Training

SPP-ARC TRAINING PORTFOLIO

Given the seminal role of SPP-ARC’s trainees in the progression and success of our research portfolio, it’s important to support them at all levels of their training journey. Through our initiatives, SPP-ARC aims to both deliver and support training programming that provides our researchers with the necessary resources and skillset to succeed both inside and outside of the laboratory.

SPP-ARC’s commitment to training comes in multiple forms and our portfolio can be subdivided into the following categories:

Funding

Fulfilling a comprehensive research portfolio in pandemic preparedness requires investment beyond laboratory materials and equipment. This includes helping our trainees to keep up with emerging experimental and analytical research techniques, as well as help in the recruitment of the next generation of researchers. We offer funding streams at multiple academic levels to fulfill this objective.

Engagement

In addition to providing research resources, SPP-ARC recognizes the importance of creating space for academic, industry, and community engagement. From building a transferrable skillset to fostering connections in both academic and non-academic settings, we provide opportunities for our research students and staff that ensure they are equipped for the everchanging scientific job market.

Programming

SPP-ARC is committed to generating unique programming through workshops, lectures, and courses that fill the theoretical and technological knowledge gaps of our trainees related to therapeutic and vaccine development. We leverage the diverse set of expertise of our cohort to learn theory and techniques from each other’s disciplines, allowing for our researchers to approach emerging research problems from any angle.

Travel & Training (TNT) Grants

With pandemic preparedness research becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, SPP-ARC is looking to support trainees in their need to develop a multifaceted skill set that complements their research projects. The SPP-ARC Travel & Training (TNT) Grant will provide up to $20,000.00 CAD in funding for several trainees per year to train at another institution or participate in an external technical workshop to learn novel techniques that benefit their laboratory and SPP-ARC-related project. The funding is meant to cover living expenses incurred while at the visiting institution, including travel, accommodation, food, and other travel-related expenses such as visa applications.

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Summer Research Studentships

In collaboration with the Alberta Innovates SRS program, SPP-ARC funds 3 undergraduate students every year to complete research projects in SPP-ARC member laboratories. This allows for budding scientists to be exposed to research in therapeutic and vaccine development that may be underrepresented in their curriculum, inspiring the next generation of pandemic preparedness researchers.

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Integrated Trainee Seminar

This seminar takes place monthly and aims to highlight the work of our exceptional faculty trainees in biochemistry, chemistry, infectious disease, immunology and beyond as they tackle projects related to our initiative's main objective of pandemic preparedness. This also provides a space for SPP-ARC researchers to communicate their research progress and earn valuable peer feedback on interdisciplinary aspects of their project.

SPP-ARC Ignites Innovation Retreat

SPP-ARC hosts an annual retreat as a means to bring internal members and external partners together to reflect on the past year's accomplishments and to establish research, infrastructure, and training objectives for the upcoming year. Hosted at the Banff Conference Centre for Arts and Creativity, this event provides opportunities to initiate team activities and create synergy among different research efforts within the consortium.

SPP-ARCing Connections Outside Academia

This networking event aims to provide trainees with an intimate opportunity to meet with leading industry partners and government officials about employment prospects in their respective fields. This event’s key feature is an interactive roundtable session: with over 10 biotechnology companies and organizations in attendance, trainees will have the opportunity to interact with leaders to learn more about their respective organizational structure, priority research areas, and career opportunities.

Tools for Science Communication

Now more than ever, it is imperative that scientists are able to not only communicate their research effectively with their peers, but to the general public audience through traditional and social media. SPP-ARC aims to facilitate the development of these skills through a micro-conference in Spring 2025.

Topics will include: tools for grant writing, journal, and media writing, as well as tips for public science engagement.

Knowledge Swap Lecture Series

As tools and technology around vaccine and therapeutic development advance, it is becoming increasingly necessary to approach research problems from a multidisciplinary perspective; this contrasts the traditional academic routes of our trainees, which often increase in their specificity as you attain higher levels of education. The Knowledge Swap hosts 2-part lecture series (2 hours each) aimed at trainees participating in an interdisciplinary project and want a quick way to get themselves up to speed on a field they are less familiar with. These lectures can also be counted toward a student’s Professional Development Credits!

The lecture formats are as follows:

Theoretical: background knowledge/overview on the field of study
Application: focused on the experiments, techniques, and functional readouts most common for a field

Lecture Themes include:

Immune responses against infectious diseases (scheduled for Spring 2025)
Chemical synthesis: how to build and test a chemical library
Virology in brief: targets of antiviral therapies
Bacteriology in brief: targets of antibiotics
Pathogen surveillance: the phylogeny and epidemiology of a pandemic

Bioinformatics Training

With advances in sequencing, high-throughput screening, and machine learning, the data output from modern experimental techniques is at a scale and complexity that many researchers have not previously been exposed to. In order to remain at the cutting-edge of pandemic preparedness research, we are focused on expanding our trainees’ knowledge in the area of bioinformatics.

Introduction to R Workshop

This workshop runs biannually and serves as an introduction to the programming language R, which has become one of the most widely used language in biomedical research. This increases our trainees’ abilities in analyzing the data output of complex experiments such as genome sequencing, multi-dimensional flow cytometry, high-throughput screening, and many more. (next offering in January 2025 – registration opening soon).

Single-cell RNA Sequencing Workshop (partnering with CBW)

Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) is an organization the facilitates the development and realization of a series of advanced training workshops in bioinformatics, in response to an identified need for a skilled bioinformatics workforce in Canada. SPP-ARC is partnering with CBW to bring a workshop on single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) to the University of Alberta, a technique that is becoming ever prevalent in the study of therapeutic development and responses.

Structural Biology Workshops

Cryogenic electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) is a fundamental pillar of SPP-ARC, with our grant supporting the opening and operations of a Cryo-EM facility; equipped with a Krios G4 Cryo-TEM microscope. In order to maximize the research potential of this equipment, SPP-ARC is generating programming to aid in the theoretical and practical principles of cryo-EM. This includes workshops in grid preparation, an integral step in the microscope imaging process.