The Government of Ontario has announced $250,000 in new funding for a program that aims to attract Indian undergraduate students to Canada and promote the benefits of graduate work at Canadian universities.

MITACS Globalink was launched last year after a successful pilot program with the University of British Columbia, Simon Frasier University and the University of Victoria. This year, U of G is hosting one of 47 students who are involved in the program.

Abhishek Goyal, who will enter his fourth-year of studies at the Indian Institutes of Technology at Guwahati in September, is working at Guelph’s Vineland Campus with Prof. Jay Subramanian, Plant Agriculture, on a project that aims to determine if activating the anti-microbial genes of fruit at the sub-cellular level can improve resistance against microbial pathogens and thus extend the fruit’s shelf-life.