By Nick Dube

UNBC Grants

UNBC researchers receive over $1.5 million in grant

Jul 17, 2025 | 5:04 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – UNBC secured more then 1.5 million dollars in grant funding to support curiosity-driven research.The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) has given the funds through their 2025 discovery grants program. The funding will support long term research projects including pavement engineering groups, freshwater ecosystems and wildfire resilience. One recipient is Dr. Sajal Saha who developing an AI-driven system to detect and respond to cyber attacks in real time says the funding is essential to achieving results.

“The grant is very helpful to start establishing a lab here. Our lab is planning to research end to end cyber attack detection, mitigation framework using generative AI and last language model. So to accomplish that we need a powerful machine and we need human resources to do all the research. This funding will help us arrange those things including the lab set up and supporting the training of highly qualified professionals.” says Sawa.

This research like many of the others that received grants are designed to progress many areas of society which will benefit communities, ecosystems and wildlife. In the case of Dr. Sawa this research could put a large dent in cyber related crimes and prevent financial losses for many worldwide.

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“After detecting an attack you need to turn on your firewall and the system, but if you need human help then it takes some time to take action. We can use machine learning and generative AI with the help of a language model to understand the attack and take the action immediately without the help of a human which would make this system automatic. So the main goal is to make a robust framework, that has a end to end solution for cyber attack detection, to prevention.” says Sawa.

In addition to those grants, additional funds were earmarked to investigate how wildfires increase soil erosion and to learn how birds adapt to disturbances such as logging and urban development.