Wanted: Student presentations for second annual Undergraduate Research Fair

Poster session at York Libraries undergrad research fair

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Undergraduate students and instructors who are in the process of writing and grading particularly strong, final research papers, are encouraged to consider the Undergraduate Research Fair. Applications to participate in the multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research Fair are due by Jan. 20, 2014 – but students are encouraged to apply early.

Associate Librarian speaks at undergraduate research fair at York U
Associate Librarian Catherine Davidson speaks to students during last year’s Undergraduate Research Fair

York University’s second annual Undergraduate Research Fair, jointly sponsored by York University Libraries and the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, will be held on Feb. 25, 2014 from 10:30am -1:30pm in the Scott Library Collaboratory.   

Admission to the juried fair is competitive. Undergraduate students can apply by submitting a graded, research-based project or honours thesis prepared between January and December 2013, along with a 250-word abstract.  

“While the 2013 fair was limited to undergraduate students in the social sciences and humanities, we still received nearly 100 remarkable applications,” explains Catherine Davidson, associate university librarian and Undergraduate Research Fair steering committee member. “This year we are welcoming applicants from all nine faculties, including Glendon College,to this pan-university celebration of student researchers, and we look forward to reviewing a large number of strong applications.”

Postering session in the Scott Library collaboratory
The Undergraduate Research Fair showcases poster presentations developed by York students. The posters documented research in progress.

Those undergraduate student researchers selected to participate in the Fair will have the opportunity to share their work by designing a poster and presenting the results of their research to the York community in a friendly, cross-curricular environment. A workshop on designing and presenting a poster will be offered to participating students, and the Libraries will arrange to print the posters at no cost to the participants.

Prizes of $500 (plus honourable mentions) will be awarded to participants deemed to have the best lower-year project, best upper-year project, best honours thesis and best poster session.  In addition, the Libraries offer an Information Literacy award of $600 to the researcher who develops and explains his/her information research strategies best.  Fair participants may also have their papers published in a peer-reviewed journal sponsored by York University Libraries.   

Last year’s fair drew a large audience of students, faculty and administrators from across the York community, as well as friends and family of the student-presenters. 

“York’s Undergraduate Research Fair provides students with the opportunity to take pride in their work. Last year over 200 audience members came by to show support for the presenters and York’s research culture,” says Peggy Warren, librarian and the fair’s organizer.

This is an excellent opportunity for undergraduates to participate in several components of the cycle of knowledge production and dissemination, says Warren. 

For more information about the Fair, participant eligibility and application details, visit the Undergraduate Research Fair website.

Brain’s plasticity enables adaptation to loss of one eye early in life

York University researchers have found that the brain is capable of adapting to the loss of an eye within the first four years of life.

York psychology Professor Jennifer Steeves and PhD psychology candidate Krista Kelly (MA ’08) already knew that people who have lost an eye early in life have good vision – rivaling that of people with both eyes intact, except for depth perception – but what they didn’t know was why.

To find out, they and several colleagues looked at magnetic resonance images of the anterior structure of the visual system of 12 adults Jennifer Steeveswho had a cancerous eye surgically removed before four years of age. This group was then compared to one person who lost an eye at the age of 59 and to a group of people with intact binocular vision.

Jennifer Steeves

“We show reorganization in the brain of individuals with early loss of one eye, indicating that the brain is more plastic and able to adapt in early life,” says Steeves of the Faculty of Health. “The changes that we see are also consistent with the excellent visual ability that people who lose one eye early in life have.”

Unlike most studies to date, which have reported brain changes only in adults who have lost an eye, this study looked at people who had an eye removed in early childhood. The researchers assessed the optic nerves, optic chiasm, optic tracts and the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) volumes of each subject. The goal was to find out what affected the maturation of the anterior visual system when it received information from only one eye. These effects were studied years after the eye loss.

The researchers found alterations in the development of the visual system occurred after the eye’s removal. The structure of the visual Krista Kellysystem – optic tract diameter, and optic chiasm and lateral geniculate volumes – was decreased in all participants who had an eye removed compared to the control subjects.

Krista Kelly

But what they found surprising, says Steeves, was that the visual structure in those participants who lost an eye early was found to be asymmetrical – larger on the side opposite the intact eye. The structure, however, remained symmetrical in the participant who lost his eye late in life.

Why does this asymmetry occur? It could be that the disconnected cells following surgical removal of the eye are recruited to the intact side or stronger feedback signals from the brain’s opposing hemisphere helped retain those cells in the participants who underwent surgical removal of their eye early, but not the older person.

These alterations in visual structure could also explain why there are no deficits in the spatial vision of those underwent early removal of an eye, says Steeves. It points to a “stronger malleability of the brain following visual deprivation that occurs earlier rather than later in life.”

The study was published in November in NeuroImage: Clinical, a journal of diseases affecting the nervous system. Kelly is lead author and Steeves is senior author of the article, “Altered Anterior Visual System Development Following Early Monocular Enucleation”. Both are from the Centre for Vision Research at York.

The research was funded by the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.

 

New research exposes public policy gaps regarding forced labour

Andrew Crane Schulich professor

New research into forced labour – sometimes referred to as “modern slavery” – released Friday was prepared by three Canadians at various universities, as well as Andrew Crance, a British professor with York University’s Schulich School of Business.

The report, “Forced Labour’s Business Models and Supply Chains”,  commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is the first scholarly analysis of the underlying business models of forced labour, say the researchers. They conclude that by understanding how forced labour makes its way into product and Andrew Cranelabour supply chains, the study opens the way to public policy decision-making designed to better disrupt the business of forced labour.

Andrew Crane

While the report is based on research in the United Kingdom, the study also has important implications for policymakers in Canada and around the world, says Crane, one of the researchers, who is the George R. Gardiner Professor of Business Ethics and director of the Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business at Schulich.

“The exploitation of vulnerable workers is a growing problem worldwide that could and should be addressed through improved public policy, and Canada is not immune,” said Crane. “Canada’s Temporary Foreign Workers Program, for instance, potentially feeds into the exploitation of vulnerable workers by tying them to employers. Unscrupulous employers have been known to cross the line into forced labour.”

“Canada has an impressive National Action Plan to combat human trafficking,” Crane said, “but so far it just hasn’t tackled the business side of forced labour directly. Our report provides new tools to do exactly that.”

The report’s other researchers are Jean Allain, professor of public international law and the director of the Human Rights Centre, School of Law at Queen’s University in Belfast, U.K.; Genevieve LeBaron, vice-chancellor’s Fellow in politics at the University of Sheffield, U.K.; and Laya Behbahani, an MA candidate at the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

The study highlights how commercial cannabis cultivation is growing rapidly in recent years and documents how those forced to work in “grow-ops” are usually Vietnamese children and adults smuggled into the U.K. and coerced to work through debt-bondage and threats to their families. It also examines the factors at work in the food and construction industries that lead to forced labour.

“While a great deal of attention has rightly been paid to the experiences of victims, very little consideration has been given to how people actually make money using forced labour. This understanding of the business dynamics of forced labour is crucial if we are going to try to end such exploitation,” said Allain.

“Businesses use forced labour to make money, and they do this in one of two ways – by either minimizing costs as a result of offering minimal pay and failing to provide basic entitlements such as pensions or sick pay; or generating revenue by charging workers for additional services, including visas, travel expenses, accommodation or transport to and from the workplace.”

The full report, Forced Labour’s Business Models and Supply Chains, is available online.

Researchers partner with e-training company to study memory and learning

Shayna Rosenbaum
Shayna Rosenbaum

How do you best remember what you’ve learned in an employee training course? That’s what York psychology Professor Shayna Rosenbaum, an expert on the psychological processes of learning and memory, and her team is hoping to figure out in collaboration with an e-training company.

Rosenbaum received a $23,951 Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada Engage grant, which supports industry partnerships, to begin the research. Together with York University and Baycrest Health Sciences post-doctoral fellow Shayna RosenbaumAlice Kim and Sylvain Moreno of the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences, Rosenbaum will research how training programs can be delivered to optimize learning retention.

Shayna Rosenbaum

They are teaming up with Axonify Inc., which provides an eLearning platform for employee training for a wide range of companies. “The opportunity to partner and collaborate with an innovative eLearning software platform like Axonify enables us to not only better relate and enhance our fundamental memory research findings, but also link them directly to everyday use and compelling business applications,” says Rosenbaum.

As Kim says, “Axonify has already incorporated principles of learning into their training platform and there are about 22,000 employees who’ve been receiving training in the database. It’s a ton of data that we will have access to.” The researchers plan to analyze the data to determine how people learn and retain information best.

The employees in the database participated in training on a voluntary basis and chose how often they would do it. “For example, they have Alice Kimimplemented spaced intervals of training into their software, so we can take that and look at what the optimal spacing would be,” says Rosenbaum.

Alice Kim

The principle of “spacing” will play an important role in the project and relates to Rosenbaum’s previous research on amnesia in collaboration with York University Professor Melody Wiseheart, and graduate students, Tina Weston and Janet Green.

“With the spacing effect, the more you space the items to be learned, the better your memory of those items is, but only up to a point,” says Rosenbaum. “Our memory tends to benefit more when items are spaced, rather than when there is no space between items.”

She gives the example of trying to remember the word “apple”. It’s easier to remember it if it’s repeated following intervening items, such as in a list: apple, rose, baseball, book, apple.

Determining the optimal spacing for efficient and effective learning and retention, and how it can be incorporated into company training, are some of the questions the researchers hope to answer.

“We’ll be looking at how far apart the study or practice sessions need to be for optimal learning, such as the frequency per week or per day,” says Kim. They’ll also look at how often material needs to be repeated for best learning.

The results can then be incorporated in Axonify’s eLearning platform. “It will also show just how robust the phenomenon is and how it can be used in the outside world for efficient and effective learning,” says Rosenbaum. “There are far-reaching applications for this.”

Rosenbaum was also awarded a $75,000 catalyst grant earlier in the year to study memory and learning in people who’ve had a stroke in collaboration with Wiseheart and colleagues at Baycrest. They have teamed up with the Heart and Stroke Foundation Centre for Stroke Recovery.

York prof receives Parkinson Society research grant

Joseph DeSouza

How does dance seemingly bypass the neurodegeneration that occurs in the Parkinson brain and facilitate improvement in movement in those with Parkinson’s disease? That’s the question York Professor Joseph DeSouza of the University’s Centre for Vision Research hopes to answer with a research grant supported by the Parkinson Society Central & Northern Ontario

DeSouza, along with other researchers, seeks to improve the quality of life for people with Parkinson’s disease through Joseph DeSouzaresearch.

“How exciting it will be to see how the brain changes as people with Parkinson’s learn to dance,” says DeSouza of the Faculty of Health. “Our lab is proud to conduct research that can make such a positive and direct effect in the lives of people in our community.”

Joseph DeSouza

DeSouza, recipient of a one-year Psychosocial Pilot Project Grant of $44,999, was one of nine researchers recognized Nov. 19 at an event hosted by the Parkinson Society Central & Northern Ontario in Toronto. This funding will support the research needed to begin the journey to prove that novel therapies such as dance do lead to changes in the brain, as we already know it increases their quality of life.

“Funding research remains one of our top of priorities as we strive to improve quality of life for Canadians with Parkinson’s and hopefully one day find a cure,” says Debbie Davis, chief executive officer, Parkinson Society Central & Northern Ontario. “As such, we are thrilled to support Canadian scientists, through the National Research Program, who are working on projects to better understand this complex disease and discover new treatments.”

As of July, Parkinson Society Canada and its regional partners support 22 new grant, fellowships and student awards representing a total of $1,273,879 committed to new research projects in Canada over the next two years. Including 13 research awards in their second year, the National Research Program is currently investing $1,758,839. Parkinson Society Central & Northern Ontario is one of the largest financial contributors to the National Research Program.

Save the date: Discussion of Internal Research Chairs Program at open forum Nov. 20

Robert Hache

Vice-President Research & Innovation Robert Haché will discuss a proposed Internal Research Chairs program (envisioned as an internal counterpart for the national Canada Research Chairs program) at an open forum Nov. 20, from 2 to 4 pm, in the Senate Chamber, N940 Ross Building.

Robert HacheRobert Haché

During the open forum, Haché will report back to the community about the consultations on the proposed program to date.

“I am pleased to report back to the York community with respect to the proposed Internal Research Chairs program,” said Haché. “This open forum will provide an opportunity for members of the York community to ask questions and provide feedback about the proposed program. I look forward to an engaging discussion.”

All students, faculty, and staff are welcome and should RSVP for this event.

To learn more about the internal research chairs program, visit the Faculty Feedback section on the Research website. (A Passport York login is required.)

VP Research & Innovation will discuss proposed Internal Research Chairs Program at open forum Nov. 20

Robert Hache

Vice-President Research & Innovation Robert Haché will discuss a proposed Internal Research Chairs program (envisioned as an internal counterpart for the national Canada Research Chairs program) at an open forum Nov. 20, from 2 to 4 pm, in the Senate Chamber, N940 Ross Building.

Robert HacheRobert Haché

During the open forum, Haché will report back to the community about the consultations on the proposed program to date.

“I am pleased to report back to the York community with respect to the proposed Internal Research Chairs program,” said Haché. “This open forum will provide an opportunity for members of the York community to ask questions and provide feedback about the proposed program. I look forward to an engaging discussion.”

All students, faculty, and staff are welcome and should RSVP for this event.

To learn more about the internal research chairs program, visit the Faculty Feedback section on the Research website. (A Passport York login is required.)

Rational thinking improves in children, adolescents with age

Rational thinking in children and adolescents improves with age and positively correlates with intelligence and executive functioning, according to the findings of a five-year study led by a York researcher.

Rational thinking has been studied in adults, but relatively less work has been done to test its development in children. It is broadly defined as how well people accomplish their goals and track truth in the world. The researchers, York psychology Professor Maggie Toplak, along with Richard West of James Madison University and Keith Stanovich of the MaggieToplakUniversity of Toronto, modified some of the adult tests to make them appropriate for children.

Maggie Toplak

“The results are very exciting. Scientifically, they are consistent with what we are finding in our adult work,” says Toplak. “But also, it’s a major step in developing new ways to examine competence in youth, beyond the current obsession with measures of intelligence and executive functions.”

Their research is highlighted in the article, “Rational Thinking and Cognitive Sophistication: Development, Cognitive Ability, and Thinking Dispositions”, co-authored by Toplak, West and Stanovich and published in the November issue of the journal of Developmental Psychology.

This research could affect how competence is assessed in youth, taking not only intelligence and executive functions into consideration, but using rational thinking and decision-making as indicators of competence.

“These measures can help us understand judgments related to youth risk and issues of legal responsibility,” says Toplak. “In our increasingly complex technological society, it will be fundamental to assess these competencies and to teach our children how and when to make careful judgments and choices.” The research could lead to several potential implications and directions for this work. In the lab at York, Toplak and her team have also examined using rational thinking to assess competence in pathological gamblers and offending youth.

In the study, the researchers looked at developmental trends in five reasoning tasks considered critical components of rational thinking in 204 students from grades two to nine, breaking them into three groups (Grades 2 to 3, 4 to 5 and 6 to 9).

With the rational thinking research with children and youth, “our strategy was to examine converging evidence. If there was evidence that older children do better than younger children on some of these tasks, then performance on these tasks should also be correlated with cognitive abilities, such as intelligence and executive functions, and dispositions related to open minded thinking,” says Toplak. “Indeed, this is what we did.”

It’s not a new question – do children get better at rational thinking as they age and develop – but it has sparked intense debate in the psychological literature, says Toplak. “There are two very different arguments. One says, of course, cognition gets better. The other side says no. Biases are introduced and reinforced and if adults make rational thinking errors, so too will children fail to recognize the situations that call for more considered reasoning as they get older.”

Under cognitive ability measures, the researchers tested verbal and non-verbal intelligence and executive functions. Thinking dispositions included the actively open minded thinking scale, the superstitious thinking scale and the need for cognition scale. As for rational thinking task, they studied denominator neglect, belief bias syllogism, resistance to framing, base rate sensitivity, other side thinking, and asked parents to rate their child’s decision making ability.

The research was supported through a Social Sciences & Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) Operating Grant to Toplak, who was recently awarded a by SSHRC Insight Grant to continue the research. “The Development of Rational Thinking Abilities: Longitudinal Change and Real World Outcomes” will involve a five-year longitudinal study of children and adolescents to determine if these measures of rational thinking predict outcomes in these youth.

By Sandra McLean, YFile deputy editor

York partners with Toronto Central Community Care Access Centre

Harvey Skinner
Harvey Skinner

York University and Toronto Central Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) have entered into a formal partnership to collaborate on joint research and training opportunities in the home and community care sector.

The partnership will focus on the following key priorities:

  • culture of health care;
  • supporting caregivers;
  • managing multiple medications;
  • prevention of falls;
  • palliative care and managing pain during end-of-life care;
  • supporting better aging;
  • developing health policy;
  • self-management programs for people living with chronic disease; and
  • enabling inter-professional team work across different parts of the health-care system.

Harvey Skinner“With the ongoing shift toward home and community care, our partnership with Toronto Central CCAC is timely in that it will advance research in these increasingly important areas, as well as benefit students with practical, experiential education opportunities,” says York University Faculty of Health Dean Harvey Skinner (right).

The innovative Toronto Central CCAC-York University partnership involves faculty and students from all five degree programs in the Faculty of Health (kinesiology & health science, psychology, nursing, global health, and health policy & management). It will offer experiential learning placements for undergraduate students and diverse, collaborative research opportunities for faculty and graduate students.

“This is a unique partnership,” says Stacey Daub, CEO, Toronto Central CCAC. “It’s driven by our shared passion for learning and innovation, influences our clients’ care and enhances their experience. The greater opportunity is to create an understanding of the importance of care planning in a team: The more CCAC care coordinators work as a team with physicians and other health-care partners in the community, the more we’ll see better health outcomes for patients in the future.”

Toronto Central CCAC connects people across Toronto with quality in-home and community-based health care. It provides information, direct access to qualified care providers and community-based services to help people come home from hospital or live independently at home. In any given month, it serves a population of nearly 1.5 million residents in the Toronto area, helping with their care needs in the community. In any given month, it supports more than 19,000 people of all ages, cultures and backgrounds: 1,700 kids getting support at their schools, 400 adults receiving rehabilitation services, the transition to a long-term care home for 240 clients and more.

Student bee researchers create a buzz

Three biology graduate students created a buzz at a national gathering of entomologists last week when they won prizes for talks and a poster about their bee research.

MariyaBrockNadia
Bee researcher Laurence Packer with grad students, seated from left, Mariya Cheryomina, Brock Harpur and Nadia Tsvetkov

Brock Harpur won Entomological Society of Canada’s President’s Award for best student talk in insect physiology and molecular biology. The PhD candidate spoke about his research in population genomics of the honey bee. Using a huge database of 53 honey bee genomes, he is looking at how worker honey bees have adapted and acquired different traits, such as aggression, immunity, foraging behavior and honey collection, traits valued by the beekeeping industry. His research is testing longstanding hypotheses about adaptation and selection of worker bees in relation to the queen bee. Harpur’s paper on the topic is under review for publication in a scientific journal.

Nadia Tsvetkov won the runner-up award for best talk in insect behavior and biological control. She is doing her master’s research on the effects of social environment on honey bee learning. She has found that bees raised in isolation are more sensitive to reward and don’t learn as well as bees raised in a group.

Mariya Cheryomina received the runner-up award for best poster. She is doing her master’s research on how habitat loss, parasitic infections and pesticide-use is causing the decline of wild bumble bee populations in southeastern Ontario. The three students made their award-winning presentations at the joint annual meetings of the Entomological Society of Canada and Ontario in Guelph Oct. 20 to 23.

Amro Zayed is Harpur’s and Tsvetkov’s research supervisor. Laurence Packer and Bridget Stutchbury are Cheryomina’s research supervisors.