/research/taxonomy/term/208/all en /research/article/special-features/2024-beatty-lecture-bridged-worlds-arts-and-science <p><span>This year’s Beatty Lecture bridged the worlds of arts and science, bringing together an Irish writer and a Danish evolutionary geneticist to discuss shared concerns, including balancing creativity with rationality and the importance of storytelling in both their fields. <span> </span></span></p> <p><span>For the fourth year, the lecture was emceed by Nahlah Ayed, host of CBC Radio’s <i><span>Ideas</span></i><span>. <span> </span></span></span></p> Tue, 29 Oct 2024 15:46:03 +0000 Eunillyne Lazado 9810 at /research /research/article/special-features/alanis-obomsawin-offers-message-optimism-beatty-lecture <p>On October 16, 2023, Alanis Obomsawin delivered the 69th annual Beatty Lecture at Pollack Hall on ����VR��Ƶ’s downtown campus. As the room fell dark her soft voice recalled her childhood, leaving everyone in the audience to paint in their own mind a picture of her early life. She recounted how she spent part of her childhood in Odanak, an Abenaki reserve near Sorel-Tracy, Quebec. “Odanak was very different then, there was no electricity or running water,” she reflected.</p> Wed, 08 Nov 2023 16:25:51 +0000 Charlotte Bawol 2248 at /research /research/article/future-ready-spinal-tap <p>Have you ever wondered what the future really looks like? Or wondered what it would be like to be able to touch it? Faculty of Engineering Professor <a href="/mecheng/people/staff/mark-driscoll">Mark Driscoll</a> does so on a regular basis. In fact, there is a machine in his lab in the Macdonald Engineering building that lets you do just that.</p> Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:03:07 +0000 Junji Nishihata 727 at /research /research/article/future-ready-authentic-educator <p>In the summer of 2012, in Queens, New York, a 12-year-old boy dove for a basketball at school and cut his arm. He awoke the next morning with a high fever, vomiting, mottled skin and low blood pressure. His pediatrician diagnosed him with stomach flu and sent the boy to hospital to get re-hydrated. The emergency room doctors gave him fluids, ran blood tests and sent him home with instructions to take Tylenol.</p> Wed, 21 Dec 2022 23:43:53 +0000 Mark Witten 721 at /research /research/article/future-ready-translation-trailblazer <p>As a boy in Jaffa, Israel, Nahum Sonenberg walked regularly with his father to the Old Protestant cemetery on a hill overlooking the harbour. His father showed him the gravestone of Thomas Hodgkin, the British pathologist who first described Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the 1800s. Sonenberg recalls them standing on the hilltop, looking over the Mediterranean: “I asked my father, what’s beyond the water? ‘That’s America,’ he said, ‘where everything is possible.’ I was only four and thought I should go there one day.”</p> Wed, 21 Dec 2022 22:39:05 +0000 Mark Witten 717 at /research /research/article/that-which-we-have-always-known-be-true <p>F<em>uture Ready is a long-read research series published by Research and Innovation. In this article, Wáhiakatste Diome-Deer, co-author of The Globe and Mail’s bi-weekly Indigenous Leaders column, reports on ����VR��Ƶ’s first Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ): Traditional Knowledge in the Contemporary World Virtual Roundtable, and examines more broadly ����VR��Ƶ's efforts at Reconciliation and Indigenous education. Portrait of ����VR��Ƶ researcher Marianne Stenbaek by internationally renowned Inuit artist, Jonasie Faber.</em></p> Wed, 04 Jan 2023 23:15:33 +0000 Wáhiakatste Diome-Deer 770 at /research /research/article/made-quebec-sky-limit-nanocrystals <p>“It’s like a Saturn V rocket, except it’s upside down.” Howard Fields is excited, and with good reason: things at <a href="http://anomera.ca">Anomera </a>are poised to takeoff, and in a big way.</p> <p>Anomera, for the uninitiated, is a small company based in Montreal with locations in Mississauga, Ontario and Témiscaming, Quebec. Anomera specializes in nanoparticles, specifically, carboxylated nanocrystalline cellulose, or CNCs for short. And while the company may be small, and the particles they sell much, much smaller, they are on the verge of big things. Very big things.</p> Wed, 04 Jan 2023 23:01:18 +0000 Junji Nishihata 769 at /research /research/article/made-quebec-moneyball-montreal <p>In 1999, at the tender age of 18, Craig Buntin boarded an airplane in Kelowna, BC. His destination: Montreal. His purpose: to find the necessary coaching that would help him reach his dream of going to the Olympic games as a figure skater. He had a one-way ticket, and enough savings to keep him going for a couple of months. If it didn’t pan out, he would be hitching a ride home.</p> Wed, 04 Jan 2023 22:43:07 +0000 Junji Nishihata 765 at /research /research/article/future-ready-giant-nano-scale <p>Marta Cerruti talks glowingly of the colourized photos her students recently made. Most researchers would reserve what’s under their microscope for purely scientific inquiry. But while the Associate Professor of Materials Engineering works on ways to grow bones and reduce mineral build-up in arteries, she likes to also look at what’s going on aesthetically. A water colour painter, she recently encouraged her students to make colloidal dispersions, cells and extracellular matrix grown on scaffolds into pieces to admire. “They’re really, really pretty structures.”</p> Thu, 22 Dec 2022 23:01:24 +0000 Philip Fine 750 at /research /research/article/future-ready-advocate-better-anthropocene <p>When you think of the Earth 50 years from now, what do you see? Do you imagine desolate cities, scorched forests, dead oceans, lost biodiversity? Elena Bennett wants you to know the future doesn’t have to be bleak.</p> <p>“We can achieve a good Anthropocene — a future that is more just, prosperous, and sustainable than our current world,” says Bennett, an ecosystem ecologist jointly appointed to the ����VR��Ƶ School of Environment and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences in ����VR��Ƶ’s Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.</p> Thu, 22 Dec 2022 22:16:27 +0000 Allyson Rowley 737 at /research /research/futurereadylaporte <p>Drug discovery is a high-stakes business. The cost of developing a new prescription medicine that gains marketing approval from regulators is about $3.5 billion – and 7 out of 8 new drug candidates in clinical development fail, according to a <i>Journal of Health Economics </i>study.</p> Tue, 20 Dec 2022 21:57:33 +0000 Mark Witten 711 at /research /research/article/future-ready-graphene-innovators <p>What is a million times thinner than a human hair, yet 200 times stronger than steel? What is lighter than paper, yet stretches up to 20% of its length?</p> Tue, 20 Dec 2022 21:40:03 +0000 Mark Witten 707 at /research /research/articles/future-ready-professor-sabrina-leslie <p>In a cavernous space in Professor Sabrina Leslie’s lab, recent PhD graduate Dr. Daniel Berard is analyzing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3U1BTFxuBU&feature=youtu.be">live videos of fluctuating single oligonucleotides</a>—short molecules of DNA—as they are trapped in three-micron-wide "wells”. To the untrained eye, the images he is inspecting on the computer screen look much like static on antiquated television sets, yet he perceives the entire trajectory of the molecules as they search for and bind to a target.</p> Tue, 20 Dec 2022 21:10:12 +0000 Meaghan Thurston 706 at /research