Elevator pitches for university students

Twenty of the province’s brightest university students presented their research to a panel of judges at McMaster today.

The graduate student with the best idea will go on to compete nationally. They had to explain their thesis in three minutes or less.

Brock University’s Alicia Azzano researched how parents can detect autism in their child pre-diagnosis. McMaster’s Matthew Canpea is trying to come up with a way to make cancer drugs more effective. The trick he says, is to find sugars of the right size and chemical composition to deliver the drugs to cancers.

Some of the other students touched on rink rage in Canadian hockey parents, and self repairing asphalt. The winner was Ryerson’s Alex Kjorven and her thesis about the gamification of climate change. She will represent the province at the national competition in June.