Travelling abroad and conducting research in international labs has been one of my goals as a research scientist. Through the CREATE program, I was able to visit wonderful places in Europe, discuss research with scientists at the forefront, and experience an international laboratory culture. It was a fantastic experience that I would treasure throughout my career.

The CREATE travel grant allowed me to finally meet collaborators I have worked with remotely for years, and work alongside them while learning new techniques, troubleshooting issues, and sharing important lessons with one another. I always find working collaboratively with others to be very productive, and we were able to finish up most of the experiments we had planned and work through a bunch of little issues that arose. I also got the chance to witness a Finnish PhD defense.

Visiting the NRC-BRI was an enriching experience! I gained a lot of technical knowledge about electrosynthesis reactors, which really helped me establish a similar setup in our lab at U of T. It was also just a great opportunity to connect with our collaborators at the NRC.

I got the opportunity to present my research to a global audience in an oral presentation with support from the CREATE program.

The travel grant gave me an opportunity to visit a Finnish lab to learn important experimental techniques related to my current research. The cost of living in Finland was high; however, with the travel grant, I did not need to worry about financial issues and could focus entirely on my lab work. In my one-month travel, I attended a conference, met many new people and gained valuable experience of doing research abroad.

Science is not a one-person job. There are times when collaboration between multiple universities is needed to ensure that a hypothesis is thoroughly verified. However, distance can make things complicated for all parties. Thanks to CREATE, Supriya and I were able to close the distance with our collaborators at Concordia University. With the travel grant, we were able to assist Concordia’s team during a weeklong fermentation with a novel organism. With the bioprocess method and the strain provided, we doubled our muconic acid titers, making our part of the project (converting muconic acid into adipic acid) much easier.