Ryan Caldwell is the Business Development Specialist at MILO & Mitacs. He is the newest member of MILO and the on-campus resource for all things Mitacs. Ryan helps faculty members, graduate students and companies navigate the many programs Mitacs offers and identifies the funding solutions that best fit their needs. His role at McMaster is to help faculty members, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows manage their grant proposals to ensure the application process as simple as possible, while also helping companies and not-for-profits find the academic experts they need to tackle challenging and important research questions.

Dr. Ryan Vieira is the Contracts Advisor and has worked at MILO for four years. His role at MILO is to assist Engineering and Science faculty members in the development of research grant applications and to draft and negotiate any required contracts associated with such research projects. Prior to joining MILO, Ryan worked in a similar capacity at ROADS and prior to that position, held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked as an historian of political culture.

Mitacs helps build collaborative research projects between Canada’s universities and community partners – including thousands of not-for-profits in Canada and companies around the globe. In this talk, they will cover strategies on how to reach out and build research partnerships, as well as how to acquire funding to support these relationships.

Mitacs has funding options to support graduate students and postdocs to work with academic research groups all over the world, as well as with companies and not-for-profits. They will go through the details of where to find these opportunities, the application process, and how to identify organizations that are committed to addressing real-world problems.

Finally, they will discuss the resources MILO offers to support its faculty members and graduate students in building research partnerships. MILO helps to identify and promote funding opportunities, assists and advises on the development of grant applications and provisional patents, and negotiates any required contracts associated with partnered research. MILO is dedicated to connecting researchers with prospective partners in industry and can advise on best practices for dealing with any obstacles that may arise during research collaborations.