Professor Radu Guiasu of Glendon’s Environmental & Health Studies Program organized a special session titled “Historical, sociological and biological aspects of invasion biology” at the prestigious American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) 2013 Conference, which took place in April at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto.
Guiasu and Glendon student Jane Duggan also presented research papers in this session, which offered a more inclusive view of introduced species and their roles in local ecosystems. The session also included presentations by top researchers in the field – Professor Mark Davis, of Macalester College in Minnesota, and Professor Brendon Larson from the University of Waterloo. The session was chaired by Professor Laura Cameron from Queen’s University.
From left, Laura Cameron, Brendon Larson, Mark Davis, Jane Duggan and Professor Radu Guiasu at the ASEH 2013 conference
Professor Colin Coates, of the Multidisciplinary Studies Department at Glendon, and the director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, was the chair of the local arrangements committee for the ASEH 2013 conference.
Duggan will be graduating this spring completing a degree in the Environmental & Health Studies Program at Glendon. She has recently finished an individual studies research project under the supervision of Guiasu. Duggan will continue her studies as a graduate student in the Master of Environmental Studies Program in the Faculties of Graduate Studies and Environmental Studies at York University.
Guiasu, a winner of the President’s University-Wide Teaching Award at York in 2010 and the Principal’s Teaching Excellence Award at Glendon in 2009, is a biologist who has conducted research for many years in the fields of ecology, conservation biology and evolutionary biology. He has published 30 scientific articles and one book, Entropy in Ecology and Ethology (2003), which he co-authored with his father, Professor Emeritus Silviu Guiasu from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at York University.
Guiasu is currently working on a book that will present a balanced and nuanced view of invasive species.