Researchers at Lakehead University are heading south.
More than a dozen faculty members left Thunder Bay on Tuesday on a road trip to Duluth. They’ll meet with members at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and Swenson College of Sciences and Engineering and Natural Resources Institute, calling it an opportunity for the scientists to get together and discuss the potential for joint research.
Lakehead’s industry liaison manager Bruce Holm said the universities have a lot of common ground in areas like mining and forestry.
“What we do is we’re trying to encourage our faculty to work collaboratively with their faculty because basically as a group we’re much stronger and are able to solve issues and problems in those areas together rather than on our own,” he said before getting on the bus.
This is the fourth time the schools have gotten together. There have already been collaborative projects in mathematics, geology, biology and forestry. But Holm said the goal is to one day have a project that requires an international grant.
“The potential exists to get one that we can only do together,” he said.
Collaboration is key science and environmental studies dean Andrew Dean said.
“In the sciences nowadays almost all research projects and research grants are really done through collaboration. The single or sole scientific researcher is really a thing of the past in some sense.”
The crew will be back in Thunder Bay on Wednesday evening.
