The hallmark of the National Research Council's (NRC)Design and Fabrication Services Branch is its ability to work with NRC researchers in a responsive, collaborative manner, leveraging the diverse capabilities of the branch in direct support of important research and technical services. This is the case even if the work must move from one part of the country to another to stay at the pace of innovation. With 13 shops spread across Canada, Design and Fabrication Services delivers design and fabrication services that meet demanding requirements for apparatus, fixturing, experiment setups and technical services for the NRC's contributions to academia, industry and major international partnerships.
A key goal of the National Research Council of Canada's (NRC) Aerospace Research Centre is to advance scientific knowledge in order to stimulate innovation, enhance our capabilities and sustain our relevance as a knowledge generator. Not only do we share our knowledge outwardly with industry and academia, but we also do this inwardly – by providing the opportunity to grow and learn from each other by exchanging ideas among colleagues. One successful example of our approach is the Early Career Network (ECN), a collective of early career employees, visiting workers and students from the NRC's Aerospace Research Centre.
In keeping with the Government of Canada's "cloud-first" digital principle, the NRC opted to implement a cloud-based solution, hosted and maintained in a highly secure, Canadian data centre. The NRC also chose to adopt a commercially available solution rather than go the traditional "built for government" path - SuccessFactors provides best-in-class standardized business processes with data integration across modules leveraging a consumer-grade web interface.
Until the Zika virus (ZV) outbreak in Brazil caught the global medical and public health communities by surprise in 2015, ZV was considered to be a benign pathogen for healthy humans. That outbreak, associated with a massive increase in babies born with neurological and other developmental defects, with similar increases in Guillain‑Barré syndrome in adults, spiralled into an epidemic affecting other parts of South and Central America, the Caribbean and the USA.