From The University of Toronto – Mississauga (CA)
6.7.24
U of T alumnae Kritika Tyagi, left, and Nuha Siddiqui, centre, co-founded Erthos, a biomaterials company that aims to create a more sustainable economy by creating plant-based alternatives to single-use plastics. Nima Zarrinbakhsh, right, is the company’s head of research and development.
MATTHEW VOLPE/U OF T
Amid Canada’s ongoing quest to bolster innovation and productivity, a new study from University of Toronto researchers is highlighting how improving supports for entrepreneurs can address these economic challenges.
The study asked more than 100 Canadian technology firms about how existing government initiatives to support startups met their needs. While praising the importance of the help they received, leaders said they need streamlined processes to access those supports, as well as significant investments that can bolster technology sectors holding the highest potential for growth for Canada.
“From our interviews, we discovered a huge, pent-up demand among tech entrepreneurs for a more integrated, simplified, rationalized suite of programs – a real one-door program with one application to get the funding they need,” says David A. Wolfe, co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and a professor of political science at University of Toronto Mississauga.
The study was conducted by researchers at the IPL, a hub within the Munk School whose mission is to study and teach innovation and its impact on growth and society.
Wolfe says technology firms consulted in the study said they face three main barriers: access to talent, access to capital and access to markets. To overcome these challenges, Canadian governments should not be afraid to make significant bets on promising technologies such as artificial intelligence, clean energy, quantum computing and new advances in life and health sciences, including regenerative medicine, founders told the researchers.
All U of T programs reflect the university’s efforts to make entrepreneurship accessible to underrepresented people. Dr. Bimpe Ayeni, pictured above, is founder of skin products startup Blair + Jack and was part of the first Black Founders Network Accelerate cohort. ALYSSA KATHERINE FAORO/AKFAORO
At the University of Toronto, robust entrepreneurship programs provide startup leaders with an extensive network and the resources to best position them for success. More than 12 startup hubs across three campuses help innovators commercialize their research and ideas.
At the same time, dedicated programs help the fastest-growing firms find the investments, talent and technology they need to grow. As U of T startups in advanced sectors gain more attention and investment, the university is assisting at every stage of their journey, from startup to finding large investors and advisers.
“U of T offers some of the most comprehensive entrepreneurship programming compared to any university around the world,” says Derek Newton, assistant vice-president, Innovation, Partnerships and Entrepreneurship at U of T.
UTEST, a deep-tech incubator for IP-based startups, provides companies with investment capital, mentoring, business strategy and incubation space. So far, the program has supported 180 companies that have gone on to raise more than $800-million as they move into the marketplace. UTEST is a partnership with Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners (TIAP) and has financial support from the Connaught Fund.
“We are equipping U of T students and entrepreneurs for the knowledge economy, helping them understand that their ideas have value and teaching them how to protect and secure made-in-Canada intellectual property,” says Jon French, director, U of T Entrepreneurship.
Indeed, the university also offers a free IP Education Program that focuses on intellectual property (IP) rights and how to deploy IP strategies to grow. More than 5,000 people have taken the course so far.
One of the companies that emerged from the UTEST program is ODAIA, a Toronto-based startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to help the pharmaceutical industry get life-changing therapies to the patients who need them faster.
Today, the company has 100 staff and counts the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in North America as its clients. Helen Kontozopoulos, an adjunct professor in the department of computer science, co-founded the company with Philip Poulidis.
“With our software we have helped our clients realize a massive productivity lift by taking something that used to consume 20 hours of planning per month to 15 minutes,” Kontozopoulos says.
U of T was an early investor in her company, she says, and helped make important connections with industry. In addition to UTEST, ODAIA participated in the Creative Destruction Lab, a program at the Rotman School of Management that connects promising startups with global investors.
“It is very difficult for entrepreneurs to get those first contacts. U of T’s network of partners and alumni are powerful. I remember being at an event in San Francisco with venture capitalists and alumni. The first thing the alumni asked me was: ‘How can I help you and do you need any connections?’ “
Throughout the year, U of T creates many opportunities for founders to meet each other, and for startups to learn from companies that have successfully scaled. The university hosts an annual Entrepreneurship Week, a four-day event that includes pitch competitions, startup showcases, keynote speeches, workshops, panel discussions and more.
One of the fastest-growing companies showcased at Entrepreneurship Week was Erthos, founded by U of T alumnae Nuha Siddiqui and Kritika Tyagi. Their biomaterials company aims to create a more sustainable economy by creating plant-based alternatives to single-use plastics.
Many U of T founders will participate in Collision 2024 this June. They include Aidan Gomez, U of T alum and co-founder of Cohere, an AI startup that uses natural language processing to improve human-machine interaction, valued at over $2-billion.
U of T professor emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the Godfather of AI,” is also speaking.
All U of T programs reflect the university’s efforts to make entrepreneurship accessible to people who are underrepresented among the ranks of founders. FemSTEM, an initiative of the Health Innovation Hub in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, is focused on uplifting women who are looking to create their own businesses. Meanwhile, the Black Founders Network, which recognizes systemic barriers and provides entrepreneurs mentorship, allyship and access to capital for Black founders, is expanding its programming with assistance from the Ontario government.
Spontaneous creative collisions among entrepreneurs are also at the heart of the vision of the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus. With its first phase of construction complete, the iconic building located in Toronto’s Discovery District has become a hub for the university’s global leadership in AI and machine learning. It is now home to the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
But larger investments are needed for these initiatives to lead to Canadian companies that scale globally, Wolfe argues.
“When we get technology firms to a certain size, they need a different kind of funding to grow. At that stage they face competing bids to buy them out from mostly U.S. companies. We need more Canadian pools of capital to keep those tech companies in Canada, and we need to make much better use of procurement targeted to Canadian technology firms.”
While acknowledging there are challenges, Wolfe say he is excited about U of T’s role in helping to change the conversation about innovation and productivity.
“The university has an openness to letting initiatives flourish from the bottom up,” he says.
“We want to enable and empower our entrepreneurs. We’re creating the next generation of Canadian companies that have a bold outlook toward research and development, taking risks and getting things to market,” Newton says.
“The University of Toronto is a global institution – prospective students and innovators come here from across Canada and around the world. Whether they are passionate about health care, the environment, education or other sectors, increasingly they want to see their research have an impact in Canada and beyond. Starting a company is one way innovators can turn their ideas into impact – and make the world a better place.”
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The University of Toronto- Mississauga is one of the three campuses that make up the tri-campus system of the University of Toronto. Located in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, the campus opened in 1967 as Erindale College, set upon the valley of the Credit River, approximately 33 km west of Downtown Toronto. It is the second-largest of the three University of Toronto campuses, the other two of which are the St. George campus in Downtown Toronto and the Scarborough campus in Scarborough, Ontario.
U of T-Mississauga campus offers 155 programs, among 95 areas of study. Its most popular programs include Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Commerce, CCIT (Communications, Culture Information and Technology), Computer Science, Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies, Earth Science, English, Environmental Studies, History, Management, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology.
There are also joint-degree programs with Sheridan College in CCIT, Art and Art History, or Theatre and Drama, leading to both a university degree from U of T and a college diploma from Sheridan. The CCIT Major and Digital Enterprise Management Specialist programs allow students the opportunity to earn Honors Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Toronto, as well as a Certificate in Digital Communications from Sheridan College.
Other undergraduate programs offered at U of T-Mississauga include Professional Writing and Communication, Economics, Mathematics, Chemistry, Languages, Physics, Environmental Sciences, Geography, and Earth Sciences (ex. Geology).
U of T-Mississauga also hosts one of the few paleomagnetism laboratories in Canada. This lab investigated the palaeomagnetic properties of rocks collected from the Apollo missions in the 1970s and was run by now professor emeritus Dr. Henry Halls. U of T-Mississauga’s best-known president was Dr. J. Tuzo Wilson, a geologist and pioneer in plate tectonics. A research wing in the William G. Davis building of U of T-Mississauga is named after him.
The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.
Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.
As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.
The University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.
Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.
The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 600,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.
Academically, The University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the “Toronto School”.
The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.
The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill University [Université McGill] (CA) .
The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.
The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.
The University of Toronto has educated Governors General of Canada, Prime Ministers of Canada, foreign leaders, and Justices of the Supreme Court. Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners, Rhodes Scholars, and Fields Medalists have been affiliated with the university.
Early history
The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As a University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.
On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a university … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue forever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-story Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.
Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the “Family Compact”. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War, the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.
Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed “Skule” since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.
A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.
World wars and post-war years
The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.
Since 2000
In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.
The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than C$1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a C$250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated C$100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.
Research
Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of over C$900 million. The University of Toronto has been named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with annual sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of C$1.2 billion. The university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of C$500,000 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of C$64,000. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.
The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts. Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviors in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.
The discovery of insulin at The University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia, brain tumors, and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index, the infant cereal Pablum, the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988 and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia, cystic fibrosis and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.
The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting C$1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. The university has patented many inventions and has been involved with many active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.
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