Carleton University and an Ottawa company are among several Ontario organizations to get access to $16.89 million in provincial funding for graduate internships.

The Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities on Wednesday announced the funding for a four-year program called ACCELERATE Ontario, with the aim of providing for 1,750 internships throughout the province across all university faculties, including engineering, political science, mathematics, and biology.

Ottawa-based physiology monitoring products maker Biopeak Corp. is one of the Ontario companies which has agreed to host interns, while Carleton University is among eight universities that have confirmed internships.

Under the program, graduate student researchers will spend a minimum of 50 per cent of their time over a four-month period at a company, undertaking research on a problem jointly identified by the intern, business, a supervising professor, and MITACS, which is a federally funded network of Centres of Excellence that is managing the internship program.

Each internship will cost $15,000, which is shared by the partner company and the ACCELERATE Program through the support of the province.