Jenny Hall

High performance computing at U of T gets a boost from CFI’s cyberinfrastructure initiative

sgupta — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 13:05:21 +0000

High performance computing at U of T gets a boost from CFI’s cyberinfrastructure initiative sgupta Thu, 07/30/2015 - 09:05

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At U of T, researchers use high performance computing to model global warming and investigate the origins of the universe

Jenny Hall

Author legacy

Jenny Hall

Topic

Breaking Research

More News

Innovation

Government

Collaboration

Research

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“This investment will enable researchers to really make strides on some of the most pressing questions of our time,” says Vivek Goel

High performance computing at the University of Toronto – and across Canada – will benefit from $30 million in funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation through its Cyberinfrastucture Initiative.

The program supports leading-edge research by providing the digital infrastructure and robust computational power required to make sense of big data.

Peter Braid, Member of Parliament for Kitchener-Waterloo, announced on July 30 the development of a national high performance computing platform, saying, “The country’s research community needs advanced technology to investigate some of the most complex questions of the day.”

“We live in the era of big data,” says Professor Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation. “So much of our scientific and scholarly inquiry deals in data sets so large that traditional processing methods fall short, effectively hampering our progress.

“This investment will enable researchers to really make strides on some of the most pressing questions of our time. At U of T, for example, we have researchers using high performance computing resources to model global warming and to investigate the origins of the universe.”

The funding will be used to create hubs at four institutions – U of T, Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria and the University of Waterloo. Together, they will form a national platform managed by Compute Canada and available to researchers at all Canadian universities regardless of location or discipline.

Compute Canada is an independent organization that oversees high performance computing resources in Canada. Over the course of the next two years, it will use the funding to replace 24 aging systems with four new systems to consolidate resources and centralize services. The four sites were selected through a national competition and a panel of expert reviewers. Each site offers an expandable and modern data centre and on-site personnel.

Scinet, the U of T system, will be upgraded thanks to the investment and will see its computing power increase by tenfold. The U of T hub is Compute Canada’s largest and will be a “large parallel system,” meaning it will be capable of handling some of the country’s largest computational jobs, ranging from hundreds to thousands of simultaneous processors.

“U of T is extremely grateful to CFI and to the government of Canada for this investment,” says Goel. “In addition to powering cutting-edge research, it will position on Canada on the competitive global stage, allowing us to attract and retain the brightest researchers as well as to pioneer made-in-Canada innovation.”

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Bruce Kuwabara on “high-speed city building” and the Pan Am/Parapan Am athletes’ village

sgupta — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 13:10:14 +0000

Bruce Kuwabara on “high-speed city building” and the Pan Am/Parapan Am athletes’ village sgupta Fri, 07/03/2015 - 09:10

Cutline

“The legacy of the Games is all about creating a sustainable neighbourhood with a mix of uses – not just condos,” Kuwabara says (photo © Brent Wagler_KPMB)

Jenny Hall

Author legacy

Jenny Hall

Subheadline

“It’s the challenge of our time to rethink how we live in growing cities like Toronto, and how we can become an exemplar of how to live in the 21st century,” says renowned architect

U of T alumnus Bruce Kuwabara is one of Canada’s leading architects. A founding partner at KPMB, he is an Officer of the Order of Canada and was awarded the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada’s gold medal in 2006.

His firm was one of many working on the design of the Pan Am/ Parapan Am Games Athletes’ Village in Toronto’s West Don Lands, a project that will provide housing to athletes and then become a mixed-use neighbourhood. (Listen to Kuwabara discuss the project on CBC Radio.)

U of T News writer Jenny Hall spoke to him about the challenges inherent in the project – and the challenges of city building in the 21st century.

Tell us about the project.
The mission was to create a home away from home for something like 7,600 athletes who are coming in two waves, first for the Pan Am Games and later for the Parapan Am Games. It’s been an integrated design process that allows a substantial amount of one of the waterfront neighbourhoods – the West Don Lands – to be developed almost all at once.

The West Don Lands plan had already been put in place (read about the alumna who worked on the plan) and the landscaping of the public realm was in place. There was a plan of streets and blocks. At the east end of Front Street, there is a new park called Corktown Commons. It’s got a lot of topography – it was designed to protect all of the land west of it from the 500-year flooding of the Don River. So you’re getting a lot of infrastructure plus a complete neighbourhood.

Our scheme works within fairly strict guidelines that were established by the City of Toronto and Waterfront Toronto. Because there were so many buildings to be built all at once, we formed a partnership with architectsAlliance to co-lead the design of all the buildings. We invited other architects to work with us, too. A firm called Daoust Lestage worked on some housing that will start out as athletes’ housing and then become affordable rental housing. MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects designed the YMCA.

It must be tricky to design buildings that have one use in the short term and another in the longer term.
It’s a pretty bold move, that you would begin by accommodating the one use, then after the Games are over, another. The challenge of the project is orchestrating the diversity of design, and trying to achieve what we called “coherent diversity,” which means that the buildings aren’t identical, but they work together.

How did you do it?
You think about the short-term accommodation – this has to be a very good village for athletes. This is their experience of living in a Toronto neighbourhood. But you have to keep an eye on the end user. There are two sets of requirements. For example, in our building code, to have accessible washrooms, you have to be able to set a five-foot diameter circle in the plan. But in this case, because of the Games, they wanted a five-foot square, which is very different – it’s larger because of the corners. That’s a challenge. You need a seamless transition from one use to another.

It’s easy to imagine an athletes’ village becoming student housing – George Brown will have some student housing in the neighbourhood. But when you get into the sites we designed, which are condominiums, you get into another order of transition. The condo is in place, but a living space might be divided in half with a temporary partition to form two bedrooms. And the kitchens won’t be there – the athletes are eating in a dining tent. There are no finishes on the floor. The appliances aren’t there. The end users, many of whom have already bought their units, are expecting their units to be pristine when they walk in. What we’re gearing up for right now is the post-Games transition.

I know the West Don Lands planning has been going on for more than a decade, but what was the time frame for actually getting these buildings designed and built?
Very short. From beginning to end, three years. It’s high-speed city building. Because of the time constraints and the drop-dead deadline, everyone had to make really good decisions right off the bat.

Do you have thoughts about this neighbourhood being the legacy of the Games?
Most of the units are sold. When all the athletes are gone and everything fades into memory, it has to be something. And that something is called the Canary District. So we went from the West Don Lands to the Pan Am Games Athletes’ Village, and it will eventually transition over several months and emerge as the Canary District.

For us, the legacy of the Games is all about creating a sustainable neighbourhood with a mix of uses – not just condos. I don’t think you can make a city with just condos and retail. The Canary District will have social housing, rental units and student housing. And we had a strategy to try to immediately create a sense of neighbourhood and amenity. For example, Front Street is shifted in its alignment to the south, which makes the north sidewalk east of Cherry Street very wide. It’s like a linear plaza that’s landscaped. You don’t see this anywhere else in Toronto. What’s really gratifying is that a lot of the people who bought in are intending to live there, unlike some other areas where foreign investors buy units and rent them out.

How will the Canary District fit into Toronto?
Toronto is in the midst of one of the greatest growth spurts in the history of the city. Therefore, the broad challenge for Toronto and places like the University of Toronto is how to think about the urban future that is upon us. How do you make liveable and sustainable cities at higher densities? How do you make a world that is compact, dense, diverse, and walkable? I think the Canary Distract will be all of that. What’s great about it is that it’s not about high rise towers, though. That’s why a lot of people like it.

At this moment in time, there are so many things going on in Toronto. There’s the whole transformation of Regent Park. Alexandra Park is being changed. We’re working on the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health site. The Queen’s Quay revitalization project just opened.

It’s the challenge of our time to rethink how we live in growing cities like Toronto, and how we can become an exemplar of how to live in the 21st century. The question we have to ask is are we making the world we want?

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His study paved the way for drugs that help millions (including his mother-in-law)

sgupta — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 15:51:16 +0000

His study paved the way for drugs that help millions (including his mother-in-law) sgupta Tue, 06/16/2015 - 11:51

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“We always have a little light on that says, beyond the pure joy and satisfaction of understanding how this works, might this be relevant to treatment of human disease, and might this have commercialization potential?” (photo by Bernardo Yusta)

Jenny Hall

Author legacy

Jenny Hall

Topic

Subheadline

Daniel Drucker on the importance of basic science, commercialization and failure

When Daniel Drucker was a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital in the mid-1980s, he worked in a lab studying GLP-1, a hormone released in your gut after you eat.

Like any good scientist, he was motivated by curiosity. He wanted to know how this uncharted biological process worked and what effects it had in the body.

What he didn’t know back then – what he couldn’t have known – was that 19 years later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would approve a new class of drugs for the treatment of type 2 diabetes based on his work on GLP-1.

Subsequent work on a chemical that gets in the way of gut hormones doing their jobs yielded another class of drug called DDP-4 inhibitors. Both classes of drugs help people with diabetes lower their blood sugar without causing weight gain or hypoglycaemia, which were troublesome side effects of previous generations of drugs.

Today, millions of people – including Drucker’s own mother-in-law – benefit from these drugs.

“The path to commercial success and the introduction of a drug to the clinic is not always a rapid, straightforward journey,” he says. “There are all kinds of challenges to be met, and it can be a long and difficult process. But many things in life are like that.”

Drucker, who is today a professor of medicine at U of T and a senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital, has gone on to repeat his commercialization success. In addition to paving the way for the development of diabetes drugs, his lab discovered the actions of another hormone, GLP-2, and filed a series of patents describing how it improves intestinal growth and function. Today, teduglutide, a drug for short bowel syndrome based on that research, is available in Europe and the U.S. and is pending approval in Canada.

He has also developed cell lines and mice engineered for the study of gut hormones. He makes these cell lines and mice freely available to academic researchers worldwide and licenses them to researchers in industry.

U of T benefits directly from Drucker’s success. The university’s approach to inventions and commercialization includes the sharing of revenues with the institution. In some cases – and Drucker has been one over the years – the revenue is directed to the Connaught Fund, a special U of T endowment dedicated to the support of research and innovation. Connaught awarded Drucker a New Staff Grant in 1987 to study the molecular biology of glucagon gene expression.

In the 25 years since Drucker’s initial discovery, the accolades have rolled in. They include the American Diabetes Association’s Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement, Japan’s Manpei Suzuki International Prize for Diabetes research and election to the Royal Society in London.

But, he says, despite his impressive record, he never sets out to commercialize his findings.

“We study basic mechanisms of hormone action. We do not set out initially to design our experiments with a view towards discovering an invention. We do the science, we hope that we ask good questions and we hope that our findings are novel and of interest.”

But, he says the key is in the mindset, in doing good science and being open to whatever emerges in the lab.

“When we make observations or discoveries, we always have a little light on that says, beyond the pure joy and satisfaction of understanding how this works, might this be relevant to treatment of human disease, and might this have commercialization potential? Keeping that light on is part of what we want to do.”

“Keeping the light on” is something we could do a much better job of, he says. “In Canada, we have fantastic basic science. We lag behind in commercialization.”

Statistics bear this out. In a recent World Economic Forum report, Canada fell from its spot as the 12th most innovative country in the world in 2010 to 25th in 2014. And, according to the Conference Board of Canada, “Countries that are more innovative are passing Canada on measures such as income per capita, productivity and the quality of social programs.”

How help close the innovation gap? Drucker has a few thoughts on the matter.

First, support basic science.

“If you say, ‘We’re only interested in work that has commercialization potential,’ you’re likely to miss 95 per cent of the key basic science discoveries, which at the time they’re made, may not have immediately obvious commercialization potential. Understanding at a very basic level how things work underlies the commercializing of subsequent more applied applications in the vast majority of instances. So neglecting basic sciences, or attempting to redirect funding away from basic science toward work that clearly has an obvious commercialization flavour, is a long-term recipe for failure.”

Second, reward commercialization.

This means, he says, that we need both regulatory change, such as tax regimes more favourable to commercialization revenue, and culture change within institutions.

“We can do a better job educating and rewarding people involved in commercialization. In many parts of the academic enterprise, it’s either passively or almost actively discouraged to interact with companies or to partake in commercial activity.”

Finally, embrace failure.

“We have had discoveries where although the science turned out to be correct, the commercialization potential never materialized. Inventors and scientists shouldn’t feel that every single patent they file has to be a home run. You need to file patents and protect your discoveries. Sometimes these will be commercializable and have great value, but many times they won’t. And there’s no way to predict it. There shouldn’t be any stigma attached to failure.”

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From Milton's velodrome to Toronto's West Don Lands: using the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games to build a legacy

sgupta — Fri, 29 May 2015 10:57:42 +0000

From Milton's velodrome to Toronto's West Don Lands: using the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games to build a legacy sgupta Fri, 05/29/2015 - 06:57

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The Cisco Milton Velodrome was built to be a community recreational centre, with multi-use courts, a walking track, fitness centre and a retail bike and repair shop (all photos courtesy Toronto 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games)

Jenny Hall

Author legacy

Jenny Hall

Some projects are new, large-scale and dazzling – the Milton Cisco Velodrome and the CIBC Pan Am/Parapan Am Aquatic Centre and Field House at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Others feature improvements to existing facilities – a new shooting range at Innisfil's trap and skeet club, upgrades to Caledon's publicly-owned equestrian park and new, wheelchair-accessible tennis courts at the University of Toronto Scarborough Tennis Centre.

But whether you're talking about a new bridge to the rowing facility in St. Catharines or new buildings and spectator seating at the Welland Pan Am Flatwater Centre, the Toronto 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games are changing the built landscape in Ontario, even before the Games begin.

“Pretty much every permanent venue that’s getting built is something that the communities surrounding them really needed in their final state,” says Mark Sterling, director of the Master of Urban Design program at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, on planning.

Large-scale events such as the Olympics or the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games are sometimes seen as expensive sinkholes that siphon resources from more pressing social and economic problems. But can they be good for their host cities and countries?

It depends entirely, says Sterling, on the planning.

For the past 15 years, Sterling has been working in various capacities as a consultant to the City of Toronto and to Waterfront Toronto on the redevelopment of the Central Waterfront, the Port Lands and the West Don Lands, former industrial lands south and east of Toronto’s financial district along Lake Ontario.

(Photo at right of West Don Lands by Spacing Magazine via Flickr.)

There had been public sector interest in redeveloping the West Don Lands since the 1980s, but various plans were stymied by problems of soil contamination and the fact that the area is on a flood plain. Eventually, in the mid-2000s, momentum gathered behind a plan, and Waterfront Toronto kicked off a process to pre-plan what was envisioned as an 80-acre mixed use site that would ultimately contain 6,000 residential units – many of them affordable – businesses, retail and 23 acres of parkland. (Read about the U of T Law alumna who devoted decades to the revitalization of the West Don Lands.)

“I got involved as part of a team doing what’s called a public realm master plan,” says Sterling, who served as urban design lead on the project. “We were designing the streets and most of the parks in detail. My role was to work with the engineers and landscape architects to make sure that as we were planning the detailed design of the streets and blocks and open space of the area, we were integrating the thinking about the way the buildings would frame those spaces.

“Then the Pan Am games showed up.”

By the time the West Don Lands were selected as the site of the Pan Am athletes’ village, the plan for the neighbourhood had already made its way through municipal approvals processes. Construction was ready to begin – and it was expected to take 15 to 20 years to complete.

But, Sterling recounts, “When Pan Am came along, all of a sudden there was an impetus to say, well, maybe we could build most of the buildings now. The buildings required for the Pan Am village were all built according to the plan that was already in place.”

In other words, he says, the Games were a catalyst for a project that was already in the works.

“In a normal development cycle, we would have expected one building to be built every two to three years. So this really kick-started the whole thing. It kick-started affordable housing provision as well because there was quite a strong mandate in that area to provide affordable housing.”

But the built legacy of the Games isn’t just in the West Don Lands. They will take place at 32 venues in 16 municipalities within a 5,300 square kilometre footprint – ten are newly built and 15 are existing facilities that have been upgraded.

(At right, students try out the climbing facilities at UTSC; photo by Ken Jones.)

Heather Irwin, a Pan Am spokesperson, says that the venues will provide Canada’s best athletes to access world-class training facilities at home. They will also, she says, serve the communities in which they’re located, communities as far flung as Haliburton and Niagara Falls.

“Community use and sport legacy is baked into their design,” she says. “It’s not an afterthought.”

For example, says Irwin, the Cisco Milton Velodrome “is the only velodrome of its kind in Canada, and only the third in North America that meets top international standards.”

The Ontario Cycling Association and the Milton Cycling Academy both plan to make the facility their home bases after the Games.

The velodrome was also built to be a community recreational centre, with three multi-use courts, a walking track, fitness centre, community bicycle storage and a retail bike and repair shop.

That the Pan Am venues will have a useful legacy after the Games is something U of T’s Sterling attributes to – once again – good planning. Population in southern Ontario is growing, and provincial plans call for intensification. Because of this, he says, most communities had public projects they wanted to undertake, and the Pan Am bid allowed them to leverage the planning that was already underway.

If Toronto is an example of deriving positive benefits out of a major event like the Pan Am Games, there are other cases that resulted in less than happy endings for the host city. Athens, for example, which hosted the 2004 Olympics, is littered with decaying, abandoned venues.

And Sterling was invited recently to attend a workshop in Lima, Peru, host of the 2019 Pan Am Games, given by a group of planners and architects.

“They were concerned that they were either going to get a lot of temporary facilities that would just disappear or, given that decision making was going to have to happen quickly, they might get the wrong kind of legacy. They don’t have any legacy projects waiting in the wings like we did.”

A city should only take on these events like Pan Am, says Sterling, “if you can use them for something you already know you want to do. Some of the failed Olympics have amounted to a big party with a lot of expensive concrete stuff left over. The positive ones are the ones where they’ve actually made a difference in their cities.

“The legacy question is a big one. There’s no reason to do this otherwise.”

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From better cancer treatments to healthier crops: new backing for U of T scientists

sgupta — Fri, 29 May 2015 10:49:38 +0000

From better cancer treatments to healthier crops: new backing for U of T scientists sgupta Fri, 05/29/2015 - 06:49

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Ue-Li Pen (centre) of the department of astronomy & astrophysics, is working on a project that will allow Canada to participate in international collaborations

Jenny Hall

Author legacy

Jenny Hall

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Research

Six U of T researchers have been awarded a total of $14.6 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation for infrastructure in support of projects tackling topics as diverse as cancer treatment and food security.

“We are enormously grateful to CFI for these investments,” said Professor Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation. “Ambitious, world-leading science requires powerful infrastructure, and we are fortunate that the Government of Canada recognizes that. It is through projects like these that our researchers will tackle society’s most pressing problems.”

The winning projects and lead researchers are:

George Eleftheriades, Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, $2.6 million for “CERES: Centre for Reconfigurable Electromagnetic Surfaces.” The centre will be the Canadian focal point for high-frequency electromagnetic wave research, bringing together researchers from a variety of fields to solve problems in the communications, security and medical sectors. A core technology to be developed is a thin, lightweight surface that controls the generation, propagation and scattering of electromagnetic waves.

Patrick Gunning, department of chemical and physical sciences, U of T Mississauga, $2,382,000 for “Centre for Cancer Stem Cell Therapeutics.” Gunning will lead the establishment of a new centre for cancer drug discovery, focusing on some of the deadliest cancers known, including varieties of brain and blood cancer.

David Guttman, department of cell and systems biology, $1,807,480 for “Food Security in a Changing World: Centre for Plant-Microbe Chemical Genomics.” The centre aims to apply approaches commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry to the promotion of plant health in order to help farmers produce high quality and high value crops in the face of population growth and climate change.

Hoi-Kwong Lo, Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, $762,660 for “Smart Grid: Cyber-Physical Operation, Security and Quantum Technology.” The project aims to make the sophisticated power generation and distribution systems we will reply on in the future smart and secure.

Ue-Li Pen, department of astronomy and astrophysics, $400,000 for “Canadian VLBI Infrastructure.” The project will build very-long-baseline interferometry, which is a technique used in radio astronomy in which observations are made simultaneously by telescopes in different locations. It will enable new observations and measurements and allow Canada to participate in international collaborations.

Sachdev Sidhu & Raymond Reilly, Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, $3,283,502 for “Engineered Biologics: Targeted Diagnostics and Therapeutics.” The project will bring together two teams of scientists. One group will generate hundreds of antibodies – a relatively new class of cancer therapy. The other will use these antibodies to create diagnostics and targeted therapies that are more effective and less toxic than existing treatments.

Funding awarded to these projects comes from CFI’s Innovation Fund, which supports promising and innovative directions in research or technology development in areas where Canada currently is, or has the potential to be, competitive on the global stage.

In addition, each project was awarded funding from the organization’s Infrastructure Operating Fund, which helps cover a portion of the operating and maintenance costs associated with the funded infrastructure.

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Canada Research Chairs: government backs leading scholars in mental health, human rights and more

sgupta — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 11:10:27 +0000

Canada Research Chairs: government backs leading scholars in mental health, human rights and more sgupta Fri, 04/10/2015 - 07:10

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CRC Julie Lefebvre, CRC Leonardo Salmena

Jane Stirling

Jenny Hall

Nicole Bodnar

Author legacy

Jenny Hall, Jane Stirling and Nicole Bodnar

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Engineering

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Chemistry

Research

Subheadline

Minister of State for Science and Technology visits UTM to award 11 new, eight renewed chairs

University of Toronto researchers made a grand showing April 9 in the federal government’s announcement of $139 million for the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program, $17.6 million of which will go to 11 new and eight renewed chairs at U of T.

Ed Holder, Canada’s Minister of State for Science and Technology, visited the University of Toronto Mississauga campus to make the announcement. “Through our government’s updated science, technology and innovation strategy, we are making the record investments necessary to push the boundaries of knowledge, create jobs and opportunities, and improve the quality of life of Canadians,” he said.

Launched in 2000, the Canada Research Chair program is aimed at helping the country attract and retain research leaders in engineering and natural sciences, health sciences, humanities and social sciences. Leonardo Salmena of U of T's department of pharmacology and toxicology and holder of the new CRC in Signal Transduction and Gene Regulation in Cancer, spoke on behalf of the chairholders.

“The Canada Research Chairs program will allow my team to build an infrastructure to conduct excellent science,” Salmena said. “More importantly, it will allow me to have a hand in training Canada’s future researchers.”

Salmena is researching the molecular basis of acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer originating in bone marrow. Through his role as a chairholder, he hopes his research can be used to develop new strategies for preventing and treating this form of cancer.

“We are grateful to the government of Canada for this investment,” said Professor Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation. “The CRC program has enabled universities across Canada, U of T among them, to attract and retain the best researchers from around the world. As such, the program is critical to the long-term prosperity of our nation.”

The diverse array of researchers backed by the program includes such leaders as Lisa Forman of U of T's Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the University of Toronto Mississauga's Joel Levine.

Levine studies the social interaction of fruit flies (hear Levine in a People Behind the Science podcast with Marie McNeely) in a bid to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie innate patterns of social interaction. (Read more about Levine.) Forman, a leading international human rights law scholar, is leveraging her Canada Research Chair to advance health as a human right for all as an integral component of responses to global health equity.

“The right to health is a fundamental human right recognized in international law that can help political and health leaders to better address global health inequities,” said Forman, Lupina Assistant Professor in Global Health and Human Rights.

Supported by CRC funding, Forman’s research seeks to strengthen the international legal framework on the right to health to better respond to global health inequity in a number of ways.

“For example, there’s a loophole in the right to health argument that permits states to deny health care on the basis of limited resources, including for the poorest and most vulnerable populations,” said Forman, who is also director of the Comparative Program on Health and Society, a health fellowship program funded by the Lupina Foundation, which supports graduate research across U of T on the social determinants of health.

International lawyers have tried to fix this loophole by developing the idea of “minimum core obligations” to meet essential health needs that cannot be denied under any circumstances, said Forman. But she added the definition of minimum core obligations does not specify the health needs it covers and fails to specify the obligations of wealthier countries to assist poor countries to meet core obligations.

“These gaps in the definition limit the ability of the right to health to protect people's health against government inaction and cuts in international health funding. My research proposes to fill this gap by analyzing how courts and scholars around the world have interpreted this concept, and using this analysis to reconceptualise how we define and implement minimum core obligations.”

(Read more about Forman's work.)

U of T’s new chairholders are:

Timothy Chan, department of mechanical and industrial engineering — CRC in Novel Optimization and Analytics in Health
Lisa Forman, Dalla Lana School of Public Health — CRC in Human Rights and Global Health Equity
Teodor Grantcharov, department of surgery and St. Michael’s Hospital — CRC in Simulation and Surgical Safety
Monica Justice, department of molecular genetics and the Hospital for Sick Children — CRC in Mammalian Molecular Genetics
Larissa Katz, Faculty of Law — CRC in Private Law Theory
Julie Lefebvre, department of molecular genetics and Hospital for Sick Children — CRC in Developing Neural Circuitries
Joel Levine, department of biology, U of T Mississauga — CRC in Neurogenetics
Jeffrey Meyer, department of psychiatry and Centre for Addiction and Mental Health — CRC in Neurochemistry of Major Depression
Elizabeth Page-Gould, department of psychology — CRC in Social Psychophysiology
Catherine Sabiston, Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education — CRC in Physical Activity and Mental Health
Leonardo Salmena, department of pharmacology and toxicology, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (University Health Network) — CRC in Signal Transduction and Gene Regulation in Cancer

In addition to funding the new chairs, eight chairs were renewed:

Patricia Brubaker, department of physiology — CRC in Vascular and Metabolic Biology
George Elliott, department of mathematics — CRC in Mathematics
Sajeev John, department of physics — CRC in Optical Sciences
Tony Lam, department of physiology and University Health Network — CRC in Obesity
Andras Nagy, department of molecular genetics and Mount Sinai Hospital — CRC in Stem Cells and Regeneration
Geoffrey Ozin, department of chemistry — CRC in Materials Chemistry and Nanochemistry
Nicholas Rule, department of psychology — CRC in Social Perception and Cognition
Elise Stanley, department of physiology and University Health Network — CRC in Cellular Neuroscience

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The problem with solitary confinement

sgupta — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 11:35:17 +0000

The problem with solitary confinement sgupta Mon, 03/30/2015 - 07:35

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Even during the years Alcatraz prison (pictured above) housed convicts, the practice of solitary confinement was criticized for harming the mental health of prisoners (photo by Shannon O'Toole via Flickr)

Jenny Hall

Author legacy

Jenny Hall

Topic

Subheadline

“The desire for retribution is understandable, but it doesn’t necessarily make good policy,” says sociologist Kelly Hannah-Moffat

It’s a practice that has been in the news since the Ashley Smith case first made headlines and, last week, the Ontario government announced it had launched a review of its solitary confinement policies.

Kelly Hannah-Moffat is an expert on prisons, risk assessment and punishment, particularly as experienced by women and marginalized populations. A professor of sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga and director of the Centre of Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, she spoke with writer Jenny Hall about the practice – what is it, what is it supposed to accomplish, and how is it being used?

What does solitary confinement really mean in practice?
Most of the time solitary confinement refers to being in a cell with a restricted amount of possessions. You’re in a cell with a steel bed that is attached to the wall. Sometimes you have a mattress, sometimes you don’t. There will be a toilet and a sink attached to the wall. You might have a barred door or a full metal door with a small window. There’s a slot at the bottom that a meal tray can go through.

Normally you are in that cell for 23 hours a day and allowed out for an hour for showers or for recreation, which is quite basic and involves moving to another space, sometimes a closed-in concrete space that has some natural light or natural air. You can walk around, but you’re by yourself. Normally, the movement between the cell and the recreation space is in restraints – shackles and handcuffs. Many cells are subject to 24-hour monitoring by camera.

There is very little human interaction. Solitary confinement basically prevents you from associating with other prisoners, and severely restricts your movement and can prevent access to visits, treatment, programmes and services.

Are you allowed to have books?
It depends on the type of solitary confinement you’re in. If you have all your privileges withdrawn, then no. But if you’re allowed some privileges, then you could have a book. If you’re on a suicide or self-injury watch, you may not have a mattress, you may not have a blanket, you may not have your own clothes and you wouldn’t have a book or anything you could use to start a fire, harm yourself, or cover a camera.

Can you explain the different types of solitary confinement?
A more punitive or disciplinary segregation would occur if an offender has violated one of the institutional rules. More commonly used is something called administrative segregation, where someone can be placed in segregation for security reasons – to protect their safety or the safety of other prisoners or to protect the security of the institution. This might be somebody who causes fights or is prone to victimization due to their offences or status. It might be someone suffering with acute or unmanageable mental health issues who can’t self-regulate in the wider population or somebody who chronically self-injures or is at risk for committing suicide.

How common is solitary confinement?
Correctional Service Canada will say that it does not use solitary confinement but instead uses forms of administrative segregation or a “secure unit.” This is a bit of linguistic gymnastics because each is a secured space where there is minimal freedom and high surveillance. So in effect, we don’t have clear numbers. But we do know from reports from the correctional investigator, who is a federal ombudsman who looks into complaints and grievances and looks at issues pertaining to the rights of federally sentenced prisoners, that there were 8,221 admissions into segregation in 2012-13. This is up from 7,137 in 2003-04. We also know that a significant proportion of complaints about conditions pertain to segregation, and that many people in segregation have mental health difficulties or are at risk of self-harm or suicide.

So the typical person in segregation is not our image of the horrible, violent offender.
We tend to have a skewed perception of prisoners, especially those who are in segregation. We see them as “the other,” as the terrifying violent predators or the mythical personalities we see on TV who are overly vicious and lethal. But that’s not representative.

Many have mental health problems or cognitive impairments. It’s no surprise when you look at files of people in prison. They are struggling with complex and interconnected issues: addiction, abuse, trauma. They were often in the child welfare system or had family-of-origin issues. They haven’t done well at the front end of their life, so it’s not surprising when they get to the back end that this is where they are.

Is it legal to put people with mental health issues or cognitive impairments into solitary confinement?
The UN declaration for the minimum standard for treatment of prisoners says that you should not put people with mental health difficulties in segregation.

That has not been honoured, and that’s partly because we don’t have very good capacities to address mental health needs in custody. People in custody don’t have good access to psychiatric nurses, to psychologists, to staff with appropriate levels of training to deal with people who are ill.

The Office of the Correctional Investigator and many international and local advocates, inquires and inquests have raised many concerns about the continuation of this practice and its damaging and sometimes lethal effects. Yet it continues.

Does solitary confinement work when it’s applied for disciplinary reasons?
You might have a sense that if we put somebody in segregation, they’re going to learn their lesson, and they’re going to come out and behave properly and follow the rules. There’s no empirical evidence to actually support that. Generally speaking, we know that deterrence is not particularly effective in getting compliance from people. International research shows that segregation has harmful effects, and that it can actually exacerbate the negative behaviour you are trying to control. It can create irreversible psychological damage.

Could that same logic mean that prison in general isn’t effective?
There is no evidence that says prison is effective. It isolates people’s mobility for a short period of time, but it does very little to ensure that someone won’t reoffend in the future. You can selectively incapacitate people, you can hold them in a space and prevent them from moving and interacting with other people for a defined period of time, but in the long term that doesn’t solve the underlying problems that bring people into conflict with the law. In fact, in terms of solitary confinement specifically, people in segregation for a long period of time will start to exhibit the very problems that you’re trying to prevent. It can create aggression, depression, suicidal ideation, a range of mental health issues that may not have been there previously, or it can exacerbate pre-existing ones.

(Cellblock in Kingston Penitentiary, closed in 2013; photo by Aimee via Flickr)

So if it doesn’t work, why has the system evolved the way it has? Is it an issue of lack of resources so solitary confinement is overused?
Part of it is resources. Part of it is who has jurisdiction over the provision of mental health services and how to arrange for those services to be delivered to people under federal sentence. One of the big issues that came up in the Ashley Smith case is how to move people into secure hospital settings where they can be treated for problematic behaviours that are then understood as symptomatic of a mental illness. In a hospital setting, you’re using treatment interventions. You’re not using punitive restrictions that will escalate into various types of use of force – macing, using restraints, having masks over people’s faces or having them in shackles and leg irons. There is international best practice on how to do this that is not being followed.

There has also been resistance to looking at community-based alternatives. We know, for example, that for those prone to self-injury, having somebody to sit there and talk to you and listen to you and just having access to non-judgmental conversations is really important.

The other side of this is that there’s a tremendous toll on the staff that have to work in those units. There is very little training given to people who work in maximum-security segregation units. Investing in the HR side of things is difficult to do. We are in an era of fiscal restraint, and we have punitive sensibilities – you get what you deserve.

And it seems that being tough on crime is a popular political stance.
Taking a hard line on crime is politically popular, but it’s very short-sighted. Parole is an excellent example of this. In Canada, we have a determinate sentencing structure, which means we send people to prison for a specific period of time. Except for life sentences, all sentences have an expiry date. Every sentence ends, which de facto means that these individuals will return to the community. The question is how would you like that person to be returned? Would you like them to come back angrier and more damaged? Or would you like them to come back with a renewed sense of purpose and opportunities to take their lives in different directions?

The desire for punishment is very human. If you or someone you care about has been victimized, the desire for retribution is understandable, but it doesn’t necessarily make good policy. Getting rid of or severely restricting parole options, for example, keeps people in prison longer. It’s very expensive and releases them less prepared to cope with the things they’re going to have to cope with – jobs, housing, transportation, child care, family reunification. And if you magnify that and think about segregation, do you really want to release someone to the street from solitary confinement?

Is there any hope for improvement? What can be done?
We see the sensational cases like Ashley Smith, and we ask how, in a modern democracy where we see ourselves as law-abiding and humane, could that happen? There are lots of community advocates accomplished at dealing with mental health issues and with chronic self-injury. Bringing some of that expertise into the prison system is an important thing, but it is equally important to limit the use of custody and provide better support for individuals in the community. Prevention is preferable, and that can be achieved by ensuring that proper social supports and resources are accessible to people in need, especially for people struggling with mental health issues or addictions.

There are also some basic standards about what is humane treatment. We need to clarify the threshold of what constitutes excessive punishment. We have rules that limit the amount of time someone is in segregation. We have rules about doing reviews. But it’s all done in-house. Where is the oversight? You’ve got corrections policing itself. You’ve got bodies like the correctional investigator, who has for years done special reports around deaths in federal custody and segregation and mental health, and has made a series of very thoughtful recommendations – but they don’t get implemented. In some cases, it’s lack of political will. Sometimes it’s jurisdictional problems. Sometimes it’s resource constraint. Sometimes it’s myopic thinking.

I don’t fault the people who work directly in institutions. Both people in custody and people who work in institutions want safe and secure spaces, but I don’t think segregation is a vehicle for doing that. It’s a short-term solution to an immediate and often preventable problem. And sometimes it exemplifies and demonstrates the failures in the system. This was stunningly obvious in Ashley Smith’s case, where you saw the woman being transferred across the country from place to place and the same things happening over and over again and escalating and escalating. There’s a pattern here, and somebody needs to be looking at the patterns holistically and at the prisoner as an individual, asking, what does she need right now? What will she need tomorrow and the next day? How do we create a holistic plan to move her forward as opposed to just trying to prevent the next incident of self-injury? It’s more of an individual than an event-based approach that is useful.

For me, it’s about identifying those systemic barriers to change. We sometimes talk about more law, more policy, more regulation. We actually don’t need that. We’ve got tons of that. We need cultural shifts in how we think of these things, strong enforcement mechanisms, a respect for the culture of law and the limits that laws present, and more holistic approaches.

Why is change so hard?
Prisoners are out of sight, out of mind and often vilified. Prison walls are more than metaphorical. It is quite difficult for people to get inside to learn about what is going on. There’s very little transparency and accountability for the decision-making that occurs inside. And there’s no significant judicial oversight other than the office of the correctional investigator, and there’s no requirement that corrections actually follow the recommendations of the correctional investigator – or of a coroner’s inquest or an inquiry. Judges’ rulings must be honoured and inquest recommendations are acknowledged, but when they then filter down into daily practices, little real substantive changes in living conditions inside occur. And prisoners do not have a tendency to complain. They don’t always know their rights. Even if they do, they think the exercising of their rights is futile because people who are adjudicating their grievances are in the very intuitions they’re grieving.

It’s a perfect storm in a way, and it’s an unsympathetic population of people. Few will take up their cause, but it’s a barometer on our civility. Yes, when you violate a law and you harm somebody, you deserve a consequence. But what ought that consequence look like? And how do we make punishment, especially in its extreme forms, productive as opposed to inhumane?

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How to kill a fungus – and why

sgupta — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 10:26:59 +0000

How to kill a fungus – and why sgupta Wed, 03/18/2015 - 06:26

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Leah Cowen, a recent winner of the NSERC Steacie Memorial Fellowship, is trying to understand and combat drug resistant fungi (photo courtesy the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council)

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Steacie Fellowship winner Leah Cowen pioneers our understanding of drug-resistant fungal pathogens

MRSA, C. difficile – most of us have become familiar with the ominous alphabet of drug-resistant bacteria. We’ve heard the alarms about the improper use of antibiotics and warnings of a frightening future without drugs to treat strep throat or protect us during routine surgical procedures.

The University of Toronto's Leah Cowen, a professor in the department of molecular genetics and recent winner of a Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council, is sounding a slightly different alarm. (Read more about Steacie fellows at U of T.)

“Fungal superbugs are a cause of just as much human mortality worldwide as some bacterial pathogens,” Cowan says. They’re killing about 1.5 million people per year, which is on par with bacterial pathogens such as those causing tuberculosis or the parasites causing malaria.”

Yet drug-resistant fungi don’t get nearly the attention their bacterial cousins do.

“Fungi mostly affect immune-compromised individuals,” she explains. “Most fungal pathogens are opportunistic, so they can only cause disease when provided an opportunity. This means the major patient groups are transplant recipients, people undergoing chemotherapy for cancer treatment and people infected with HIV.”

And that last group of patients means there is a global inequity in terms of who is hardest hit by fungal superbugs.

“The global burden is much greater in places like sub-Saharan Africa,” she says. “Fungal superbugs don’t rank as much of a threat to the average North American or European, so there’s less media attention. We didn’t get nearly as concerned about Ebola, for example, until it came to North America and Europe.”

To make matters worse, fungi are hard to kill, and that’s because they have a lot in common with their human hosts. Like us, fungi are eukaryotes. This means our cells are organized similarly, containing a nucleus and a series of organelles, which are smaller membrane-enclosed structures inside the cell that perform specific functions. Fungi and humans also have similar sets of genes and cellular processes.

Because of these similarities, when you try to kill a fungus, you often end up introducing disastrous side effects in the human host. Many bacteria, on the other hand, are relatively easy to kill. As a result, while we have a dozen or so classes of antibiotics, there are only three classes of anti-fungal drugs. And fungi are quickly developing resistance to them.

Cowen, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Microbial Genomics and Infectious Disease, wants to know exactly how this happens, so she is investigating how fungal pathogens cause disease and how they evolve resistance to the drugs we use to try to kill them.

A believer in the importance of both fundamental and applied research, Cowen complements her exploratory work with drug development. She’s particularly focused on a protein called HSP90, which is known as a chaperone protein.

“Inside cells, it’s incredibly crowded,” she says. “People often don’t appreciate this. You get images from biology textbooks, and it looks like each protein is doing its own thing and has its own space. In reality, a cell is a very densely packed environment. Proteins bump into each other all the time and engage in what people call promiscuous interactions – interacting with proteins they’re not supposed to be interacting with.”

Enter HSP90. Like a chaperone at a dance urging hormone-happy teenagers not to stand too close, HSP90’s job is to make sure these promiscuous interactions don’t happen. It has long been known that HSP90 plays a role in cancer, but Cowen discovered during her post-doctoral fellowship that it is also critical in facilitating drug resistance in fungal pathogens.

“If you inhibit HSP90, you can reverse drug resistance of many fungal pathogens,” she says. “You can also block new resistance from emerging. We also discovered that it is a key regulator of many facets of biology that is required to cause disease. As a chaperone, it regulates the function of many key circuit points in the cell – it basically allows the cell to function.”

In other words: stop the chaperone, stop the disease.

The tricky part, though, is that this chaperone protein has a counterpart in the human cell. The challenge is to figure out how to disable it in fungi and not in humans.

“We are developing molecules that can go in and selectively target the fungal protein with minimal effects on the human protein.”

Fungi, says Cowen are “understudied and underappreciated.” In addition to threatening human health, they pose a major threat to plants and agriculture – fungi are responsible for the Irish potato famine and Dutch elm blight.

“I was always very interested in the microbial world around me,” she says when asked about the origins of her interest in bacteria’s less famous cousin.

“I did my undergraduate in microbiology and immunology in part because I thought microbes provide fantastic systems to address scientific questions. They reproduce really quickly. They’re the most abundant organisms on the planet. They outnumber human cells in our own bodies by an order of magnitude. They influence all aspects of human health and ecosystem health. Yet they’re so tractable in the lab. You can come up with an idea, do an experiment, and have an answer in a couple days.”

“These life forms have a huge impact on every aspect of our planet.”

Jenny Hall is a writer with the office of the vice-president, research and innovation, at the University of Toronto.

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NSERC awards: big night for U of T as researchers take home three Steacie Fellowships, one postdoctoral prize

sgupta — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 08:21:01 +0000

NSERC awards: big night for U of T as researchers take home three Steacie Fellowships, one postdoctoral prize sgupta Tue, 02/17/2015 - 03:21

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(photos by NSERC)

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NSERC invests $5.3 million in U of T research

sgupta — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 10:19:41 +0000

NSERC invests $5.3 million in U of T research sgupta Tue, 02/10/2015 - 05:19

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NSERC funding will allow Professor Frank Wania (above) and Professor Carl Mitchell to test their simple, inexpensive technique for sampling mercury in the atmosphere

Sarah McDonald

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Sarah McDonald and Jenny Hall

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