Kite Events

Hosted by the Canadian Cardiovascular Society and Heart and Stroke, the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress (CCC) is the largest gathering of cardiovascular and allied health professionals in Canada. Cardiologists, cardiovascular surgeons, researchers, nurses and other cardiovascular specialists from across Canada and around the globe come to CCC to connect with other members of the cardiovascular team, to discover how to incorporate the latest science into their practice and to attend cutting-edge, accredited education sessions.

CPSR's Stroke Program in Neurorecovery (SPiN) Workshop is going online again this year! The SPiN workshop brings together young researchers from across the world to learn from expert faculty about basic science and clinical stroke research. This four-day workshop is targeted for trainees (primarily, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows) and will be an excellent opportunity to network with other trainees and faculty in the field from within and outside of Canada. All trainees are welcome to apply; however, despite being online this year, we will only be able to accommodate a limited number of spots to be able to keep the breakout groups reasonably small, so apply early!

Inspired by the traditional “Three Minute Thesis (3MT)” competition, the "Three Minute Trainee" competition challenges KITE trainees including graduate students, post-docs, and staff, to communicate the key concepts of their research in a compelling 3-minute presentation. A panel of judges evaluates each of the presentations and decides the winners of 1st, 2nd and 3rd place awards, while the audience will vote for a People's Choice Award. This is a great chance to hone your presentation skills and to come up with a short pitch about your work that can be used at conferences, for interviews, networking events, and grant proposal writing.

The WSIB’s Grants Team and the Prevention Division at the Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development have partnered to highlight and showcase six research projects. Each event date will feature three research presentations, a panel discussion and a Q&A segment.

The first virtual Toronto Biomedical Engineering Conference (ToBE2021), formerly known as IARC, is a few months away and we are now accepting abstracts for review. Submit your abstract by April 2nd to get the chance to present your research at the conference this year. This is a great opportunity to showcase your research to a broad audience, establish collaborations and gain valuable presentation experience.

Every three years, scientists, practitioners, students and other professionals from around the globe meet to address key ergonomic issues and to capitalize on opportunities for knowledge-sharing, collaborations, partnerships and friendships. The ultimate goal is to elaborate and advance ergonomics science and practice, thereby contributing to improved quality of life.

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation of Greater Montreal (CRIR) is a unique research center. For the past 20 years, it has been distinguished by the excellence, breadth and diversity of its research in rehabilitation, as well as through its interdisciplinary, intersectoral and knowledge mobilization initiatives. These initiatives have an important impact in the clinical, scientific, public and community sectors. CRIR provides an extraordinary environment for the training of new researchers, and is also a model of partnership and administrative synergy.

Join us for EPIC presentations from AGE-WELL students, postdoctoral fellows, research staff and ECRs as they share their research in the “Supportive Homes & Communities” Challenge Area. The “Supportive Homes & Communities” Challenge Area focuses on promoting independent living through appropriate supports and services, including the design of physical spaces and the use of technology within the environment.

Movement has a profound impact on our brain – find out how only a few minutes every day can make a difference to last a lifetime. We often think of physical activity contributing only to physical fitness – but there is strong evidence to support that movement benefits, protects, and sustains our cognitive fitness as well. Movement in all forms has profound impacts on our brains across our lifespan, from improving mental health to reducing risk of dementia, and more. Join our panel of advocates, community leaders, and researchers to discover how only a few moments of movement each day is an investment to promote brain health for years to come.

Hosted by Toronto Rehab Institute – University Health Network (“TRI”), Federation of Indian Chapters of Commerce and Industries (“FICCI) and the Consulate General of India (“CGI”), the Canada India Summit will address the themes of Pandemic Response and Post-COVID Healthcare, Biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence and will also feature the CIF/Kite Institute Powerplay Pitch competition for innovators and start-ups in the healthcare sector.

This interactive and introductory online session will demonstrate effective PubMed searching techniques to help you find the evidence you need. PubMed is a free resource that contains more than 32 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature.

This event will focus on the influence of Socioeconomic Status on Rehabilitation, and Disability Rights and Access to Rehabilitation.

The CSRS aims to recognize and highlight the work of researchers who engage in stress-related research in Canada.

The Neural Engineering Community welcomes researchers, members of academia, clinicians, and representatives of patient associations, industry, government agencies, funders, and other interested parties to attend the premier conference for this highly interdisciplinary fi­eld. NER is the world’s gathering place for biomedical engineers, neuroscientists, and clinicians to share research and to exchange ideas and breakthrough advances in novel engineering tools for elucidating brain function and neuro technologies for the restoration and enhancement of impaired sensory, motor, and cognitive functions.

Dr. Tarek Rajji (Executive Director) will be presenting to members of KITE to introduce the Toronto Dementia Research Alliance (TDRA) to KITE researchers, what the TDRA can offer to KITE researchers (e.g., collaborative research opportunities, mechanisms for recruitment, access to patient/family advisory councils, training tools) and to find ways of engaging KITE more into TDRA.

This event will focus on Equity in Rehabilitation for Black and Indigenous People and Sex and Gender Considerations in Rehabilitation.

Research trainees are our future research leaders and mentors. Creating a culture in which they are able to thrive and have equitable opportunities to reach their full potential is critical to the success of our research enterprise.

As part of the Canada India Healthcare Summit, this webinar will include Drs. Alex Mihailidis and Shehroz Khan of KITE, and will investigate how artificial intelligence can be used to overcome covid-19 and future pandemics.

Krembil Brain Institute, Johns Hopkins University and Gairdner Foundation invite members of the community to attend this free two half-day symposium. There are more than half a million Canadians currently living with dementia, including Alzheimer’s, the most common type of dementia. By 2031, that number is expected to rise to close to a million.

The KITE Research Institute will be hosting the next Women and Science virtual event called "Imperfection During COVID-19: Succeeding with the Struggle Together".

On International Women’s Day, CIHR’s Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction (INMHA) is hosting a virtual learning event to discuss the impacts of COVID-19 on women’s mental health and substance use. The event will highlight results from the Knowledge Synthesis Grant: COVID-19 Rapid Research Funding Opportunity in Mental Health and Substance Use and how the research can be used to inform policies, practices, guidelines and programs to improve the mental wellness of women in Canada.

The 2021 symposium will be held virtually. All abstracts will be reviewed for poster presentations with an opportunity to submit a 2-minute video presentation posted on the symposium and the Canadian Concussion Centre websites.

This interactive online session will teach you about the 8 steps involved in a systematic review, and why you need to prepare for each before you get started. Systematic reviews, if well done, provide a reliable and minimally biased source of information on topics of concern to clinical practice, patient safety and responsible health care services.

This public education event is geared to Grades 7-12 and early university age students of all genders and will feature three highly accomplished female scientists and clinicians; Drs. Valerie Wallace, Sowmya Viswanathan and Mojgan Hodaie will give short TED talk-style presentations on their lives and careers, as well as what inspired them to enter the fields of brain, arthritis, and vision research. Mayim Bialik, PhD, of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ will also be delivering an inspirational message. The event, moderated by Dr. Gelareh Zadeh, a neurosurgeon and co-Director of the Krembil Brain Institute, is meant to inspire and engage young minds and is geared to anyone with an interest in STEM education.

CIHR will be hosting “Ask Me Anything” sessions designed to support participants and answer questions about the Spring 2021 Project Grant competition. Questions will be accepted via a Slido question board. Duration: 90 minutes

How will robotics and neuromodulation change health care and rehabilitation? Join top researchers from the University of Toronto, the KITE Research Institute -University Health Network, Southeast University and Nanjing Medical University to assess the future of rehabilitation and the specific actions needed to realize the promise of emerging research for Canadian and Chinese patients.

We are so excited to let you know that KITEC is back with a new series of Mindful Moments, yoga and meditation practice sessions, open to all KITE scientists, staff, and trainees! During this session we will practice yoga and mindfulness as a group. Our amazing yoga instructor is Ruby Tang. Ruby attended her first yoga class over a decade ago, and she came back to yoga at a point where she felt stuck in her everyday life. Through the practice, she found a sense of much-needed inner freedom and groundedness.

Visual communication skills are a key asset for anyone looking to make an impact with their research and share ideas with diverse audiences, but it can be challenging to translate scientific data into clear and informative illustrations.

Advance your clinical knowledge and skills with two days full of presentations and workshops led by field experts, showcasing the latest developments in Acquired Brain Injury. The conference will be taking place virtually via the Remo conference platform. Remo is a web-video conference platform that allows people to have face-to-face networking online just like in-person events that build meaningful relationships and conversations. To ensure you have the best virtual conference experience possible, web demonstrations and guides will be provided as we get closer to the conference dates. We look forward to seeing you at these sessions and at the conference!

CALLING ALL PROPSECTIVE STUDENTS: Learn all about the Rehabilitation Sciences Program at The University of Toronto!

We are collecting donations with the goal of raising $5000 to fund an annual occupational therapy award and bursary for CPD in Debbie’s name at UHN.

A panel of former CIHR reviewers will answer your questions about the grant review process, characteristics of a great grant application, and common pitfalls. The discussion will focus on how the review process has changed with remote review, and how remote review might influence how you approach your grant application.

The Canadian Frailty Network (CFN) presents Protecting Your Health: Preparing for the Influenza Season in the age of COVID-19. In this webinar experts from the healthcare field will answer your questions on why influenza impacts older adults more heavily, what vaccinations are recommended, and how getting your vaccinations can help you stay healthy as you age!

Visual perception entails solving a wide set of tasks, e.g., object detection, depth estimation, etc. The predictions made for multiple tasks from the same image are not independent, and therefore, are expected to be ‘consistent’. We propose a broadly applicable and fully computational method for augmenting learning with Cross-Task Consistency. 1 The proposed formulation is based on inference-path invariance over a graph of arbitrary tasks. We observe that learning with cross-task consistency leads to more accurate predictions and better generalization to out-of-distribution inputs. This framework also leads to an informative unsupervised quantity, called Consistency Energy, based on measuring the intrinsic consistency of the system. Consistency Energy correlates well with the supervised error (r=0.67), thus it can be employed as an unsupervised confidence metric as well as for detection of out-of-distribution inputs (ROC-AUC=0.95). The evaluations are performed on multiple datasets, including Taskonomy, Replica, CocoDoom, and ApolloScape, and they benchmark cross-task consistency versus various baselines including conventional multi-task learning, cycle consistency, and analytical consistency.

This conference will bring together emerging and established scholars including intervention researchers in the field of aging and anthropology, developing opportunities to further collaborate and strengthen our specialist network. The conference program will also include workshops and mentoring opportunities directed towards students and early career scholars to help create links with the professional and academic community across disciplines.

Please join our upcoming "Mindful Moments" session on June 17, 2020. Mindfulness is the practice of being aware of yourself, your body and your surroundings in the present moment. This practice is greatly helpful in day to day life, but more so in the times of challenge, like what we are facing now. This online mindfulness session is organized by the KITE Trainee Executive Committee and is open to all KITE scientists, staff, and trainees.

Mindfulness is the practice of being aware of yourself, your body and your surroundings in the present moment. This practice is greatly helpful in day to day life but more so in the times of challenge like what we are facing now. Therefore, We have organized an online mindfulness session, so that we can all practice mindfulness at the same time as a group. This online mindfulness session is open to all KITE scientists, staff, and trainees.

As we continue with our COVID-19 efforts, it’s important that we maintain our health wellness including keeping physically fit. We are proud to feature our team of experts—Dr. Paul Oh, Dr. David Langelier, and Robert Bertelink—who will guide us through the medical health benefits of exercise, exploring it as a preventative measure against cancer and chronic conditions, and offering advice on how we can create a customized exercise plan for ourselves and our family. Broadcast through YouTube LIVE, we encourage you to invite your family members and friends to join this session. See below for more details. Make sure to register to get your link!

Join us on Tuesday May 12th for a casual conversation over coffee with Dr. Elizabeth Rochon. Dr. Rochon is the Associate Director, Senior Scientist, at KITE-Toronto Rehabilitation Institute-UHN, Professor at Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, and Co-Team Leader, Communication Team, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.

We are pleased to invite you to another session of "Online Mindfulness with KITE Trainees" on Wednesday Apr 22, at 02:30-3:00 PM! Join our amazing mindfulness coach, Michelle Bancroft, to practice mindfulness techniques that will help increase relaxation and resiliency.

Managing your mental health during COVID-19 - An online course for U of T alumni with this free four-week (four-module) MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Opens April 13, 2020 (You can follow along weekly or take the course at your convenience. There is no deadline for completion but virtual access to the content and teaching assistant ends May 29, 2020.) Featuring perks and content tailored to U of T Alumni. Registration deadline: May 22, 2020

Kite Trainees is hosting a series of virtual coffee chats with scientists and experts, to support mental health and professional development of our trainees during this time of social-distancing practice.

In this second COVID-19 webinar, a joint presentation with the Joint Centre for Bioethics, we will explore the ethics of using restrictive measures in the control of infectious diseases. Responding to a pandemic through the healthcare system alone may not be effective. The use of public health measures such as physical distancing clearly raises important ethical issues regarding the limits to personal freedoms in times of public health emergencies. Although these measures played a role to prevent the spread of SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009 and Ebola in 2014-16, they were limited in scope in comparison to the measures used in the COVID-19 response.

This one-day event will be dedicated to helping the biological science and chemistry communities understand the process of turning novel discoveries into druggable targets for small molecule therapeutic development. It will also cover multiple aspects of the drug discovery process; from hit generation and pharmacokinetics, to intellectual property and commercialization strategies. Local success stories of “Bridging the Gap” and AI in drug discovery will be presented, along with a keynote presentation by Dr. Barbara Tate, Venture Partner at the Dementia Discovery Fund.

Come and join us for the KITE-Trainees social event, and solve some challenging riddles at Riddle Escape Rooms!

The Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA) Training and Capacity Building Program is holding an event for students, investigators, and research staff. The event will provide a unique opportunity to learn critical skills in engagement of people with lived experience and their care partners. Patient-oriented research is increasingly required for CIHR Patient-Oriented Research competitions. Don't miss out on this valuable learning opportunity to build your expertise as a patient-oriented researcher!

This information session is designed to prepare students for the first International Conference on Aging Innovation and Rehabilitation (ICAIR). All Kite and RSI trainees interested in submitting a poster and/or presenting at the conference are encouraged to attend to learn about the changes being made to the registration process of this event, as well as tips and tricks for posters.

CRANIA, along with Novela Neurotech and Hahn Schickard, invite the neuromodulation research community, to a seminar-style half-day workshop on Novela's new research tool, the Open Source Wireless Neuromodulation Research Kit (OpenKit), to support and advance your research efforts and programs. The OpenKit significantly advances multi-channel recording, data processing and sharing capabilities. The OpenKit is open-sourced allowing greater collaboration, further development, and the acceleration of translational research towards novel treatments for neurological disorders. This partnership initiative is in keeping with CRANIA's mission.

Learn about innovative and evidence driven strategies and recommendations to enhance wellbeing following TBI. This event will bring together the clinical, research and legal communities to network, learn and share research, clinical practice and personal experience in TBI.

A Balancing Act - Clinical & Research Work: The Student Perspective will showcase graduate students who will share their experiences in clinical practice and research, discuss how those two worlds influence each other, and talk about how to balance them.

Our experts will begin with an overview of general depression and symptoms, followed by an insightful discussion about self-care. You will learn the foundational attitudes of mindfulness, with tools and tips to integrate into daily living to help cope with chronic pain, stress, anxiety and depression.

Institute Director, Milos Popovic will share with you the pathway ahead for The Kite Research Institute.

You are invited to a free public event on promoting brain health in later life! Interact with researchers from the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA) and health-focused organizations to find out more about brain health. Researchers from CCNA will share information and answer questions on supporting brain health and reducing risk of cognitive decline and dementia.