spin-out company based on his research, focused on understanding the brain and how biomedical engineering can be used to help people affected by neurological, psychiatric and sensory disorders. His research on drug delivery and biosensing with microneedles has led to collaborations across the world, with his students winning multiple awards both at international conferences and locally. He has multiple patents pending, with one fully granted.
He has won multiple entrepreneurial competitions and received numerous awards and honours, including winning the 2018 TENET i2c competition, graduating from the first cohort of the CDL:Rockies program and pitching at the 2018 Falling Walls start-up of the year international competition in Germany. He teaches the final year undergraduate Entrepreneurial Capstone course in the Schulich School of Engineering, works closely with the Hunter Hub and is a judge for multiple awards and pitch events in the community. In 2023 he received the Outstanding Research Impact Award and the Undergraduate Training Excellence Award from his Faculty.
Mohammad Keyhani
- Associate Professor and Director (DBA Program), Haskayne School of Business
Dr. Mohammad Keyhani is an Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the DBA Program Director at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. His teaching and research focus on the areas of digital entrepreneurship, generative AI applications, and entrepreneurial experimentation. Mohammad regularly supervises both PhD and DBA students at the doctoral level and his research has been published in top tier peer-reviewed journals and presented in international conferences where he has received multiple best paper and best reviewer awards. He is also a no-code enthusiast and entrepreneur and an OnDeck No Code Fellow (ODNC2). He has designed and taught one of Canada's first "Generative AI and Prompting" courses at the university level. His other experiences include roles such as business advisor to multiple startups, Lab Strategist at the Creative Destruction Lab Rockies, and a David Rockefeller Fellow at the Trilateral Commission. He received his doctorate in strategic management from the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada, and has a M.Sc. in Entrepreneurship and B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics, both from the University of Tehran, Iran.
Marc Strous
- Professor and Associate Head (Growth and Diversification), Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment
- NSERC Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Geomicrobiology
Dr. Marc Strous is a Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary’s Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment. He was trained at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) and brings a cross-continental wealth of experience to the UofC. His interests cover a wide range of subjects in microbial ecology, from the oceans to the subsurface, from metagenomics to the element cycles. Strous played a leading role in the unraveling the microbiology of anammox and its application in wastewater treatment. He followed up with the discovery of bacteria that turn nitric oxide into oxygen, developed an algorithm for estimating natural isotope abundances of individual species within microbial consortia from proteomics data and maintains an annotation pipeline for bacterial genomes. Currently he tries to understand how bacteria adapt to extremely high pH and how 10,000 year old groundwater can still contain oxygen.
Mea Wang
- Professor, Department of Computer Science
- Child Health & Wellness Researcher. Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute
Dr. Mea Wang joined the Department of Computer Science in 2008 after completing her PhD degree at the University of Toronto. She has over 20 years of research experience in the design and development of computing and networking systems, with special interests in multimedia networking, cloud computing, distributed systems, software defined networking, mixed/extended reality, and data science. Throughout her career, Dr. Wang has led many industry projects, resulting in four U.S. patents and five software releases. Her engagement in innovation and entrepreneurship have been recognized with the Faculty of Science Award of Excellence in Community Outreach, the University of Calgary PEAK Scholar award, the University of Calgary Faculty Association’s Community Service Award, and the Order of the University of Calgary.
Pierre Kennepohl (Moderator)
- Associate Dean, Community and Innovation
- Professor, Department of Chemistry
Dr. Pierre Kennepohl is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Calgary and his research interests focus on going small to make big discoveries, as he examines how base molecules relate to molecular computing. In 2021 Pierre received Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) funding to better understand which characteristics of molecules will matter when put into a computing system. Pierre is a vital resource as the Faculty of Science strives to contribute to scientific growth through research, innovation, and entrepreneurial thinking.