York University establishes research fund to support Black scholars
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The York Black Research Seed Fund will provide $150,000 in funding and mentorship to support the research activities of Black academics.
The fund aims to promote equitable and inclusive funding to set roots for research projects and support future growth. The fund has two streams:
The Open ResearchFund provides three awards, at $25,000 each, to support funding for three Black scholars for a duration of 24 months.
The Collaborative Research Fund provides three awards, at $25,000 each, to support Black early career researchers who plan to collaborate with a Black scholar on a 24-month research project.
Both funds are open to all Black scholars, but preference is given to emerging and early-career researchers to further their research projects.
Supported by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation (VPRI) in collaboration with the Office of the Vice-President Equity, People and Culture (EP&C), the fund was created to respond to and support the University’s commitment to addressing the systemic anti-Black racism and white supremacy that pervades academia.
Amir Asif
“York University is committed to excellence and inclusiveness in research, scholarship and knowledge creation,” said Amir Asif, vice-president research and innovation. “Black scholars face significant barriers in academic research. The York Black Research Seed Fund signals our ongoing commitment and long-term support in advancing equity and inclusion and removing systemic barriers that have hindered the success of Black scholars.”
The call is an important pilot project and represents York University’s ongoing commitment to funding equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in research and scholarship. An annual budget of $750,000 per year over three years will be dedicated to supporting Black, Indigenous, gender and disability research and knowledge mobilization.
Sheila Cote-Meek
“Black scholarship is vital to advancing knowledge and creation that will have a positive impact on the communities we serve,” said Sheila Cote-Meek, vice-president equity, people and culture. “The York Black Research Seed Fund is one step forward in addressing the challenges that Black scholars face in advancing their careers and will set in motion a future that promotes excellence and inclusiveness in research.”
In addition to the York Black Research Seed Fund, the University has committed $100,000 to support the research activities at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) and the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas, two organized research units (ORUs) based at York University. This funding is provided in addition to the operational support funds made available to the ORUs from the Office of the VPRI.
CERLAC is a hub for inter- and multidisciplinary research on Latin America and the Caribbean, their diasporas and relationships with Canada and the rest of the world. The Harriet Tubman Institute is the preeminent, interdisciplinary centre for research, both historical and contemporary, on Africa and its global diasporas.
Lassonde students recognized for outstanding contributions at co-op placements
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Two computer science students, Adrian Fagarasanu and Thalia Godbout, from the Lassonde School of Engineering, received this year’s Nascent Co-op/Internship Students of the Year Award.
Adrian Fagarasanu
Adrian Fagarasanu is a third-year computer science student who spent the summer working remotely at his dream co-op placement with European Space Agency (ESA) as a data systems intern. During this time, he was an integral part of the Application & Robotics Data Systems Division in Darmstadt, Germany. His work focused on remoulding the department’s technical vision of designing a Java plugin to interface two simulation software component layers in order to represent simulation kernel data in a Unity 3D rover visualization environment. Fagarasanu discovered major issues with the large task at hand and spent long hours working tirelessly to rethink and reimplement a feasible solution for the simulation build.
Fagarasanu left behind a foundation at ESA for further simulation plugin avenues to be explored with far more ease. “Adrian Fagarasanu showed great motivation to solve the challenges presented when dealing with the given topic and worked highly independently,” said Nicole Neis, mission data systems engineer in the Applications & Robotics Data Systems Section at ESA. “His knowledge and competencies in computer science prepared him well for the tasks.”
Prior to his work term at ESA, Fagarasanu had completed his first co-op placement at the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) for 12 months. His passion, grit, determination and resilience have been evident throughout both work terms and have been the driving force behind his impactful contributions and successes to the Space Industry. “Over the four months I was employed at ESA, I had the pleasure of experiencing a profound growth in my professional understanding of the software engineering world through the inspired space industry lens,” said Fagarasanu.
Within the Lassonde community, Fagarasanu has helped facilitate the partnership between Lassonde and ESA and got involved in a variety of clubs and extracurricular activities. He also took part in national and global competitions, including the largest space and science hackathon, NASA Space Apps Challenge, where his team became one of eight honourably mentioned global winners.
Thalia Godbout, a third-year computer science student, discovered her passion for digital accessibility technology during her 12-month internship with the Ontario Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services (Children, Youth and Social Services I&IT Cluster). During her work term with the Accessibility Centre of Excellence (ACOE) as an accessibility technology analyst intern, she provided consultations, training and created a wide array of educational resources that empowered Ontario Public Service (OPS) project teams across various ministries to develop user-friendly and accessible digital products.
Thalia Godbout
“By the end of my placement, I developed a passion for this field and realized how much I love working with people and exploring how we interact with technology,” said Godbout. She took the initiative to tackle new projects and went above and beyond what was expected of her. Thanks to her drive, Godbout was given new responsibilities including training new staff, independently leading client accessibility assessments, co-presenting at national accessibility week events and co-leading drop-in sessions for OPS staff.
“Thalia was an exceptional co-op student and will certainly be an asset to any team she joins in her future,” said Erika Hartog, senior accessibility technology analyst at AOCE. “Thalia’s quality of work and dedication to accessibility and inclusivity has dramatically helped the AOCE improve processes and increase digital accessibility awareness within the OPS.”
In addition to her exceptional workplace contributions, Godbout has been active at Lassonde and the broader York University community through her involvement in hackathons and assisting with fellow student career development through job search support.
The Nascent Co-op/Internship Students of the Year Award is sponsored by Nascent Digital and recognizes two students for their exceptional contribution to their respective host employer along with their involvement in the Lassonde community.
Study shows how artificial intelligence could improve breast cancer chemotherapy results
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A new study out of the Lassonde School of Engineering and Sunnybrook Hospital offers the potential for doctors to personalize cancer treatment.
Breast cancer will affect roughly one in eight women at some point in their lives, and it kills about 5,000 women every year in Canada. Among the available treatment options, chemotherapy is the most common and offers great hope of saving lives.
Unfortunately, 30 to 40 per cent of patients do not see improvements to their prognoses following chemotherapy, a treatment that comes with intense side effects. And, what’s more, doctors must wait until a patient’s chemotherapy regimen is well advanced, or even concluded, before they can know with any certainty whether the treatment has worked.
A new study involving researchers from the Lassonde School of Engineering and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre offers a potential solution to this clinical problem.
The study, which is published last week in Nature’s journal Scientific Reports, combines state-of-the-art imaging techniques with sophisticated machine learning using artificial intelligence (AI). The result is a methodology that could allow clinicians to predict – before or soon after treatment begins – how well individual breast-cancer patients will respond to chemotherapy.
“Currently, there is no clinical method to predict the response of breast cancer patients to chemotherapy,” says the study’s lead author, Ali Sadeghi-Naini, an associate professor and York Research Chair in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Lassonde School of Engineering. “But in this paper, we demonstrated how an AI architecture can be trained for deep machine learning of images to predict the response of patients to chemotherapy before the patient has started the treatment.”
For breast cancer patients, the implications are immense. The study, which drew on existing clinical data, includes 10-year survival analyses that demonstrate significant differences in survival rates between those patients that the study’s prediction model identified as ‘responders’ to chemotherapy and those identified as ‘non-responders.’
The current standard method for evaluating patient response to chemotherapy is measuring changes in tumour size after the conclusion of treatment.
“Generally, when someone receives chemo, what happens is three to five months after chemo, a CT or MRI scan will be done,” says co-author Dr. Gregory Czarnota, chief of the Department of Radiation Oncology, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. “Size is measured at that point. By then, you’ve lost the opportunity to do something about it. You can’t alter the treatment or tailor it to the patient’s individual response.
“So, if we can tell with near 90 per cent accuracy, using this methodology we’ve developed, that a person won’t respond to chemo, there’s no reason to go forward. We could also tailor treatments according to patient’s predicted level of response. We could alter drug types, alter dosages, or change the length of a treatment regime. We could also consider alternative treatment routes for patients who are predicted not to respond at all to chemo.”
The study’s methodology involves an artificial intelligence program designed to learn how to make minute distinctions between Quantitative Ultrasound (QUS) parametric images of cancerous tumours, at a volume and level of detail that would be impossible for human beings. The new study builds on previous research on QUS parametric imaging, an advanced technology that transforms raw ultrasound signals (which are often discarded by the scanner after generating conventional images) to measure and visualize biophysical properties of tissues.
In a prior paper, published last year, Sadeghi-Naini, Czarnota and their co-authors demonstrated QUS parametric images could be used to distinguish between individual tumours in terms of their aggressiveness and responsiveness to chemotherapy.
“In this new study, we integrated AI and QUS imaging to make better use of the two,” says Sadeghi-Naini.
The researcher focuses on Locally Advanced Breast Cancer (LABC), a particularly virulent and relapse-prone form of the disease that is marked by especially large tumours. Up to 20 per cent of breast cancer cases are LABC.
The study was led by Sadeghi-Naini, along with graduate students Hamidreza Taleghamar and Seyed Ali Jalalifar. It was co-led by Czarnota, who is also a clinician scientist at the Sunnybrook Research Institute.
The study was funded by Ontario’s Ministry of Colleges and Universities through the Early Researcher Awards (ERA) program, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), and Terry Fox Foundation through a New Frontiers Program Project Grant.
Michael Riddell
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Michael Riddell
Professor Michael Riddell in the Faculty of Health has collaborated on a new study published in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism that documents the preclinical journey of a drug with encouraging proof of effectiveness
Johnny Rungtusanatham
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Schulich Professor Johnny Rungtusanatham is the featured interview in Podcast or Perish. He talks about why stores are sold out of many goods during the pandemic, public policies that could make supply chains more resilient and the British Columbia floods
Welcome to the February 2022 issue of Brainstorm
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“Brainstorm,” a special edition of YFile publishing on select Fridays during the academic year, showcases research and innovation at York University. It 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 the February 2022 issue
A collaboration with a York researcher is changing the ‘forever’ of tattoos What is the science behind semi-permanent tattoo technology? Faculty of Science chemistry Professor Chris Caputo’s research is revolutionizing this form of personal expression in new and interesting ways for a Canadian startup.
University students in Toronto experience exploitation and discrimination in housing options New research co-led by Luisa Sotomayor, an associate professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, and researchers at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University, reports that students lack affordable, adequate and sufficient housing options that would enable them to live close to their campus.
Working toward treatment for rheumatoid arthritis Faculty of Health Professor Ali Abdul-Sater’s passion for understanding the body’s immune response has led him to a discovery that he hopes will eventually relieve the suffering of people with rheumatoid arthritis.
Launched in January 2017, “Brainstorm” is produced out of the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation in partnership with Communications & Public Affairs; overseen by Krista Davidson, senior manager, research communications; and edited by Jenny Pitt-Clark, YFile editor, Ashley Goodfellow Craig, YFile deputy editor, and Alysia Burdi, YFile communications officer.
Podcast or Perish
Schulich School of Business Professor Johnny Rungtusanatham, Canada Research Chair in Supply Chain Management at York University, is a leading expert on the subject of supply chain disruptions. In the most recent episode of Podcast or Perish, Rungtusanatham discusses the impact of the huge storm in British Columbia, why stores are sold out of many goods during the pandemic, and what kinds of public policies could make supply chains more resilient.
Podcast or Perish is a podcast about academic research and why it matters. Join host Cameron Graham,professor of accounting at the Schulich School of Business, for a special 10-part series featuring extraordinary researchers and creators at York University and their innovative methodologies and approaches. A new episode is launched every month.
Podcast or Perish is supported by York University’s Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation in partnership with Schulich School of Business.
Working toward treatment for rheumatoid arthritis
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Faculty of Health Professor Ali Abdul-Sater’s passion for understanding the body’s immune response has led him to a discovery that he hopes will eventually relieve the suffering of people with rheumatoid arthritis.
By Elaine Smith
Research by Ali Abdul-Sater, a York Research Chair in the Regulatory Mechanisms of Inflammation, and an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science, Faculty of Health, has determined that a specific protein, TRAF1, holds the key to controlling inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis and a specific mutation to the protein can reduce the amount of inflammation the joints experience. With funding from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Arthritis Foundation and York University, Abdul-Sater and his research team are currently testing their findings in mice and hope the results will eventually translate to humans.
“We are planning to use TRAF1 to develop new therapy for rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory diseases,” Abdul-Sater says. “I wouldn’t wish rheumatoid arthritis on anyone; it is one of the most painful chronic diseases and it becomes progressively worse. For some sufferers, it can take hours just to get their joints moving each morning.”
Abdul-Sater calls TRAF1 “the Swiss army knife of proteins” because it serves different functions in different immune cells. He discovered that TRAF1 can control or limit inflammation by preventing certain immune cells (macrophages) from producing too many cytokines that destroy the joints; on the other hand, previous research indicated that TRAF1 is also known to activate other immune cells (lymphocytes) and enhance their ability to produce antibodies or cytokines that damage the joints. The key is to find a way to stop TRAF1 from activating lymphocytes while preserving its ability to limit inflammation and cytokine production.
Faculty of Health Professor Ali Abdul-Sater (foreground) in his lab
It turns out that TRAF1 is a scaffold, or a platform, from which these signals are sent out. Abdul-Sater found that each of its functions used a different type of scaffold, so he was able to disrupt one function while leaving the other intact. In fact, he discovered a specific genetic mutation that does just that: it prevents immune cells from overproducing antibodies while suppressing its joint-destroying cytokine production, thus reducing inflammation and keeping the joint intact.
Using the CRISPR genetic engineering tool that allows scientists to modify the genes of a living organism, Abdul-Sater and his team are currently creating this mutation in mice to determine whether they are protected from rheumatoid arthritis. If they are, he hopes to move forward toward using this discovery to create therapeutics for people currently living with rheumatoid arthritis.
“We’re not ready yet for interventions in humans,” he says. “Our next step would be to collaborate with medicinal chemists to develop a small molecule that can be taken as a drug and then, hopefully, move on to clinical trials. Drug formulation is a long process. We started from the ground up in finding a way to target this key protein.”
Abdul-Sater says research of this nature requires a real love for the work.
“To stick it out, you have to have passion,” he says. “There are lots of setbacks and long hours, but the reward is the joy of discovering something new and seeing it make a difference in the world.
“I have had excellent support from my department and my Faculty, and I feel lucky to get paid for doing something I love,” he adds.
A collaboration with a York researcher is changing the ‘forever’ of tattoos
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What is the science behind semi-permanent tattoo technology? Faculty of Science chemistry Professor Chris Caputo’s research is revolutionizing this form of personal expression in new and interesting ways for a Canadian startup.
By Krista Davidson
A York University research team is collaborating with Inkbox, a Toronto-based startup that uses semi-permanent tattoo technology, to better understand the science behind their revolutionary tattoo technology. The science could support the development of semi-permanent tattoos with different colours. Inkbox was acquired by Bic in January 2022 for U.S. $65 million.
Chris Caputo is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Metal-Free Materials for Catalysis. His research focuses on developing greener and more sustainable chemistry by eliminating the need to use expensive and toxic transition metals.
In 2015, Caputo met the Inkbox CEO and co-founder, Tyler Handley, and later became the company’s director of research and development before joining York University, where he continued to work with the company to develop their technology with the help of York’s Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation (VPRI).
Inkbox’s revolutionary technology is different than a normal tattoo because it is a fruit-based extract that stains the epidermis layer of skin instead of being injected into the dermis layer, allowing the dyed skin to slough over time and enable the disappearance of the tattoo.
Faculty of Science chemistry Professor Chris Caputo in his lab
“We really wanted to understand the mechanism of how and why this fruit extract turns your skin dark blue when applied, so we could take that development a step further towards new colours,” says Caputo. “Our research at York has been fundamental to identifying the chemistry behind the process of developing new colours and helping Inkbox expand their R&D pipeline.”
Caputo was able to hire a team of researchers, one of which is now employed at Inkbox, and avail of the University’s state-of-the-art synthetic chemistry wet lab.
“A collaboration with Chris’s group, funded by Mitacs and NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Collaborative Research & Development grants, has allowed Inkbox to do molecular-level research that would otherwise have been impossible with the budget of a startup company,” said Ian Mallov, manager, Formulation & Regulatory Affairs at Inkbox Tattoos.
“We were dealing with a blank canvas because nobody in the world has ever looked at this challenge before. It’s been a wonderful and exploratory project where we could take the time to refine our hypothesis and reach our goal towards achieving different colours,” said Caputo.
To date, Inkbox has filed several patents on the research undertaken through this collaboration. Caputo continues to collaborate with Inkbox and a small team of researchers, led by Sanjay Manhas, Charley Garrard and Nico Bonanno, who are currently working on projects at York. With the new Bic acquisition, Inkbox can expand its revolutionary technology to broader markets with new offerings.
“Chris has guided this research toward developing new tattoo ink dyes and understanding the mechanism of action of the current active dye. This has contributed significant value in terms of intellectual property for the company,” said Mallov.
Caputo’s research, which includes developing efficient synthetic strategies, is supporting sustainability for Inkbox by finding ways to significantly reduce waste materials and energy needed to produce new dyes. This work supports the University’s goals in elevating York’s contributions to the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically SDG 12 which calls for sustainably managing natural resources, reducing and managing waste better, and promoting sustainable lifestyles and company practices.
The experience has been particularly eye-opening for Caputo and his team about the possibility of modifying molecules and manipulating dyes to support sustainability for other commercial products.
“We’ve potentially unlocked new properties for a natural product by taking a systematic synthetic chemistry approach. It has made me think about what other naturally occurring feedstocks we can apply this to for the generation of more sustainable dyes in the future,” said Caputo.
Researchers help Canada’s largest police services eliminate racial profiling in policing
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Police cruiser
Lorne Foster and Les Jacobs have turned their expertise in human rights and research into a powerful force for equity.
By Krista Davidson
Lorne Foster
For the last decade, human rights experts Lorne Foster and Les Jacobs have been central figures in helping, through their research, to address systemic racism within some of Canada’s largest police departments. Recently, the pair announced they are joining forces with the Waterloo Regional Police Service to collect and analyze race-based data to further their research on anti-racism in policing.
The multi-year collaboration with the Waterloo Regional Police will develop an extensive data collection system across all police-citizen interactions, including the use of force, stop and question, traffic stops, charges, arrests and releases to support a more holistic approach to addressing instances of systemic racism within the service.
“The Waterloo Regional Police Service are thinking ahead. They want to better understand how to collect and use race-related data and analyze it to identify concrete measures for addressing systemic racism,” says Jacobs, a professor emeritus at York’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) and the York Research Chair in Human Rights and Access to Justice. Jacobs is also vice-president of research and innovation at Ontario Tech University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
With Foster, a professor in the School of Public Policy & Administration at LA&PS, director of the Institute for Social Research and the York Research Chair in Black Canadian Studies & Human Rights, the duo is more than equipped to support the Waterloo police. They are the principal architects behind the 2017 Ontario Anti-Racism Act, which aims to identify and monitor systemic racism and racial disparities within the public sector. The act outlines what race-related data can be collected and how it can be used. It is the first and only race data standard in Canada.
Les Jacobs
The act continues to serve as an important milestone in Canada because it emphasizes the importance of disaggregating data to identify patterns of systemic racial disparities. It has significance for many public sectors but has relevance for the justice sector, including police services in Ontario.
The first major project by Foster and Jacobs was a comparative research analysis with police forces in Ottawa and this created a landmark racial profiling study, which took place from 2013 to 2015. This was followed by a second study from 2016 to 2019, with each study collecting about 125,000 traffic stops for a combined data set of 250,000. The dataset has since increased multifold and continues to grow.
They have also worked with the Toronto Police Services on a project focused exclusively on racial disparities in the use of force incidents. Their Waterloo, York and Peel police service collaborations went beyond the use of force to examine racial disparities and bias across all police-civilian interactions to better understand how race data research could be used to find concrete measures for addressing systemic racism.
“Before these collaborations, police services didn’t systematically collect race data, so their findings were colour blind. Groups, particularly those in government, begin to recognize that if they truly wanted to eliminate systemic racism in society, they needed to collect data that could help them to advance racial equity,” says Foster.
The disaggregated race data provides a starting point for police services to look constructively from an evidentiary perspective. Foster and Jacobs take a two-pronged approach to their research collaborations with the police departments.
“Our research methodologies are distinctive because we’re very committed to the idea that if race data is collected, it has to be made public. Secondly, it is important to involve racialized communities and to talk to them about what they want from the research project so we can better address what the community needs,” says Jacobs. “It’s not replaying the past and laying blame, but about figuring out how to make the future better.”
“Our research points to a baseline that enables people to have a constructive rather than polemical dialogue,” adds Foster.
While each police service in Ontario is different, Foster and Jacobs have identified similarities, particularly with recommendations on specific training and other strategies that will benefit the departments, including the use of early warning technology – a data-based police management tool that detects officers who display problematic behaviour, body-worn cameras and targets for reducing racial profiling in traffic stops.
“One recommendation we made for Ottawa, which had a disproportionately high number of traffic stops among Black and Middle-Eastern males, ages 16 to 24, was to create a target to bring down traffic stops for those groups by 20 per cent per year,” explains Foster.
Their key recommendation, however, is police departments should continue to collect and analyze race data in the future.
“I’m really proud of the progress that Les and I have made with police forces in Ontario. It is not an insignificant change. In the end, our research will make our society a little more inclusive and bring the justice sector closer to eliminating systemic racism and discrimination, and advancing racial equity,” says Foster.
