Prince George, B.C. – Good news for UNBC researchers.

This as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) has provided the school with $436,000 in funding through its grants and scholarship programs.

“These grants will allow UNBC researchers to probe, explore, and innovate on important topics that matter to people,” says UNBC President Dr. Daniel Weeks.

Three NSERC Discovery Grants will help fund research projects in health care, biology and computer science along with purchase of new imaging equipment and $52,500 for scholarships and fellowships.

Biochemistry Professor Dr. Chow Lee is “very happy” the funding will help purchase a piece of equipment with imaging capability for proteins and nucleic acids analysis.

He says the new equipment will greatly assist not just his research, but also with “several other principal investigators in the Northern Health Science Centre.

“An analogy would be it’s a pen and we need to write on a piece of papers. A pen is fundamental for us to express ourselves,” says Lee. “So this piece of equipment is a workhorse – we need it, absolutely need it, for our daily work.”

Specifically, the equipment will allow Lee to understand the RNA decay processes as they relate to cancer.