Research is one of the biggest drivers of student employment on campus, and students learn valuable skills such as project management, data collection, and analytic methods. University of Windsor’s Outstanding Scholars program contributes more than 40,000 hours of research assistantships each school year. With so much of our work in the hands of students, it is critical that they learn to communicate their experiences says Tim Brunet, coordinator of the Outstanding Scholars Program in the Student Success and Experiential Learning Centre. Since 2021, Brunet has led the annual UWill Discover project, where students complete workshops, participate in events and present their research at a week-long conference. This year, thanks to a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, UWill Discover had a new focus: to allow students to work from the ground up and influence the promotion of the UN Sustainable Development Goals on campus. More than 400 participated in UWill Discover as they mobilized knowledge for a wide range of topics, many of which related to the Sustainable Development Goals.

“I aimed to expand the student voice through the UWill Discover project,” says Dr. Brunet. “First, we needed young scholars to access international systems-level conversations about sustainability, and second, to gain experience in presenting and gaining new connections with knowledge networks.” Students are involved at every stage of UWill Discover, including the development of workshops and the execution of events. Funding from the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation allowed Brunet to take four students to a Model United Nations in Washington, D.C., where they participated in conference activities and brought back new ideas. “Seeing a conversation about the Sustainable Development Goals in such a huge international venue sparked ideas about how we can prepare our students to debate and present on wicked problems.”

In addition to employment on campus, getting involved in research is a critical pathway to skill development that can help students launch into their careers. At the Odette School of Business, a hands-on learning program has been providing students with research and consultancy opportunities where they build projects from the ground up, from scoping to data collection to recommended implementation. Under the direction of Francine Schlosser, with support from Odette colleagues Gerry Kerr and Professor James Marsh (formerly Senior Director at St. Clair College’s Zekelman School of Business), and then-Dean of Odette Allan Conway, the program was founded in 2006. It has gone through many organizational structures since then (including a partnership with the Faculty of Law and an active role in the foundation of University of Windsor’s Entrepreneurship, Practice, and Innovation Centre), but its goals remain the same: to train future business leaders in strategic thinking, qualitative and quantitative research, and key transferrable skills. In 2021, the program became the Odette Student Business Consulting Group, offering a supervised, course-based opportunity for undergraduate students to enter a research-consulting partnership with a business.

Dr. Schlosser credits student Carol Adu-Bobie with an essential contribution to the program’s newest iteration. In 2023 Adu-Bobie collected crucial data through interviews with Odette alumni now active in the business community to understand evolving needs as well as to identify corporate partners who want to foster young talent through the program. “Carol’s work helped us crystallize the structure of the program so we could meet the needs of our partners but ensure that students were building the skills that will help them access meaningful career opportunities,” says Schlosser. “It also helped us fill out our roster of client partners. Many of them have an amazing but very specific skill set, so there’s a real opportunity for the business acumen of our students to positively impact their clients. It’s so satisfying for students to see their work in action.”

Now, new partners are reaching out directly, or being referred to the program by past clients. One of the most impactful projects of the past year was a chance for two students to work with BlackBerry Limited. on a project supporting water security in Indigenous communities. Filippo Crespi and Afnan Alhussainawi worked with University of Windsor alumni Noah Campbell, then Senior Elite Technical Marketing Specialist at BlackBerry. “Our task,” says Crespi, “was to explore the intricacies of their diverse cultures, best practices for engagement, and opportunities to further understand and enhance water security in communities.” As a non-Indigenous student, he says, the project was profoundly educational. “[It] was not just academic, it was a journey into understanding and appreciating the depth of Indigenous cultures by the wisdom and perspectives of those who embody and protect these traditions.”

Campbell sang the praises of the two students, saying “The quality of the actual deliverable they produced absolutely amazed me. I knew it would be good because of the questions they were asking throughout the project and who they managed to secure interviews with, but the final product far exceeded my expectations.”

Schlosser believes the innovative structure of the student consulting group offers a unique opportunity to both students and partner clients. She invites companies interested in becoming a client to reach out to her directly (fschloss@uwindsor.ca).

Nurturing passion and creative thinking is essential to student success in research, says Professor Alice Grgicak-Mannion, Geospatial Learning Specialist at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research. She provides guidance and mentorship to teams of student researchers who are turning their passion for the environment into hyper-local research projects as part of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Certificate hosted by the School of the Environment. Two recent projects are providing community partners with essential datasets to inform policy decisions, while also giving students a hands-on learning experience building a research project from the ground up.

One project with the Essex Region Conservation Authority (ERCA) maps the historical footprint of greenhouses in Essex County. The student team wanted to understand the environmental and economic impacts of food production under glass— trade networks, algal blooms, light pollution, worker rights, and more.

Applying a multidisciplinary approach, students worked to contextualize GIS data collected from aerial photographs, historical datasets, and new surveys with an understanding of the importance of greenhouses as a local economic driver, and to explore the sometimes love/hate relationship between greenhouses and neighbouring communities. The project is already helping ERCA evolve its practices for monitoring nutrient loading in waterways, and has been incorporated into large-scale modelling at the University of Toronto. Findings have also been shared with the Province of Ontario, for consideration in policy decisions. An interactive story map launched in April 2024, and is available to the public to explore the data.

Grgicak-Mannion’s second project examines tree growth in the Town of Amherstburg. At annual tree giveaways celebrating Earth Day, students connected with recipients to enrol their trees in the study, and then visited the trees over multiple years to map them and log their wellbeing. This data will be used to inform tree-planting strategies employed by the Town, as well as make projections about canopy growth, and map tree health against water tables, air pollution patterns, speciation, and other environmental factors. Students developed the project with support from the Town and guidance from Grgicak-Mannion, whose own research tracks air-pollution patterns via particulate matter settling on leaves. A forthcoming presentation to Council will also help students hone their knowledge transfer and outreach skills, translating their data in ways that are useful for politicians and the public.

In both projects, students earn a qualification in GIS use and analytics, but more than that, they learn to channel something they care about into real-world impact, says Grgicak-Mannion. “Each of these projects has the capacity to grow and be further incorporated into municipal and regional decision making – but they also get students excited about data and how it can be used in creative and innovative ways to tell us something about the world we live in, and how we can shape it for the better.”