Basic Research and Education
Through our support of the Hakai Beach Institute and other programs, we continue to be a significant funder of applied scientific research. But we also believe that there is more to science than this focus on the urgent issues of the day. We see science as a very special human activity:
- Driven by the spirit of exploration, creativity and imagination
- An essential element of human culture
- Just plain interesting and inspiring
In any era certain fields of research hold more promise than others. Often it is the availability of a new suite of analytical tools that creates opportunities for discovery in such promising fields. We believe that molecular biology is such a field so that is where we concentrate our support, specifically in the area of microbial diversity.
We currently support two research groups:
- The Centre for Microbial Diversity and Evolution (CMDE) at the University of British Columbia.
- The Centre for Comparative Genomics and Evolutionary Bioinformatics (CGEB) at Dalhousie University.