York University takes measures to prevent birds from flying into windows and dying
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The catastrophically high number of birds killed every year when they smash into glass windows is one of the main reasons why Canada and the United States have lost almost three billion birds since 1970, according to Faculty of Science biology Professor Bridget Stutchbury.
York University will be installing a bird-friendly, dot-patterned window treatment at several key sites on the Keele Campus to make the windows more visible to migrating birds and reduce bird deaths. The Bethune walkway has already had the window treatment installed.
The Bethune walkway on the Keele Campus with the bird-friendly window treatment installed
Also on the list to receive the window treatments are the Pond Road Residence, the southeast green roof in the Bergeron Centre for Engineering Excellence, the Seymour Schulich Building courtyard, the Life Sciences Building and the Founders College Residence.
York is one of the first universities in Ontario and among the first in Canada to install a bird safety film to the windows of key older buildings known for a higher number of bird deaths. The product has been shown to reduce bird mortality by 80 per cent.
Bridget Stutchbury
Stutchbury, an expert on bird extinction and migratory songbird declines, leads York’s sustainability efforts to prevent bird deaths, along with her master’s student Lisa Horn.
An internationally recognized expert on the ecology, behaviour and conservation of birds, Stutchbury is best known for her 2009 study of the migratory behaviour of birds, in which tiny tracking devices were placed in miniature backpacks on birds’ backs and then retrieved a year after migration. She has written or co-written more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, including “A neonicotinoid insecticide reduces fueling and delays migration in songbirds,” published last month in Science.
Across Canada, about 25 million birds are killed each year when they accidentally fly into glass windows, while bird collisions with buildings in the Greater Toronto Area alone are estimated at one to 10 million each year. Toronto is on a major migratory corridor and York University, with its green landscaping and several woodlots, is a common spot for migrating birds.
Stutchbury estimates that at least 1,000 birds each year are killed by window collision at the Keele Campus, which is to be expected given the many buildings and natural landscaping.
Chemistry prof receives $450K NSERC grant to research molecules for tattoo technology
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Can temporary or semi-permanent tattoos look as good as the real thing? Faculty of Science chemistry Professor Christopher Caputo thinks so and is hard at work with his team to produce a new range of colours.
Caputo recently received a $450,000 Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Collaborative Research and Development (CRD) Grant with Toronto startup Inkbox to study molecules to improve semi-permanent tattoo technology.
Christopher Caputo. Photograph by B.D. Colen, Faculty of Science communicator in residence
NSERC contributed $300,000, while Inkbox is pitching in an additional $150,000 over three years.
The partnership is expected to result not only in more colour choices, but also potentially new molecules that the team will develop from scratch using natural chemicals from fruits and vegetables. Currently, only one colour, a blue/black, is available for semi-permanent tattoos.
“This is fun, exciting, fundamental science,” said Caputo, who will work with Postdoctoral Fellow Sanjay Manhas and MSc students Fiona Jeeva and Lucas Torres. “Once we have a better understanding of how the current molecules interact with the skin – specifically how they bind to and dye the skin – we can use this knowledge to build new molecules with different colour properties but the same bonding capability.”
“The tattoos actually change the colour of your skin,” said Caputo, who worked at Inkbox before coming to York, and tested a bunch of first-application tattoos on his own skin.
Inkbox is looking forward to the results. “The collaboration with York University enabled by the CRD allows Inkbox to leverage the talents of top researchers to pursue new products, new intellectual property and to access valuable scientific expertise,” said Ian Mallov, a research chemist at Inkbox. “As one of Canada’s 25 fastest growing companies, having top personnel and access to great research facilities will allow Inkbox’s research and development to keep driving our growth.”
Semi-permanent tattoos last anywhere from one to three weeks depending on the person’s skin. “That means there are no regrets,” said Caputo. “No one is stuck with a tattoo design they no longer like or want forever.”
Many people get semi-permanent tattoos as a trial run for a permanent one. This way, they can experiment until they decide on the design, size and location they prefer. And, unlike the peel, wet and stick variety of tattoos kids may be familiar with, Inkbox works with a specific molecule in a common South American fruit that is not only edible but binds to the skin to create a real semi-permanent tattoo.
One of the advantages of collaborating on the research with Inkbox is it allows graduate students and postdocs to get real-world experience and to witness their research in action.
“It’s great that startups can leverage university expertise,” said Caputo. “It gives students a unique opportunity. Chemistry can be quite abstract, so this is a way to bring it to life to solve practical problems. It takes fundamental chemistry and creates a product in a retail environment where thousands of people can access it.”
Geography prof’s articles most cited and most read in world’s leading science and technology studies journal
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Kean Birch
It’s a rare achievement to have the most cited or the most read article in an academic journal; having both at the same time with different papers is an almost unheard-of achievement in a discipline.
But that’s exactly what York University Professor Kean Birch has achieved. Birch is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and the current graduate program director of the Graduate Program in Science & Technology Studies (STS). In August, two of his papers were the most cited and the most read articles in the world’s leading science and technology studies journal, Science, Technology, & Human Values. Both papers are open access.
The most cited paper is a 2017 article titled “Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy: Finance, Assetization, and the Management of Value.” It draws on research funded by the York University Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies’ Minor Research Grant and outlines the new concept of “assetization” for understanding how things like scientific knowledge are transformed into capitalizable assets. Its groundbreaking nature is evident in the way its arguments have been taken up and cited across a range of social science disciplines, and from the fact that it has been downloaded more than 5,000 times to date.
In following up on this achievement, Birch and his collaborator Fabian Muniesa, a senior researcher at the École des Mines de Paris in France, have a new edited book coming out from MIT Press next year called Turning Things into Assets in which contributors analyze how knowledge, nature, infrastructure and social relations are all assetized. For example, York University Associate Professor James Williams from the Department of Social Science has a chapter in the book on social impact bonds.
The most read paper is a 2019 article titled “Technoscience Rent: Toward a Theory of Rentiership for Technoscientific Capitalism,” which has already been downloaded nearly 2,000 times since being published online in February of this year. It builds on the earlier 2017 paper by outlining a theory of “rentiership” for understanding the resurgence of monopolies and rent-seeking in contemporary, technoscientific capitalism. As such, it highlights the critical need to examine the relationship between technology and society.
The article represents the theoretical starting point for a $270,000 Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council Insight Grant that Birch received in 2018, and that he outlined in an invited lecture at a 2018 conference jointly organized by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research to mark the birthday of Karl Marx. See a video of his talk here.
Birch was pleasantly surprised by the two achievements. “I was keeping an eye on the downloads of my paper on rentiership to see how much interest there was in it, but I didn’t expect it to end up as the most read article in the journal,” he said. “It just shows how much interest there is in the relationship between technology and society.”
Aquatic Research Group Seminar looks at the ecological impacts of microplastics
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The first event in the 2019-20 Aquatic Research Group (ARG) Seminar Series features University of Toronto Assistant Professor Chelsea Rochman presenting a talk titled “Ecological impacts of microplastics in the environment.” It takes place today, Wednesday, Oct. 9, at 12:30 p.m. in 140 Health, Nursing & Environmental Studies Building (HNES). The seminar will be followed by a free lunch at 1:30 p.m. All members of the York community are welcome to attend.
The pan-Faculty ARG Seminar Series, organized by biology Professor Sapna Sharma in York University’s Faculty of Science, brings top ecologists from across the province to York to talk about their research in aquatic ecology and what’s causing stress in our waterways.
Chelsea Rochman
Motivated by basic and applied questions, Rochman’s research seeks to understand the sources, fate and ecological implications of anthropogenic pollutants in freshwater and marine ecosystems. Since microplastics provide a unique opportunity to examine a complex mixture of contaminants, her past and current body of work focuses specifically on microplastics. Their presence is associated with the physical stressor of the particle, innate chemicals added during manufacturing and chemicals that accumulate on microplastics from surrounding water.
Rochman, who received her PhD in ecology through a joint program at San Diego State University and the University of California, Davis, is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Previously, she was a David H. Smith Postdoctoral Fellow in the Aquatic Health Program at UC Davis. To bridge the gap between academia and management, Rochman collaborates with non-profit organizations and government agencies.
Here’s a look at the rest of the ARG Seminar Series lineup:
Nov. 13: Professor Robert Bailey (Ontario Tech University), “Bioassessment of freshwater ecosystems”
Feb. 12: Assistant Professor Claire Oswald (Ryerson University), “Impacts of road salt inputs on GTA streams” (tentative title)
Feb. 24: Assistant Professor Carly Ziter (Concordia University), “Thinking beyond the park: landscape structure, land-use history and biodiversity shape urban ecosystem services”
March 11: Professor Karen Kidd (McMaster University), “Local through global influences of human activities on mercury in aquatic ecosystems.”
Each seminar will start at 12:30 p.m., followed by a free lunch at 1:30 p.m. The seminars will all take place in HNES 140 except the talk on Feb. 24, which will be in 306 Lumbers Building.
The ARG includes researchers who focus on aquatic science from the Faculties of Science, Engineering, Environmental Studies, and Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. The seminar series is designed to engage this multidisciplinary scientific community at all levels, including graduate and undergraduate students, both at York University and in the wider aquatic science community.
Seminar series sheds light on ecological stress affecting our waterways
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Water equals life. But microplastics, pharmaceuticals, road salt, mercury and more are washed or flushed daily into waterways, harming fish and affecting drinking water. Learn more about these ecological stressors from ecologists across the province at the upcoming pan-Faculty Aquatic Research Group (ARG) Seminar Series 2019-20.
Learn more about what’s causing stress in our rivers and lakes. The ARG Seminar Series brings top researchers to York University to talk about their research in aquatic ecology.
“This year’s ARG Seminar Series is covering some of the most topical issues in aquatic sciences,” says Associate Professor Sapna Sharma of the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, who leads the organization of the series. “Our lineup is incredible. These women speakers are doing some amazing transformational research on some of the most important issues in aquatic ecology.”
Each seminar will start at 12:30 p.m., followed by a free lunch at 1:30 p.m. The seminars will all take place in 140 Health, Nursing & Environmental Studies Building except the talk on Feb. 24, which will be in 306 Lumbers Building.
Wednesday, Oct. 9: Assistant Professor Chelsea Rochman of the University of Toronto will present the talk “Ecological impacts of microplastics in the environment.”
Wednesday, Nov. 13: Professor Robert Bailey of the Ontario Tech University will discuss “Bioassessment of freshwater ecosystems.”
Wednesday, Feb. 12: Assistant Professor Claire Oswald of Ryerson University will talk about “Impacts of road salt inputs on GTA streams” (tentative title).
Monday, Feb. 24: Assistant Professor Carly Ziter of Concordia University will present “Thinking beyond the park: landscape structure, land-use history and biodiversity shape urban ecosystem services.”
Wednesday, March 11: Professor Karen Kidd, the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in Environment and Health at McMaster University, will look at “Local through global influences of human activities on mercury in aquatic ecosystems.”
All members of the York community are welcome to attend the seminars.
The ARG includes researchers who focus on aquatic science from the Faculties of Science, Engineering, Environmental Studies, and Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. The seminar series is designed to engage this multidisciplinary scientific community at all levels, including graduate and undergraduate students, both at York University and with in wider aquatic science community.
STS Seminar Series to focus on automated neoliberalism, Oct. 8
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Kean Birch
The third event in this year’s Research Seminar Series in Science & Technology Studies (STS) takes place on Oct. 8 and features Kean Birch, York University geography professor and director of the Graduate Program in Science & Technology Studies.
Now in its 26th year, the series has hosted hundreds experts from across Canada and around the world presenting on a wide range of STS-related topics. The talks are free and open to the public, and STS majors are especially encouraged to attend. Refreshments will be provided.
The Oct. 8 seminar, titled “Automated Neoliberalism,” will run from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in 203 Bethune College (Norman’s).
The core contradiction in neoliberalism studies is that markets are organized and require significant bureaucratic co-ordination and governance. In light of the increasingly technoscientific nature of contemporary capitalism, it is important to examine exactly how markets are organized and how their governance is configured by techno-economic processes.
In this talk, Birch will argue that the entanglement of technoscience and capitalism has led to an automated neoliberalism in which markets are automated through technology platforms, personal lives are transformed into private data assets, and social relations are automated through algorithms, distributed electronic ledgers and rating systems. Two questions arise in light of these changes. First, are markets being automated away, in that market exchange ends up no longer underpinning social order or organization? And second, does individual and social reflexivity problematize techno-economic automation, in that new platforms, data assets and ranking algorithms are all dependent on individuals telling the “truth”? It is worth considering the political implications of this automated neoliberalism and our reflexive enrolment in it.
Here’s a look at the rest of the Fall 2019 lineup:
Oct. 22: Zbigniew Stachniak (York University), “The IBM Images Archive”
Nov. 5: Kelly Bronson (University of Ottawa), “Data-driven: Agribusiness, Activists and Their Shared Politics of the Future”
Nov. 19: Kate Henne (University of Waterloo), “Grey Matters: Imagining Traumatic Brain Injury Through the Lens of Sex Difference”
Dec. 3: John McLevey (University of Waterloo), “Democracies in Crisis? Online Deception, Disinformation and Political Polarization in Comparative Perspective”
Unless otherwise specified, all seminars in this series will take place on Tuesdays from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in 203 Bethune College (Norman’s).
Further details will appear in YFile prior to each talk, and the lineup for Winter 2019 will be released at a later date. This series is sponsored by York University’s Department of Science & Technology Studies, Faculty of Science, and co-ordinated by members of the department. For more information about the Research Seminar Series in Science & Technology Studies, contact Professor Conor Douglas at cd512@yorku.ca or visit sts.info.yorku.ca/seminar-series.
York professor awarded residential fellowship at Oslo’s Centre for Advanced Study
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Professor Hélène Mialet in the Department of Science & Technology Studies, Faculty of Science, is currently in Oslo, Norway, where she received a residential fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science & Letters for the fall of 2019.
The Centre of Advanced Study provides its Fellows with uninterrupted time to further their research. Each year, the Centre hosts three research groups working on different projects in the fields of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.
Each project receives a grant from the Norwegian Ministry of Education & Research. These resources will facilitate Mialet’s work on her current book project involving the management of Type 1 diabetes.
She is studying three different groups, which are working on different technologies, including: biohackers who are trying to produce a more affordable insulin and destabilize the current definition of what it means to do science; hackers who are producing an artificial pancreas; and a facility that trains therapeutic dogs capable of recognizing hypoglycemic episodes.
The notion of translation is at the core of her project, which she says moves between artificial, human and animal intelligence, counterculture movements and official science, bioengineering and natural evolution. “As such, it is at the intersection of disciplines such as animal studies, artificial intelligence, philosophy, anthropology, and science and technology studies,” said Mialet.
The “Body in Translation: Historicizing and Reinventing Medical Humanities and Knowledge Translations” program focuses on interdisciplinary research and collaboration among academics and professionals from different fields to explore ideas and practices of translation in medicine and the humanities, as does Mialet’s work.
As a philosopher and anthropologist of science, Mialet has written several books, including Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawkingand the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
“Collaborating with scholars in the humanities and social sciences and medical professionals around this notion will not only enrich my project,” said Mialet, “but also help me explore the possibilities of ‘translating’ this unusual collaboration to York.”
Welcome to YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2019, part two
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Welcome to YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2019, part two. In this special issue, YFile introduces new faculty members joining the York University community and highlights those with new appointments.
The New Faces Feature Issue 2019 will run in two parts: part one on Friday, Sept. 13 and part two on Friday, Sept. 27.
In this issue, YFile welcomes new faculty members in the Lassonde School of Engineering; the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies; the Schulich School of Business; and the Faculty of Science.
New Faces was conceived, developed and edited by Ashley Goodfellow Craig, YFile’s deputy editor, with support provided by Lindsay MacAdam, communications officer, and Jenny Pitt-Clark, YFile editor.
Fifteen new faculty members bring expertise to Faculty of Science
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This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2019, part two (see part one here). Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments.
Fifteen new faculty members will join the Faculty of Science this academic year in the departments of Biology, Chemistry, Physics & Astronomy, Mathematics & Statistics, and Science & Technology Studies.
The new faculty members will boost the Faculty with their expertise and enthusiasm, and provide even better learning experiences and opportunities for students.
“It is an exciting time in the Faculty of Science and I welcome our new faculty members,” said Interim Dean of Science EJ Janse van Rensburg. “Not only do we have a robust and intensive research community here at the Faculty of Science, we also strive for teaching excellence by continuing to recruit highly qualified candidates to our teaching stream. Our new colleagues will help the Faculty of Science to excel even further in research and teaching.”
Nassim Bozorgnia
Nassim Bozorgnia
Nassim Bozorgnia joins the Department of Physics & Astronomy as an assistant professor. Her research is focused on dark matter phenomenology, and more specifically on developing various strategies to significantly improve our knowledge of the dark matter distribution in our galaxy.
Understanding the nature and distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way is a fundamental problem in astroparticle physics, and has important implications for attempts at discovering dark matter. Bozorgnia has studied the impact of astrophysical and particle physics uncertainties on dark matter searches using various approaches. In particular, she has extracted the dark matter distribution of Milky Way-like galaxies from cosmological simulations, and studied their implications for dark matter direct and indirect detection. More recently, she has studied the interaction of dark matter subhalos with stellar streams. Analyzing the features induced by these interactions in stellar streams can provide important information on the particle nature of dark matter. The scope of Bozorgnia’s research interests also includes tackling other open problems in dark matter phenomenology, as well as exploring different topics in astroparticle physics.
Bozorgnia obtained her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2012. She has held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, at the University of Amsterdam and at Durham University.
Claire David
Claire David
Claire David joins the Department of Physics & Astronomy as an assistant professor. She is jointly appointed as scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) to work on the future international science project in particle physics called the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).
Neutrinos are the most abundant particles yet very difficult to detect. Studying the elusive neutrino is key to understanding how the whole universe is structured. David plans to contribute to the calibration program of DUNE as well as the data acquisition system of the detector. The challenge is to make it sensitive to both high-energy neutrinos from the beam generated at Fermilab and also from cosmological events such as supernova, where neutrinos coming from these exploding stars reach us at lower energy.
Prior to coming to York, David first completed a master of engineering in applied physics at INSA Toulouse in France, specializing in nanophysics and instrumentation. She then obtained a PhD in particle physics from the University of Victoria, working in the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider. She has continued working with ATLAS as a postdoctoral Fellow at DESY in Hamburg, Germany. David contributed to the discovery of a rare production mode of the Higgs boson that can unveil unknown physics beyond the current theory. In parallel, she has worked in detector design and construction to upgrade the ATLAS experiment. While starting the newborn DUNE-Canada group with Deborah Harris on neutrino physics, David will continue her activities on collider physics within the local ATLAS team at York University.
Deborah Harris
Deborah Harris
Deborah Harris joins the Department of Physics & Astronomy as a professor and senior scientist in a joint hire between York University and Fermilab in the U.S.
Harris aims to understand neutrinos, tiny neutral particles that weigh almost nothing and almost never interact, but could be the reason that the universe is dominated by matter and not simply light. Harris works on DUNE, a new cutting-edge neutrino experiment based in the U.S. that will send neutrinos 1,300 kilometres through the Earth and study how much they change from one kind to another in the intervening time. DUNE will be built using the lessons learned from the current round of experiments, and Harris will continue her research on how neutrinos interact in matter and how they change over time using data from two different neutrino experiments, MINERvA in the U.S. and T2K in Japan.
Harris received her PhD in high-energy physics from the University of Chicago in 1994. As a research associate at the University of Rochester, she used high-energy neutrinos to better understand the weak force. In 1999, she joined the staff of Fermilab, but focused on lower energy neutrinos to better understand neutrinos themselves – how they change over time, and how they interact. She has served as the scientific co-spokesperson of the MINERvA experiment since 2010.
Elaina Hyde
Elaina Hyde
Elaina Hyde will join the Department of Physics & Astronomy as an assistant professor. Her research “in and above the cloud” combines astrophysics, data science, cloud computing, planetary sciences, optical engineering, telescope operations and telescope observations. Her current favorite programming languages are Python, C, R and SQL.
Hyde’s research focus is galactic archeology and data science for astrophysics. While gathering data, she has worked with instrumentation and telescopes across the world. Her experience with optical telescopes will allow her to provide technical leadership for York University’s Allan I. Carswell Observatory. Furthermore, she will assist the observatory operations and co-ordination.
A key motivation for Hyde is the promotion of astronomy education and research through public telescope activities and exploration. As a lecturer, trainer and consultant, she is constantly innovating teaching methodologies for interdisciplinary audiences across the sciences, as well as for businesses, students and the general public.
Prior to starting at York, Hyde went from the University of Arizona to a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, a master’s in the Netherlands and a PhD at Macquarie University in Australia. This was followed by positions as research support astronomer, international telescope support office information officer and instructor, as well as private-sector roles as trainer and consultant in data science, and work as a certified Google Cloud trainer and Google Cloud engineer.
Christopher Jang
Christopher Jang
Christopher Jang joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor. He completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where he studied the novel mechanisms viruses use to hijack and control the protein synthesis machinery of their hosts. His postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania was an organic extension of his doctoral work, and was focused on the genome-wide regulation of protein synthesis in the context of human circadian rhythms.
Throughout his career, Jang has been passionate about biology education and has held teaching appointments as a visiting assistant professor at Haverford College and as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, he was involved in the development and assessment of an introductory course-based undergraduate research program that consisted of a metagenomic analysis of the campus urban microbiome. He hopes to continue developing these types of scalable experiential programs in biology at York.
Currently, Jang’s other research interests include the metacognitive regulation of study behaviour and its manipulation, and the development of community-based education programs in undergraduate biology.
Jude Kong
Jude Kong
Jude Dzevela Kong joins the Department of Mathematics & Statistics as an assistant professor. His area of research is mathematical biology, with a focus in spatial ecology and infectious diseases. More precisely, he is interested in formulating and analyzing models for the spatiotemporal dynamics of species on the move, the dynamics of phytoplankton and bacteria in marine water, and the dynamics of microbes vis-à-vis environmental and human health.
Kong earned a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Alberta in 2017, and was a Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council (NSERC) postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University and the Center for Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University from 2017 to 2019.
Kong is enthusiastic about big data, using his research to inform decision makers, teaching and bringing mathematics to underrepresented communities. He loves dancing, cooking and eating good food, and gardening.
Nikola Kovinich
Nikola Kovinich
Nikola Kovinich received his PhD in 2011 from Carleton University in Ottawa. His PhD research focused on understanding the genetics and biochemistry of specialized metabolite biosynthesis in the seed coat of medicinal black soybean, and on engineering soybean metabolism to produce a visible colour marker that could be used to identify genetically modified grains.
His postdoctoral studies at Ohio State University in the U.S. focused on understanding the fundamental processes of metabolite transport in plants. In 2012, Kovinich was awarded a Pelotonia Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate his novel approach for producing derivatives of natural anticancer drugs using a combination of semi-synthesis and metabolic engineering. In July of 2015, he was hired by West Virginia University at the rank of assistant professor to research the genetics of plant metabolic responses to stress. He taught undergraduate- and graduate-level molecular genetics courses. Kovinich joins York University to continue researching gene regulatory networks that control plant metabolism and to teach undergraduate and graduate biology students.
Kovinich was nominated for awards in mentoring undergraduates in research at Ohio State and West Virginia universities, and was recently selected to receive National Institutes of Health funding for training undergraduate students in molecular genetics research.
Robin Marushia
Robin Marushia
Robin Marushia joins the Division of Natural Sciences in the Department of Science & Technology as an assistant professor. Marushia is a plant invasion ecologist with a background in both theoretical and applied ecological research. She earned a BA in biology and a certification in secondary education at Gonzaga University, where she acquired her holistic, liberal arts approach to higher education. Marushia went on to earn an MSc in plant biology and a PhD in plant sciences from the University of California, Riverside, investigating a range of invasive plant traits, patterns and processes in arid California ecosystems.
She also completed an NSF Fellowship quantifying the trait patterns of invasive versus noninvasive Brassicaceae species in New Zealand. Marushia then completed a postdoc at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC), focusing on plant community dynamics via the Nutrient Network, a global research co-operative, and studied patterns of invasion in stressful ecosystems. She transitioned to public outreach and education as the associate director of the Koffler Scientific Reserve, and to developing student-centred learning experiences and as a lecturer at UTSC, Seneca College, University of Toronto Mississauga and Arizona State University.
Currently, her pedagogical interests include bringing natural history and experiential learning to the university classroom, and engaging urban students with nature right here in Toronto. Marushia is looking forward to joining the Division of Natural Sciences and the York University community, and creating field course opportunities for non-science students.
Andrew McEachern
Andrew McEachern
Andrew McEachern joins the Department of Mathematics & Statistics as an assistant professor. He completed his PhD in applied mathematics at the University of Guelph in 2013, working on a project sorting DNA sequences. He most recently worked as a limited-term assistant teaching professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
McEachern is interested in making large classes seem small through the use of active learning techniques and bringing online resources into the classroom. He is also interested in the transition from secondary to tertiary education, as well as using game theory as part of the education process. He is an avid participant in outreach at every level and will be starting a popular mathematics column at York. He has also supervised undergraduate students on projects in mathematical biology.
Tihana Mirkovic
Tihana Mirkovic
Tihana Mirkovic joined the Department of Chemistry in July 2019 as an assistant professor. She received a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Toronto, where her interdisciplinary research encompassed the development of nanomaterials and studies of photophysical and dynamical aspects of nanoscale systems. Since graduation, she has effectively balanced research, teaching and administrative positions at the University of Toronto. As a postdoctoral Fellow and research associate, she worked on elucidating the principles of light harvesting in photosynthesis. Parallel to her work in the lab, Mirkovic has taught large undergraduate classes to science and engineering students as a sessional lecturer. More recently, she worked at the Impact Centre at the University of Toronto, where she focused on facilitating the development of educational programs aimed at bridging the gap between academia and industry. She combined her two passions, data science and education, and has completed a number of data-driven studies aimed at elucidating career paths of scientists and the landscape of entrepreneurship and innovation education at Canadian universities.
Her interest in education spans beyond the classroom, as she has been involved in a number of outreach programs, most notably as a senior mentor for the Canadian Chemistry Olympiad and as a volunteer for Pueblo Science, a non-profit organization aiming to increase science literacy in developing countries. At York, Mirkovic plans to develop theme-based frameworks integrating interdisciplinary projects and experiential learning activities into the chemistry curriculum in order to synergistically enhance students’ technical and professional skills and prepare them for careers in research or industry.
Saeed Rastgoo
Saeed Rastgoo
Saeed Rastgoo joins the Department of Physics & Astronomy as a full-time sessional assistant professor. His research focuses on an interconnection between quantum gravity, black holes and the fine structure of space-time on both fundamental and phenomenological levels.
Many of the present problems in fundamental physics are associated to a regime where both gravitational and quantum effects are significant. This is the realm of quantum gravity, a theory that is not yet fully developed. Rastgoo has been working on the development of nonperturbative approaches to quantum gravity, as well as studying quantum black holes. He has studied the interior and the full space-time of quantum black holes, including their singularities, horizons and interaction with matter fields. Furthermore, by analyzing the propagation of gamma ray bursts on cosmological quantum space-time, he has derived phenomenological bounds on the scale of quantum gravity. He is currently working on a hybrid approach to the quantization of black holes, which includes all the backreaction effects between gravity and matter fields. He is also involved in developing models that consider space-time as an emergent phenomena using a variety of techniques, including renormalization methods as well as Mandelstam’s approach.
Rastgoo obtained his PhD from Universidad de la Republica in Uruguay in 2012, and has held postdoctoral positions at UNAM and Universidad Autonoma Metrpolitana in Mexico. Prior to coming to York University, he was an assistant professor of physics at the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico.
Sandra Rehan
Sandra Rehan
Sandra Rehan joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor with a research focus in evolutionary ecology. Rehan received her PhD (biology) from Brock University, with a focus on behavioural ecology and population genetics. Her PhD was co-supervised at Flinders University of South Australia, where she studied life history evolution and molecular phylogenetics. Subsequently, she conducted a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. After her PhD, Rehan became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, where she focused on behavioural genomics. In 2013, she joined the University of New Hampshire as an assistant professor of genome-enabled biology, where she developed genomes and characterized microbiomes for native bees.
Rehan’s research focuses on sustaining native bee populations through a combination of landscape ecology and comparative genomic and sociodemographic approaches. Her research combines a passion for the fundamental biology of bees with the need for applied conservation. More recently, Rehan has been researching bee holobionts, with a particular interest in understanding the interplay of nutritional ecology and social environment on bee health.
Rehan has received several awards, including grants from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, and the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research. She was recently named a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society in London, U.K.
Birgit Schwarz
Birgit Schwarz
Birgit Schwarz joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor with a secondment in the Division of Natural Science.
She completed her PhD in biology in 2016 at Simon Fraser University (SFU), where she studied migratory connectivity and communication in a small shorebird, the western sandpiper. While completing her PhD, Schwarz’s interest in teaching and in pedagogical research intensified and she participated in several Teaching & Learning Development Grant projects.
Her postdoctoral research at the Institute for the Study of Teaching & Learning in the Disciplines at SFU examined the experiences of instructors with the implementation of flipped classrooms. As a sessional instructor, Schwarz taught evolution and behavioural ecology courses at SFU, as well as several block courses at Quest University in Squamish, B.C.
Trevor VandenBoer
Trevor VandenBoer
Trevor VandenBoer joins the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor in analytical and environmental chemistry. His research involves the development of instrumentation to probe the atmospheric chemistry of reactive nitrogen species. Emissions of reactive nitrogen have perturbed the global nitrogen cycle to unprecedented levels. These chemicals are introduced to the environment by human transportation, agricultural and industrial activities. His work focuses on the impacts of these compounds on indoor and outdoor air quality, with an emphasis on the role of exchange at interfaces. VandenBoer’s research program is currently funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Environment & Climate Change Canada.
VandenBoer completed a PhD in environmental and atmospheric chemistry at the University of Toronto, focusing on the quantitation and atmospheric chemistry of alkyl amines and nitrous acid at a variety of national and international field locations, including an NSERC-supported exchange at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. He then held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Memorial University in St. John’s, N.L., where he quantified the exchange of reactive nitrogen at the biosphere-atmosphere interface across a latitudinal transect of boreal forest sites.
Tao (Toby) Zeng
Tao (Toby) Zeng
Tao (Toby) Zeng joins the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor. Zeng received his PhD under the supervision of Professor Mariusz Klobukowski at the University of Alberta in 2011.
He then did his NSERC and MRI-Ontario postdoctoral research with Professor Pierre-Nicholas Roy at the University of Waterloo (2011-13), and held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship with Professor Nandini Ananth and Professor Roald Hoffmann at Cornell University (2013-15). He joined Carleton University as an assistant professor in 2015 and moved to York University in 2019.
His research interest lies in theoretical studies of organic optoelectronic processes, vibronic coupling, Jahn-Teller and pseudo-Jahn-Teller effects, relativistic effects in chemistry and microscopic superfluidity.
Revised: Two science communicators in residence join Faculty of Science
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YFile note: On Oct. 1, Alison Motluk informed the Faculty of Science that she would not be able to fulfill her role as a science communicator in residence. The story has been altered to reflect this change.
The Faculty of Science welcomes three two new science communicators in residence this academic year – B.D. Colen, Alison Motluk and Patchen Barss. Each will bring experience covering a wide range of relevant and globally significant science topics for major publications, documentaries, broadcast and through photography. This is the third year of the highly successful program, which has attracted top science journalists and communicators, and garnered applications from across the globe.
Although Colen was part of last year’s candidate search, he started his Faculty of Science residency this September and will be on campus once a week, usually on Wednesdays. Motluk will join the Faculty of Science for eight weeks beginning Oct. 28 and continuing until Dec. 20. Barss’ 10-week residency starts Jan. 6, 2020, and runs to March 13 (Barss will be on campus five days a week).
“We are excited to have such highly regarded journalists and communicators embedded in our Faculty,” says Interim Dean EJ Janse van Rensburg. “It is a great opportunity for our faculty members and students to have such high-calibre candidates as a resource to learn how to better communicate their research to the public. At the same time, I hope B.D., Alison and Patchen will enjoy their time here digging deep into ongoing research that piques their interest and engaging with our researchers and students.”
The goal of the program is to help promote excellence in science-related communications.
Patchen Barss
Barss tells stories about emerging multidisciplinary research. He has written, edited and produced material for television, magazines and newspapers, as well as for universities, museums, research institutes and public outreach campaigns. He most commonly writes about cosmology, artificial intelligence, genetics, the relationship between math and nature, and similar meaty topics.
“I’m interested in messy, process-based, incremental research more than headline-grabbing breakthroughs,” he says. “The York science communicator residency is a rare opportunity to watch scientists at work over time, pursuing questions they are most curious about, and whose answers tend to be complex and elusive. These are the stories I like to tell.”
Barss has worked for the BBC, CBC, the Discovery Channel and TVO; Scientific American, Nautilus, The Walrus and the National Post; the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Council of Ontario Universities. His children’s book, Flow Spin Grow: Looking for Patterns in Nature, came out in 2018 from Owlkids Books.
Working with cultural consulting firm Lord Cultural Resources, Barss has developed content and strategy for the Perlan Museum of Natural Wonders in Reykjavik and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, as well as for many other science, children’s and general interest museums.
He also works as a research communications trainer, helping scientists connect more effectively with media, policy makers, donors and the general public.
B.D. Colen
B.D. Colen
“Improving public understanding of, and respect for, the sciences and scientists is literally essential for humankind’s continued survival,” says Colen. “I look forward to working with York’s researchers and students to help them find ways to communicate with an increasingly skeptical public.”
Between his years as a reporter, editor and columnist for the Washington Post and Newsday, and his years in academic and corporate public affairs, Colen, a Pulitzer Prize recipient, has 40 years of experience in science and medical communications. He taught science feature writing, news writing and documentary photography for 19 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and covered subjects ranging from the early years of the HIV-AIDS epidemic to bioethical issues surrounding death and dying and the care of premature infants. In his public affairs career, he was at various points the media affairs director for Harvard Medical School, communications director of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and, for 11 years, director of communications for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Harvard University’s senior communications officer for university science. Now a permanent resident of Canada, living in London, Ont., Colen is the author of 10 published books, all on medically related subjects, including Born At Risk; O.R.: The True Story of 24 hours in a Hospital Operating Room; Mr. King, You’re Having A Heart Attack (with Larry King); and Hard Choices: Mixed Blessings of Modern Medical Technology.
And with all of that, Colen says his first and greatest love has always been photography, which he began professionally by photographing the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for a weekly newspaper five days after he turned 17.
