Read on to learn how U of T is bridging borders, deepening its commitment to international students and scholars, preparing all its students for an interconnected world and building long-lasting partnerships worldwide.

Startups Could Help Solve Some of Africa’s Biggest Health Challenges

Mathew Okwoli, a software engineer, has more than a passing familiarity with the shortcomings of Nigeria’s sprawling blood supply system. A few years ago, an aunt of his died during surgery because the hospital where she was being treated didn’t have enough blood. In the aftermath of this family tragedy, Okwoli began to investigate why it occurred. “We discovered that in various hospitals, they don’t have the right facilities for blood storage, or can’t connect to blood banks around them,” he says.

These revelations seeded an idea: could he build a software platform that would give users – hospitals and physicians – access to the locations of the closest blood banks with matching supplies? Read the full article

Finding the Right Antibiotic

Health-care researchers at a hospital in the Philippines are working with the lab of Cynthia Goh, a U of T chemistry professor, to test a prototype of a diagnostic device the lab invented that monitors the growth of bacteria – and measures its resistance to antibiotics. It’s designed to help physicians choose the best medication for managing infection.

The new instrument, called BactiTrack, significantly lowers the time required to make this determination, allowing patients to receive the appropriate medication quickly.

BactiTrack is also inexpensive, making it suitable for low-resource settings. Researchers hope the tool will help reduce overuse of antibiotics – a problem that leads to the increased prevalence of drug-resistant microbes. —Alyx Dellamonica

A Blueprint for Global Prosperity

Early in her academic career, Amy Bilton, a mechanical engineering professor at U of T, worked on an innovative way to remove salt from well water in the Yucatan region of Mexico. The technology made the water fresh enough to drink. But in many projects, she observed, the equipment eventually fell into disrepair because the local community was unable to maintain it after the engineers left. For Bilton, whose parents worried about the water levels in the well on their own farm, it was a lesson in the limitations of one discipline solving complex problems. Read the full article

Bat Signals

Experts believed the Jamaican flower bat was so critically endangered that a mere 500 remained in existence worldwide, in a single cave.

But an international research team, led by Phillip Oelbaum, a PhD student in biology at U of T Scarborough, has discovered the elusive animal in two more locations.

The species was so rarely seen that it was declared extinct until 2010, when a small colony was found in Jamaica’s Stony Hill Cave. The identification of two new breeding grounds raises hopes for the creature’s longer-term survival, Oelbaum says.

He and a colleague at the University of the West Indies now plan to search for the bat at 30 more sites, and to study its habitat, behaviour and diet. —Don Campbell

U of T Is Deepening Its Commitment to Global Education

By many measures, U of T is one of Canada’s most global universities – three in 10 students come from outside the country. At the same time, the world geopolitical situation is becoming increasingly fraught, and the Canadian government recently took steps to reduce the number of international students arriving in Canada. To sort through what this means for the university, and how U of T can continue to provide students with an outstanding global education, University of Toronto Magazine editor Scott Anderson spoke with Professor Joseph Wong, U of T’s vice-president, international. Read the full article

What is the cosmos made of?

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, nearing completion on a mountaintop in northern Chile, will use the world’s largest digital camera to photograph “transient” objects in the night sky – objects that pop into view, disappear from view, or change position during the telescope’s planned 10-year run.

Renee Hlozek, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at U of T’s Dunlap Institute – and the Canadian lead on the observatory’s investigation into dark energy – says astronomers will use data from Rubin to study star formation, stellar explosions, the structure of the Milky Way galaxy and the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

“We’ll answer fundamental questions about what our cosmos is made of and how it will change with time,” says Hlozek. —Dan Falk

Can We Learn from Other Cities How to Build Transit Better?

When a public transit project in Toronto takes years or even decades to materialize (hello, Eglinton Crosstown), it may provoke groans or shrugs – but not surprise. We’ve come to accept the seemingly endless planning process and construction delays as inevitable.

So, Alec Mak found it inspiring to learn this past February that in Pune, a city of about seven million in Western India, transportation decision-making can happen quite efficiently. Mak, who was then in his final year of an undergraduate degree in civil engineering, was visiting the city for three days as part of the School of Cities’ new International Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Project. Read the full article

A Student’s Path from War to Hope

In the summer of 2022, Vadym Lytvynov left Ukraine and enrolled in the master of science in biomedical communications program at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine. He has received support from the university’s Scholars-at-Risk program, which offers bursaries of $10,000 to undergraduate and graduate students who have recently sought asylum or are from countries experiencing conflict or political turmoil. Here, Lytvynov, who will graduate this fall, tells his story of coming to U of T. Read the full article

The Littlest Ape

The discovery of a previously unknown ape species in a clay pit in southern Germany has revealed that the diversity and ecology of European apes millions of years ago was more complex than first thought.

David Begun, a U of T anthropology professor, is part of an international team that examined fossils from the pit to identify the new genus – Buronius manfredschmidi, the smallest type of great ape ever found.

Buronius lived in trees 12 million years ago alongside another great ape called Danuvius. Based on their fossil analysis, Begun and his fellow researchers believe Buronius was much smaller than its neighbour (weighing just 10 kilograms), more agile, spent more time in the treetops and ate a vegetarian diet. —Staff

Is the U.S. Entering a New Era of Instability?

In recent history, the United States has often served as a kind of global democratic ideal – a “shining city on a hill,” as former president Ronald Reagan used to say, “open to anyone with the will and heart to get here.” Not perfect by any means, but a durable example of a government that responds to the will of its people.

But with the U.S. presidential election only weeks away, and the polls showing an extremely close race, many political observers worry that the country could soon slip into uncharted territory. Read the full article

Gardens for Change

Fikile Nxumalo, an associate professor at OISE, is embarking on community-based research in South Africa to develop climate-smart, Indigenous food gardens in primary schools.

The project builds on previous work in neighbouring Eswatini, in which Nxumalo assembled a group of parents and their children, elders, teachers, and community-based agronomists to discuss the effects of climate change. Out of these discussions came the idea to build school gardens to cultivate Indigenous foods.

By drawing on Western scientific knowledge and the community’s ecological know-how (while also listening to children’s ideas), Nxumalo says this project demonstrated the potential for collaboration to address global warming. “There is knowledge in communities that should be central when designing responses to climate change,” she says. —Staff