NAIT Applied Research

Chances are you've eaten MSG today. It’s naturally in your tomatoes 🍅. Your mushrooms 🍄. That bag of seaweed snacks in your desk drawer.

So why does the seasoning get such a bad rap?

We sat down with Linda Ho, our Applied Research Chair at the Centre for Culinary Innovation, to uncover where that reputation actually came from and to learn more about the facts of what MSG truly is.

Check it out 👇

Have you met Jeremiah Bryksa?

He's an applied chemist and a research associate at NAIT Applied Research, and if funding were no object, he'd take his work straight to space to study microplastics there 🚀🧑‍🚀

Back on earth, most of his time is spent figuring out how to accurately measure microplastics in freshwater systems. Six years ago, when Jeremiah started in this microplastics journey, there wasn’t really a great method for sampling microplastics, so his team built one!

We sat down with Jeremiah to get to know his work and him a bit better. Check it out! 👇

If you want to find Matt, don’t look on campus. Look for a highway, a boat, or even a plane ✈️

Have you met Matthew Menzies? Matt is a Community Engagement Specialist with our Indigenous Partnerships & Engagement team. Think of Matt like a bridge, but a bridge that travels where the communities actually are.

Our approach is community-first: we start from what communities tell us they need, and build from there. Matt is essential to making that happen. He is building relationships with communities and making sure our teams understand exactly where support is needed the most.

We sat down with Matt to learn more about his work, and about him. Turns out he's also into photography, recently picked up birding (pre-midlife crisis?), and thinks Thunderstruck by AC/DC sums up his job pretty well. Check it out!

As a student research assistant with our Clean Technologies Group, Channy is right at the center of our plastics circularity project. She spends her days breaking down the properties of different plastics, finding ways to actually reuse them instead of tossing them into a landfill.

At university, you usually only get to read about advanced testing gear in a textbook. In our Clean Technologies lab, Channy gets to use those exact instruments every single day to solve real problems for our industry partners. On top of the lab work, she’s also learning the business side; discovering what it actually takes to manage a major research project from start to finish.

Watch the video below to learn more about Channy and what she has been doing at Applied Research👇

Sophie Ng sees food science as a mix of strict data and art.

As a research student in our lab, she is constantly bouncing between a wide variety of products, then zooming in on the details needed to actually make them work. And for her, getting to work on so many different products is the best part of the job 😎!

At NAIT Applied Research, she’s gaining the hands-on experience you can only get by working directly with the industry on real products.

We had a quick chat with Sophie about her student experience at our Centre for Culinary Innovation. Check it out 👇

Sam calls it the "perfect marriage": the intersection of hard science and the culinary arts 🔬+ 🍰

At our Centre for Culinary Innovation, Sam Summers, our Student Researcher, is turning that passion for cooking and science into a career. In our culinary lab, one day Sam is dialling in a cookie formulation; the next, he is running chemical samples for a food company. This is hands-on food science every student needs.

👇 Check out Sam’s student experience with us!