ASPIRE is a special edition of YFile publishing on select Fridays during the academic year. It showcases research and innovation at York University. ASPIRE offers compelling and accessible stories about the world-leading and policy-relevant work of changemakers in all Faculties and professional schools across York and encompasses both discovery and applied research.
In this issue:
Meet York University’s latest commercialization Fellows Four budding researchers completed York University’s Commercialization Fellowship program, which enables them to develop their academic research into a commercially viable product.
Meet York University’s latest commercialization Fellows
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By Corey Allen, senior manager, research communications
Four budding researchers completed York University’s Commercialization Fellowship program – now in its second year – at the end of April.
The Commercialization Fellowship program is funded by the innovation arm of the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation at York. The program runs from January to April and provides graduate students and postdoctoral Fellows support and assistance to develop their academic research into a commercially viable product.
The Fellows receive $7,500 as stipend, with a quarter of the funds earmarked for research activities like prototype testing, proof of concept projects, or validation studies. They also participate in workshops and seminars that focus on various topics related to commercialization, including design thinking, intellectual property, licensing, and partnerships. Additionally, Fellows work at and receive advice on patent searching, industry outreach, and pitching.
“The fellowship provides a valuable opportunity to support and train the next generation of innovators and supports them on their entrepreneurial journey,” said Suraj Shah, associate director, commercialization and strategic partnerships.
Aspire spoke with the four Fellows about the fellowship program and their products.
Kajanan Kanathipan
Kajanan Kanathipan, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Project title: Modular single-stage step-up photovoltaic (PV) converter with integrated power balancing feature
Kanathipan’s doctoral research focuses on the development of new extraction techniques for renewable energy, particularly solar power. Solar energy can be tricky to harness for power due to varying atmospheric conditions, like cloud cover.
Kanathipan is determined to find a way to circumvent this issue and build a device that not only streamlines the conversion process, but can maximize power extraction under all operating conditions.
Solar energy starts with sunlight, which is made up of photons. Photovoltaic (PV) panels convert the sunlight into electrical currents. This is then converted to electricity that supplies power for machines, homes and buildings to run on. It’s a two-step process involving different converters.
Kanathipan’s idea would reduce the power conversion to a single step, using the same converter. This converter would also be able to better balance and store power from the PV panels to not stress or drain one converter more than the others.
The invention would allow the entire conversion system to safely operate under different weather conditions. This would reduce equipment costs and produce a greater amount of energy for PV plants.
“We are looking to design and control photovoltaic conversion well enough that it provides an innovative solution in the solar technology industry,” says Kanathipan, who works out of the Advanced Power Electronics Laboratory for Sustainable Energy Research (PELSER) and is supervised by John Lam, associate professor at the Lassonde School of Engineering.
Kanathipan says the fellowship program has provided education and training not found in the lab, like the workshops on how to protect your intellectual property, build business partnerships, or how to determine a potential customer.
Right now, Kanathipan is working on a scaled down prototype, a key component of his dissertation.
Kanathipan is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering.
Stephanie Cheung
Stephanie Cheung, Faculty of Education Project title: VoteBetter
Cheung created the VoteBetter app, a SaaS (software as a service) product, which aims to drive civic engagement in student politics. The application operates as a virtual election space for post-secondary student constituents, candidates and incumbents, and provides a central source for locating, contributing to and comparing campaign priorities. Users can view candidates’ profiles, submit questions, and view, rank and comment on crowd-sourced campus issues. Once the election is over, the app tracks the campaign promises of elected representatives and serves as a community forum.
Under the supervision of Natalia Balyasnikova, assistant professor in the Faculty of Education, Cheung’s master’s research examines contemporary trends in political participation on diverse campuses in the Greater Toronto Area and explores how undergraduate student election voter engagement and turnout might be improved. The idea for the app was inspired by her research and Cheung’s own experience in student politics, in addition to a former role as a public servant with the provincial government.
“VoteBetter can be used as a tool for students to deepen dialogue and focus more on the substantive issues their communities face than surface-level politics,” Cheung says. “Student groups can wield hefty budgets and their constituents deserve well-informed leaders who understand pertinent issues and are equipped to pursue sustainable change.”
Cheung says the fellowship program has offered structure and guidance as she works through her research and development phase. She says she is interested in the commercialization of her master’s research not for profit, but to extend the impact of her academic work.
“I am often asking myself how research can live off the page,” she says. “And I’m interested in my work facilitating opportunities for co-constructing knowledge and bridging theory to practice.”
Currently, Cheung’s VoteBetter app is being validated with end users.
Cheung is a part-time master’s student in the Faculty of Education and full-time staff at York where she works as manager, student success and stakeholder engagement at Calumet and Stong Colleges in the Faculty of Health.
Mehran Sepah Mansoor
Mehran Sepah Mansoor, Mechanical Engineering Project title: A method of fabricating one-dimensional photonic crystal optical filters
Mansoor works out of York University’s Advanced Materials for Sustainable Energy Technologies Laboratory. His research at the AM-SET Lab has led to him inventing a novel fabrication method for a photonic crystal optical filter, which can transmit sunlight over a broad range of wavelengths.
Mansoor, under the supervision of AM-SET Lab’s founder Paul G. O’Brian at the Lassonde School of Engineering, believes the invention could have several applications, but it could be particularly useful to improve thermal energy storage systems, particularly those that store solar thermal energy.
Thermal energy storage involves preventing losses via heat conduction, convection, and radiation. Mansoor’s photonic crystal filter more effectively controls solar radiation and thermal losses simultaneously and can transmit sunlight to be absorbed and converted to heat in a thermal storage medium.
The filter can also reflect radiative heat from the medium, which has longer wavelengths than sunlight, minimizing heat losses. The stored energy can then act as a power source later when sunlight is no longer available.
“The innovation is the way the materials in the photonic crystal filters have been fabricated and the treatment applied to them to achieve the optical properties needed to refract or bend light in a desired manner, as well as the way we have been able to stack all of the materials together,” said Mansoor. “Our method eliminates unwanted energy absorption in the photonic crystal while improving the energy transmission of the filter.”
Mansoor cites the program’s design thinking workshop as a highlight of his time as a Fellow. He says the fellowship also provided him a greater understanding of how to patent technology. This invention marks his first patent.
So far, Mansoor has completed simulations of the invention and has some preliminary results. He is in the early stages of creating a prototype.
Mansoor is a second-year master’s student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering.
Abbas Panahi
Abbas Panahi, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Project title: A novel portable platform based on field-effect transistor integrated with microfluidics for biosensing applications
Panahi’s academic work studying biosensors – a device to detect and target molecules – grew stronger after a PhD internship at Mitacs. Now in his fourth year as a PhD student and under the supervision of Professor Ebrahim Ghafar-Zadeh at the Lassonde School of Engineering, Panahi has invented a new biosensing platform that can detect disease.
The platform uses sensor technology that can be used on a portable device, like a smartphone, to analyze the specific concentration of RNA or any biomarker in a saliva sample.
“This technology has huge potential for medical application,” Panahi says. “The device could be used in hospitals for non-expert users to run clinical tests and help detect viruses quickly and easily.”
The portable sensor was developed entirely at York University’s Biologically Inspired Sensors and Actuators (BioSA) Laboratory – from the testing and modelling, to all the engineering – by a team of students and research associates under the direction, guidance and conceptualization of Ghafar-Zadeh. The development process involved a variety of tasks, including in-house testing, modelling and engineering design.
For Panahi, the fellowship program gave him a complete education for what it takes to start a science-based venture. He says the fellowship allowed him to fully consider every aspect of the commercialization process and develop a strong business model. He also says the program’s teachings on how to match the technology with market needs was invaluable.
Currently, Panahi is working on technology market matching, and readying the device to undergo clinical tests in the next year.
Panahi is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering.
York receives $300K from provincial agency to advance research commercialization
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By Corey Allen, senior manager, research communications
Commercialization efforts for York University research have received a $300,000 boost in funding from Intellectual Property Ontario (IPON).
The new funding will support the Office of the Vice-President Research and Innovation and the IP Innovation Clinic at York University to enhance its intellectual property and commercialization services to York researchers and their partners, particularly for increasing research outputs related to artificial intelligence, automotive and medical technology.
Jennifer MacLean
“With IPON’s financial backing, we will be able to streamline and develop a full-service IP and commercialization pathway for our faculty, students and our partners, and strengthen York’s pursuit of licensing and research partnership opportunities,” said Jennifer MacLean, assistant vice-president of innovation and research partnerships. “Our goal is to triple the number of disclosures and double the number of patents filed by York students and faculty per year, while supporting licensing and partnerships that move York’s great ideas forward.”
The fund will help create two new staff positions – an assistant director for the IP Innovation Clinic and a business development and commercialization manager for OVPRI – and increase business and commercialization impact for IP holders in Ontario.
“This investment is just one example of how IPON is supporting our province’s postsecondary institutions and innovators, by providing them with the funding, tools, knowledge and connections they need to harness the value of their IP,” said Jill Dunlop, minister of colleges and universities. “Initiatives like this are helping our province’s innovators benefit from IPON’s expertise and ensuring the economic and commercial benefits of home-grown innovation remain right here in Ontario.”
Commercialization of research outputs can mean bringing a new product or service to the market. An invention by a researcher can solve a problem faced by consumers or businesses or help make life easier or more efficient. Commercialization can also extend the positive reach and impact University research has on society by driving revenue growth through sustained market opportunities.
Pina D’Agostino with an AI robot
“The IPON funds will be invaluable to help scale the many successes of the IP Innovation Clinic working with Ontario’s startups,” said Pina D’Agostino, associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and the founder of the IP Innovation Clinic. “With these resources we can serve many more clients who do not have money to pay for expensive legal fees. We are also able to train many more law students to be IP and business savvy to protect key assets in the disruptive tech economy.”
York is among 10 universities and colleges in Ontario to receive funding as part of the provincial agency’s pilot project to strengthen Ontario’s knowledge economy.
New organized research unit focused on water issues rides wave of early success, impact
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By Corey Allen, senior manager, research communications
OneWATER, a new organized research unit (ORU) at York University, is in its infancy but is already driving positive change.
Launched last fall, OneWATER sent delegates to the United Nations in New York within its first few months of operating, where its members headlined a panel at the UN Water Conference. During the conference, OneWater announced its researchers will play a key role in the delivery of the Water Academy – a collaborative education program between York, several other academic institutions and UNITAR (United Nations Institute for Training and Research).
Sylvie Morin
“OneWATER was created to bring together water experts from all over campus as well as partners and communities and go beyond what we can accomplish as lone researchers,” says director Sylvie Morin, professor in the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science. “We didn’t anticipate this much momentum.”
OneWATER is an acronym that details the combined expertise of its members – W for water management, A for artificial intelligence, T for technologies, E for education and sustainability and R for resource recovery and reuse.
Initially proposed as an ORU by Satinder Brar, professor and James and Joanne Love Chair in Environmental Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, Lassonde School of Engineering, OneWATER brings together York University’s experts on water-related issues in multiple disciplines across several Faculties and units.
From civil engineering to water governance to environmental justice and more, OneWATER is the central hub at York for leading water-related experts to unite, conduct interdisciplinary research and generate knowledge on pressing issues, like water security, flooding and sanitation. This work has the potential to significantly inform and influence public policy.
For Morin, OneWATER creates a platform for York researchers to tackle bigger questions that would otherwise be unable to be fully explored within a single department or Faculty.
“We have something very special here,” she says. “As a collective, OneWATER can conduct higher-level, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research at York, take a significant leading role in Canada and compete for more significant grants. As an ORU, we are also better positioned to work on larger-scale projects with international collaborators.”
This summer, Morin will begin work on her first project under OneWATER.
Morin, along with Stephanie Gora, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, and Yeuhyn Kim, a PhD candidate co-supervised by Morin and Gora, will develop new materials for sustainable wastewater treatment focusing on pesticides and pharmaceuticals.
Welcome to the December issue of ‘ASPIRE’
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“ASPIRE” is a special edition of YFile publishing on select Fridays during the academic year. It showcases research and innovation at York University. “ASPIRE” offers compelling and accessible stories about the world-leading and policy-relevant work of changemakers in all Faculties and professional schools across York and encompasses both discovery and applied research. “ASPIRE” replaces the previous special issue “Brainstorm.”
In this issue
The engine behind human gut microbiome analysis and data science As his career unfolds, biostatistician Kevin McGregor is becoming very familiar with the human gut microbiome. His work is particularly relevant given the human biome is a community of microorganisms that inhabit our bodies and appears to be linked to numerous health concerns, both physical and mental.
Black scholars form new interdisciplinary research cluster A group of professors affiliated in various ways with York University’s African Studies Program join forces to create a unique, interdisciplinary research cluster focusing on adaptive knowledge, response, recovery and resilience in transnational Black communities.
Career change bears fruit for artist/curator If School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design Assistant Professor Marissa Largo needs confirmation that becoming an academic was a wise career move, she can simply look at the two awards she won in November at the 2022 Galeries Ontario/Ontario Galleries Awards gala.
Cinema studies professor practises what he preaches School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design Assistant Professor Moussa Djigo believes that if he is going to teach production, he should understand the DNA of filmmaking.
Career change bears fruit for artist/curator
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By Elaine Smith
If Marissa Largo needs confirmation that becoming an academic was a wise career move, she can simply look at the two awards she won in November at the 2022 Galeries Ontario/Ontario Galleries Awards gala, celebrating the outstanding achievement, artistic merit and excellence of arts institutions and professionals in the public gallery sector.
After only one year at York, where she is an assistant professor of creative technologies in the School of Arts, Media, Performance & Design, Largo won the Exhibition Design and Installation (Budget over $20,000) award for her curatorial project at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham, Elusive Desires: Ness Lee + Florence Yee. Largo also took home the award for Curatorial Writing, Text Between 2,000 and 5,000 Words, for her essay about the show, “Elusive Desires: Queer Feminist Asian Diaspora and Suburban Possibilities.” She was also a finalist for Best Exhibition, Budget over $20,000 (Thematic).
Marissa Largo
“It is truly an honour to be recognized by my peers in public art galleries,” Largo remarks. “It is equally wonderful to do this critical curatorial work and to have it widely appreciated.
“Curatorial work is a form of research and York University has a capacious understanding of what knowledge production can be.”
Largo, an alumna of York’s undergraduate Visual Arts and Education programs, began her career as a secondary school art teacher over a decade ago. As one of the few teachers of Filipino descent in a school board with a large Filipino population, Largo had many questions about lack of representation in certain fields such as education and art. This prompted Largo to learn more about social justice, the topic she pursued for her PhD at the University of Toronto. She was considering whether to remain in the secondary school system when the pandemic hit.
“I thought it might be time to pivot in order to mentor other racialized leaders to become professors, artists, educators and curators so they may assert their presence in Canada,” she says. “Being at York University allows me to effect change on a grander scale.”
Prior to joining York University, Largo was an assistant professor at NSCAD University and a sessional instructor at OCAD University.
Largo’s research, her curatorial work and her art criticism focus largely on the Asian diaspora in Canada and its intersections with race, gender and settler colonialism. Her PhD thesis forms the basis for a forthcoming book Unsettling Imaginaries: Filipinx Contemporary Artists in Canada (University of Washington Press) examines the art and oral histories of four Filipinx artists who are asserting their presence in Canada and pushing back against colonialism with their work.
“The Filipinx artists of my study offer radically different alternatives to national belonging,” Largo says.
She appreciated the juxtaposition of curating a show of Asian diasporic artists in a gallery named for Frederick Varley, a member of the Group of Seven.
“Unionville, where the Varley is situated, celebrates its settler heritage through its preserved Victorian style architecture,” Largo says. “Differences of race, class, and gender are obscured to promote a quaint, picture-perfect milieu. The artists of Elusive Desires not only point to the omissions in the Canadian cultural archive, but they create a space for belonging in this context.”
From left: Pictured at the 2022 GOG Awards are Marissa Largo, Anik Glaude (curator of the Varley); artists Lan Yee and Ness Lee; Director of the Varley Niamh O’Laoghaire and artist Annie Wong
Meanwhile, Largo is successfully carving out her own space for belonging at York. This past summer, she curated an exhibition titled X Marks the Spot: Filipinx Futurities at the Gales Gallery on the Keele Campus. She paired three established Filipinx artists with three emerging Filipinx artists, including two York students.
“Their work connected and diverged in compelling ways, which guided my curation,” Largo says. “These partnerships also acted as a method of mentorship. I am thrilled to mentor the next generation of Asian diasporic scholars and artists, so our knowledges, cultures, and histories may be recognized for their importance and vitality.”
Cinema studies professor practises what he preaches
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By Elaine Smith
Assistant Professor Moussa Djigo believes that if he is going to teach production, he should understand the DNA of filmmaking.
Although Djigo has a scholarly book in the works, this assistant professor of film production in the School of Arts, Media, Performance & Design is focusing most of his creative energies on making his own films.
“My research is doing what I teach,” he says.
Djigo has written, directed and produced two feature-length fiction films to date: Obamas (2015) and Rosalie (2018). They have won 20 awards on the film festival circuit between them, screened at venues worldwide and aired on TFO (a Canadian French language educational television channel).
Moussa Djigo
“I usually take about three years to complete a feature film from the time we begin shooting,” he notes.
Obamas, written shortly after Djigo moved to Montreal from France, is his response to a debate taking place about Quebec cinema at the time about whether films actually reflected life in Montreal. He addressed the primacy of race in judging people by creating two main characters who are each played by three actors of different backgrounds and ethnic groups.
“It’s a philosophical take on identity,” says Djigo. “It shows how people stick to rigid ideas that aren’t so true; we tend to just repeat what we have been told about ourselves without questioning the validity of it.
“People [in the film] may be judged based on how they appear on the outside, even though their character is the same. It could be anyone meeting anyone. Faces don’t tell anything about territory any more. We are a country made predominantly of immigrants and the idea about where you are from becomes more and more complicated.”
Rosalie takes a poke at the romantic comedy genre by doing an autopsy of a failed relationship instead of promising a successful one.
“Usually, in a romantic comedy, the woman gets a man, has kids and lives happily ever after,” Djigo says. “You create something that doesn’t exist in real life to make people dream. In Rosalie, the dream is a thing of the past while the present is a nightmare.
“In an era where personal freedom is conquered, many seem not to be happy in their love life; freedom doesn’t seem to solve things for us. Maybe love has a lifespan if you disregard the old rules. How depressing.”
Djigo has a third film in the works, one that he hopes to have ready in the spring for the upcoming festival season. It’s his most personal film yet, a meditation on fatherhood that is a tribute to his own father who passed away last year. Djigo and friend and colleague York AMPD Assistant Professor of film, Manfred Becker, who acted as his cinematographer, made a trip this summer to the village in Senegal where he grew up and shot the film on site.
“It’s about every father who wants to be there for his children,” Djigo says. “I wanted to take my art back to the village where I grew up, and it was very nice to involve people there.”
The film features a couple of actors with theatre experience, but most of the participants are non-professional locals (farmers, fishermen or shepherds), including his mother.
“I think I’ll do that again,” Djigo says. “Untrained actors don’t overthink their performances; they have nothing at stake. They are just there to have fun.
“The sky is the limit if you create trust with your cast and, as director, establish a family-like relationship. It’s the vibe I try to create. I tell them: ‘Go ahead and look extremely silly if you want’; it takes away the pressure. If they’re not thinking about you judging them and they know they’re allowed to fail, then they succeed.
“It will probably be my best film yet. But that’s what I say after every shoot.”
The engine behind human gut microbiome analysis and data science
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By Elaine Smith
As his career unfolds, biostatistician Kevin McGregor is becoming very familiar with the human gut microbiome. His work is particularly relevant given the human biome is a community of microorganisms that inhabit our bodies and appears to be linked to numerous health concerns, both physical and mental.
McGregor, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the Faculty of Science, is a biostatistician who joined York University in 2021 after finishing his PhD at McGill University. He is part of the team involved in creating and teaching in the department’s new data science program, which makes its debut in 2023, but he is also involved in developing statistical models and associated software packages for understanding the makeup of the gut microbiome.
“My training is very quantitative, so I’m involved on the mathematical/statistical side,” says McGregor. “The microbiologists collect all the data and it’s my job to come up with the statistical methods to analyze it.”
Kevin McGregor
He might be involved in looking into one species of microorganism if it’s abundant and considered relevant to a particular disease, such as Crohn’s disease, or he might be exploring the interaction between various types of microbes in the overall network.
“Microorganisms don’t live independently; they may be symbiotic or competing for resources,” says McGregor. “We’re looking for correlations related to metabolic interactions. I usually develop a methodology for analysis and the accompanying software. The first step is more theoretical; then, I create a software package so the microbiologists can plug in the data and get answers.”
Most of the studies compare the genetic sequencing for the microbiomes of hundreds of individuals. Researchers are looking at the counts of various species of microorganisms that are present to see if the patterns align with specific diseases or biomarkers.
One of the challenges of analyzing microbiome data is that numerous zeroes appear to indicate that certain organisms have no presence in an individual’s microbiome. Sometimes, these are false negatives; the stool sample that was used to sequence the individual’s gut microbiome simply didn’t include a specific microbe.
“They are statistically difficult to deal with,” McGregor says. “It requires that I develop a statistical method that can look at the network patterns but get around this challenge.”
The programs that McGregor devises must determine what the probability is that any zero truly indicates the absence of that microbe. One of the methods he employs to weed out the false negatives is the zero-inflated logistic normal multinomial model.
Next comes the software development that allows him to “fit” the model: input real data and get an output. Genetic sequencing of the microbiome provides “tons of data,” says McGregor, and the models are complicated. The associated software can take “hours and hours to run” on a computer, so he looks for shortcuts, such as the variational Bayes method, a statistical tool that is computationally efficient. McGregor is currently supervising a postdoctoral fellow, Ismaïla Ba, PhD, who is working on this model.
McGregor says he loves the problem-solving aspect of his work, devising new models or improving existing ones. He also likes the real-world applications that his work makes possible and enjoys the opportunity to collaborate with researchers in a broad range of fields. He recently joined forces with Joseph De Souza, an assistant professor of systems neuroscience, to apply for grants that will allow them to examine microbiome data related to Parkinson’s disease. He’s also involved with the Integrated Microbiome Platforms for Advancing Causation Testing and Translation (IMPACTT) team, which is a multi-disciplinary microbiome research core across Canadian universities.
“My dream is to be viewed as having a positive impact on microbiome research, developing models and giving sound advice to researchers in the field,” McGregor says. “I’d also like to come up with statistically innovative techniques in this area and be recognized by the statistics community.”
McGregor’s career is young; look for its impact to grow exponentially.
Black scholars form new interdisciplinary research cluster
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By Elaine Smith
A group of professors affiliated in various ways with York University’s African Studies Program join forces to create a unique, interdisciplinary research cluster focusing on adaptive knowledge, response, recovery and resilience in transnational Black communities.
The research cluster focuses on the nexus between structural injustices and Black communities’ adaptive knowledge systems and resources for mitigating, responding to and recovering from epidemics.
The Overcoming Epidemics: Transnational Black Communities’ Response, Recovery and Resilience cluster was born in response to a call from the vice-president, research and innovation to accelerate interdisciplinary research with a focus on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) around key institutional strategic initiatives.
Mohamed Sesay
“We built on our existing relationships to develop a team to harness our expertise and research interests to look at inequity concerns in disease outbreaks among Black communities,” says Mohamed Sesay, assistant professor and co-ordinator of the African Studies Program in the Department of Social Science in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS). “We were interested in connecting health questions to structural and social justice questions.
“We’re not just interested in outbreaks among Black communities, but in knowledge systems. We want to develop an intersectional, feminist and decolonial framework to interact with communities’ responses to epidemics and the barriers they face.”
While the call for funding may have given the group the impetus to formalize the project idea, the members all have an interest in creating an interdisciplinary consortium. In addition to Sesay, the interdisciplinary team of researchers includes LA&PS Professors Sylvia Bawa, Mary Goitom, Uwafiokun Idemudia and Nathanael Ojong, Glendon Professor Gertrude Mianda, Faculty of Science Professor Jude Kong, Lassonde Professor Solomon Boakye-Yiadom, Faculty of Health Professor Oghenowede Eyawo and Faculty of Education Professor Oyemolade Osibodu. The group is currently working in partnership with the Black Creek Community Health Centre in Toronto and leveraging ongoing collaborations to consolidate/establish research partnerships around Africa.
“Our partners appreciate that we are Black scholars researching pressing issues of inequality and epidemics that affect us as Black people,” says Sesay.
Sylvia Bawa
“All members of the cluster are aligned in our interests to conduct research differently and in ways that move away from orthodox extractive practices,” says Bawa, an associate professor of sociology.
“We want to be sure the knowledge we create has practical policy implications, but you can’t study epidemics in isolation without considering historical events and the current climate. We plan to create knowledge in a decentralized way, collaborating with communities so that we serve them without exploiting them.”
Jude Kong
Adds Kong, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and director of ACADIC, “We want the communities to tell us what the problems are. We are tools for them to use to solve these problems. It is research being done from the grass roots up and we want to see the learning that takes place.”
Western PhD candidate Alice Sedziafa, the co-ordinator of the cluster, says that epidemics are the common starting point for their research, but they want to see what other issues each community faces, such as the gender-based violence and to create evidence-based solutions.
Oghenowede Eyawo
Notes Eyawo, an assistant professor of global health epidemiology, “We will be centering the voice of the communities in knowledge and solutions production, which is quite unique. In the past researchers have come to communities and acted as experts. We will co-create the research questions and generate knowledge together with the community.”
In addition to the initial cluster funding, they are currently preparing Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Development and Engage grants applications and have applied for the second round of cluster funding with an eye toward a three-year cycle of research activities.
Welcome to the inaugural issue of ‘ASPIRE’
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“ASPIRE” is a special edition of YFile publishing on select Fridays during the academic year. It showcases research and innovation at York University. “ASPIRE” offers compelling and accessible stories about the world-leading and policy-relevant work of changemakers in all Faculties and professional schools across York and encompasses both discovery and applied research. “ASPIRE” replaces the previous special issue “Brainstorm.”
COVID-19: Social networks helped spread fear among investors Schulich Professor Ming Dong, whose research specializes in examining in behavioural and social finance, worked with two former PhD students to research the role that social networks played in emotional decision making among mutual fund managers in five hot spot cities in the United States.
Biologist finds hope for critically endangered species Marc Dupuis-Desormeaux, a Glendon biology course director, is working to save the pancake tortoise that is native to some areas of Africa and assessing what it will take to develop a community-based conservancy plan.
Book offers exploration of sugar, power and politics Glendon associate professor of history Gillian A. McGillivray delves into Latin America’s past through the lens of sugar. The result is her book Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959.
