COGRAD was founded in 2015 as a result of funding from the Western Economic Diversification Canada. The vision of the Centre is to provide an internationally accredited analytical facility committed to advancing and supporting industry and/or government mandated environmental monitoring obligations. This will be achieved through the development of faster and cheaper analytical monitoring techniques, tools designed to delineate sources of crude oil exposures, design of innovative strategies to remediate and monitor crude oil components in the environment and forensic studies leading to new areas of analytical research.
Implementation of newly developed analytical technologies and methodologies by private laboratories will lead to the creation of new employment opportunities and diversification of the economy in Western Canada. New scientific tools developed at COGRAD will be invaluable to the Oil and Gas industry allowing them to fulfill their current and future environmental monitoring mandates with increased confidence in the produced scientific data.
COGRAD Team Members
Dr. Gregg Tomy, PhD, Director
Gregg has over 20 years of experience analyzing complex contaminants in environmental matrices. He is a trained analytical environmental chemist and graduated with his PhD from the University of Manitoba in 1997. Gregg has received numerous national and international recognitions. In 2009, he was awarded the top young international environmental researcher by his peers at the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) and the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. His scientific expertise has been sought by members of the United Nations Stockholm Convention, the premier global treaty that regulates the production and use of anthropogenic compounds in the environment, as an international expert on analytical chemistry and ecotoxicology. As a former government of Canada scientist, Gregg received the Ministerial Award of Excellence (2011), one of the highest awards that can be given to a federal scientist, for his scientific work on behalf of Canada with the United Nations.
Dr. Jörg Stetefeld, PhD, Director
Dr. Stetefeld is a Canada Research Chair in Structural Biology and Professor for Biochemistry. He studied Biochemistry and Crystallography and received his PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry under the supervision of Nobel laureate Robert Huber. Dr. Stetefeld worked for several years in the pharmaceutical industry and established his research group in Winnipeg in 2006. He performs an integrated approach combining several high-resolution structural biology techniques with in-depth biophysical and biochemical methods. His expertise lies in revealing structure-function relationships of target systems and the development of applications thereof. Dr. Stetefeld determined the first right-handed coiled coil structure of the archaea S. marinus. This unique nanotube shows four large cavities and lays the foundation for the development of passive sampler devices as a new generation bioremediation tools.
COGRAD 