Durham College (DC) has been honoured by Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan) with their coveted Award of Excellence.

During today’s 2026 CICan Connections Conference in Ottawa, we received the Gold Program Excellence Award for Applied Research and Innovation.

The award recognizes the significant growth of DC’s research centres over the last five years, and the national recognition and industry partnerships our Office of Research Services, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (ORSIE) continues to foster.

“We have five high-performing research centres that are really recognized in their fields,” said Debbie McKee Demczyk, Associate Vice President, Innovation and Research. “I am immensely proud and grateful to work with our team of superstars. These are people who care deeply about our community. They care about success and excellence, and they care about providing students with great opportunities to work on amazing projects.”

Each of DC’s research centres played a key role in earning this award, according to McKee Demczyk.

• “The AI Hub is a Technology Access Centre – supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada – that has become very well known, not only locally, but also nationally. We’ve earned a lot of respect in that ecosystem.”
• “The Mixed Reality Capture Studio is doing a fabulous job of carving out a space for themselves, and expanding virtual production capabilities with a new LED research stage to meet growing demand in a number of sectors. It’s really a centre of excellence.”
• “There is tremendous promise in the work the Centre for Cybersecurity Innovation can do in support of the defense sector. We’re very strongly positioned to help organizations enter the defense space or become more prepared to be part of that defense supply chain.”
• “The Centre for Craft Beverage Innovation is serving a lot of needs that are complementary to small business and entrepreneurship and the tourism focus of Durham Region.”
• “The Social Impact Hub is making a difference right here in our community by collaborating with organizations to develop new approaches to serving their clients.”

Although the work of our research centres speaks for itself, there’s no denying the value of receiving an award from CICan.

“It’s really a stamp of credibility. Our clients know that we do good work, but when they hear that we’ve won this gold award, it’s just another way of recognizing that they made the right choice in coming to us. They take great pride in knowing that they’ve worked with a top of class research centre,” said McKee Demczyk.

That pride can be shared by everyone at DC.

“We’ve got a pretty awesome applied research enterprise here at Durham College.”