Kim Luke

U of T's Mark Lautens and the art of being a great doctoral supervisor

rasbachn — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 04:00:00 +0000

U of T's Mark Lautens and the art of being a great doctoral supervisor

rasbachn Wed, 09/20/2017 - 00:00

Cutline

Mark Lautens on supervising doctoral students: “They should see you as having their interests in mind and helping them reach their potential, rather than you dictating what they do and how hard they have to work”

Kim Luke

Author legacy

Kim Luke

Topic

Our Community

Faculty of Arts & Science

Department of Chemistry

Like most successful relationships, partnerships between doctoral students and their supervisors are a matter of finding the right fit.

Supervisors look for motivated, dedicated and hard-working students who can excel in their field and students look for guidance to do excellent scholarship in supportive and stimulating environments that will position them well for future careers. A good match is important: Supervisors and doctoral students work together for at least five years, longer than many people stay in a job.

For some graduate students, University Professor Mark Lautens of chemistry is that model supervisor. Lautens has supervised more than 50 graduate students and his outstanding performance was recently recognized with the School of Graduate Studies JJ Berry Smith Doctoral Supervision Award.

A renowned researcher, Lautens was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2015 for “his contributions at the forefront of organic chemistry, which have led to the creation of new medicinal compounds with fewer side effects.” Lautens was also recognized this week by the Royal Society of Canada with the Henry Marshall Tory Medal, which is awarded once every two years for outstanding research in any branch of astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, physics, or an allied science.

Lautens says he looks for a combination of enthusiasm and determination. Doctoral students must have the ability to keep trying when they hit a roadblock and the aim of making their own creative intellectual contribution to the project. He also thinks it helps when students view you as an adviser rather than the boss.

“They should see you as having their interests in mind and helping them reach their potential, rather than you dictating what they do and how hard they have to work.”

For Tomislav Rovis, joining Lautens’ group offered a “palpable sense of being in the middle of something that mattered,” doing science at an international scale and competing with the best groups in the world.

“That was somewhat terrifying to a young and very inexperienced researcher but it was also incredibly attractive. I’ve never regretted that decision,” said Rovis.

Now an organic chemistry professor at Columbia University, Rovis was impressed by how much Lautens cared about science and the development of his people. He also appreciated Lautens’ openness and flexibility.

Rovis did not major in chemistry during his undergraduate years, which meant his decision to pursue graduate studies in chemistry was an unusual one. After finishing his bachelor’s degree, he worked for a while and travelled around trying to figure out what to do with his life. He eventually decided to go with his passion for organic chemistry.

Since he did not have an undergraduate degree in chemistry, Lautens advised him to take qualifying courses in a probationary semester while applying to graduate school.

“No other program would have looked at me without an undergraduate degree in chemistry or its equivalent,” said Rovis. “I’m grateful that U of T’s chemistry department – and Mark specifically – looked outside the norms to let me pursue it.”

After completing his undergraduate degree, one of Lautens’ current students, Hyung Yoon, vacillated between whether to pursue graduate studies in pharmacy or chemistry. He found that Lautens’ group offered the exact combination he was looking for: the opportunity to explore research directly related to the development of drugs.

“I thought that Mark was the best choice for me since he was very enthusiastic and the work environment was very supportive,” said Yoon. One of his proudest accomplishments working with Lautens so far has been presenting – and receiving a prize for – a poster at an international conference in South Korea.

Drawn to Toronto’s urban lifestyle and to U of T for its reputation in chemistry, Jane Panteleev researched several potential supervisors. She chose Lautens because his work is recognized across industry and academia in North America and Europe, and has the potential to affect industrial processes and advance chemistry’s role in materials and drug discovery.

Now employed at Amgen Inc, a leading biotechnology company in Cambridge, Mass., Panteleev works on drug discovery programs in therapeutic areas including inflammation, cardiovascular and kidney disease, and neuroscience.

“I loved the systematic and analytical approach employed in the study of chemistry,” said Panteleev. “I also liked that organic chemistry could be applied in many industries including energy, materials, and pharmaceutical sectors.”

While doctoral students go on to many different careers, their doctoral supervisor can have a tremendous and long-lasting impact.

For Panteleev, learning to be analytical and detail-oriented when conducting research were valuable lessons. She also credits Lautens with showing her how to be an effective project leader and supervisor. “Mark’s style of leadership gave me the opportunity to be more independent and to own my research accomplishments.”

Rovis also took away some lasting lessons in how to work with people, including the doctoral students he now supervises.

“There are people in my field that use their positions as adviser to validate their own insecurities,” he said. “They brook no dissent and no contradictions.

“Mark was never like that. I vividly remember contradicting him as a junior graduate student in a group meeting in front of the entire group and he did not use his intellectual muscle and experience to squash me. In retrospect, I was mostly wrong – but not always! – but that’s not the point. Mark let me voice my opinion without retribution. That’s invaluable and the way I run my own group now.”

Read Better Living Through Chemistry, a Q & A with Lautens

Highlighting humanities: U of T's Jackman Humanities Institute celebrates 10 years, welcomes new director

ullahnor — Wed, 31 May 2017 18:18:33 +0000

Highlighting humanities: U of T's Jackman Humanities Institute celebrates 10 years, welcomes new director

ullahnor Wed, 05/31/2017 - 14:18

Cutline

Robert Gibbs (left) is the outgoing director of the Jackman Humanities Institute. Alison Keith (right) is the incoming director (photo by Diana Tyszko)

Kim Luke

Author legacy

Kim Luke

Topic

Our Community

Humanities

Jackman Humanities Institute

From the undergraduate scholars-in-residence research program to the creation of a digital humanities network, the Jackman Humanities Institute has much to celebrate over the last decade.

Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) was established in 2007 thanks to significant donations from the Hon. Henry N.R. “Hal” Jackman, former lieutenant-governor of Ontario and former U of T chancellor. In 2002, he donated $15 million to support the humanities at U of T and then doubled that donation in 2007 with another $15 million – making it the largest gift to the humanities at a Canadian university. The gifts were double matched by the university, spurring increased investment in U of T’s humanities departments.

As JHI marks its 10th anniversary this year, U of T's Kim Luke spoke with outgoing director Robert Gibbs, who has led the institute since its inception, and incoming director Alison Keith about the institute's achievements and what’s ahead.

What have been key achievements for JHI over the past ten years?

Robert Gibbs: The short answer is that we have expanded both the range and the kinds of humanities research activities at the U of T.

The U of T’s humanities departments and centres are world leaders and have exceptional researchers, ranked very highly on all accounts. JHI had no need to duplicate or distract from that. Instead, we aimed to support research that would augment and often complement the traditional and disciplinary research. So, we always looked for ways to forge connections and engage across disciplines, units, faculties and campuses.

No single department could host the research that we have sponsored. For example, the undergraduate scholars-in-residence research project involves faculty from seven different disciplines and five faculties and reaches 50 students from all of the colleges and all three campuses. The chance for our undergraduates to explore humanities research, even at this relatively small scale, is enhanced by the multiple methods and approaches at play. It also creates a cohort of faculty who otherwise might not know each other.

Each year, we bring together a group of scholars – a Circle of Fellows – to explore a theme from their various perspectives. The annual themes – such as Translation and the Multiplicity of Languages; Humour, Play and Games; and Time, Rhythm and Pace – help forge connections across disciplines and generations. Because we do not have a core discipline or approach, the JHI has been open to greater latitude, and this openness allows the different methods and topics to proliferate.

The digital humanities network is one of the most important communities of research to emerge at U of T in the last years. With 215 members, including 150 faculty, it is changing the digital humanities landscape at U of T. Scholars are finding out about new methods, finding new collaborators and creating new projects. There is a huge desire to learn from each other and the JHI is playing a key role by bringing people together.

Why did you decide to take on the role of becoming JHI's next director?

Alison Keith: I was excited to be offered an academic administrative post in which humanities research figures centrally. There are very few administrative positions in the contemporary academy in which we have the opportunity to nurture and celebrate the research conducted by scholars across the full range of humanities disciplines – from the study of languages, linguistics and literature to art, history, philosophy and religion.

The JHI is also an ideal environment for the kind of multidisciplinary research that I do. As a classicist, I work daily with texts written in Latin and ancient Greek (and scholarship in French, German and Italian) and try to assess the historical events that shaped the philosophical and religious commitments and artistic goals of classical authors. So, the opportunity to foster and participate in theoretical and methodological conversations across the humanities disciplines that the JHI supports excites me very much.

What do you hope to accomplish during your term as director?

Alison Keith: The JHI has achieved a great deal in its first years, and I hope not only to maintain the momentum of the established programs but also to consolidate the innovative developments in international, digital and undergraduate humanities research initiated this past academic year.

My top priority is to raise the public profile of humanities research in general and the research undertaken at the JHI, in particular. We have a long way to go get the word out on the street – or even across our huge university – about the most basic questions driving humanities research at JHI.

Social media offers some terrific opportunities, and I hope to launch a weekly blog to showcase the innovative research questions and cross-disciplinary dynamics at the institute. I’m also excited about the idea of a podcast to showcase humanities scholarship in the public sphere.

Raising our international profile is important, and I hope to explore the possibility of targeting specific areas for new streams of postdoctoral fellows in journalism or public humanities research and also for scholars-at-risk.

What do you wish people understood better about the humanities disciplines and their role in today’s world?

Alison Keith: I wish that people understood that humanities disciplines aren’t studied in a vacuum but interact with today’s world in so many ways.

Reading books and visual images and being able to analyze narrative and argument are skills that we use all the time in our lives and workplaces to make sense of our personal as well as the larger social contexts in which governments and institutions act.

Historical interest in how a given society approaches different issues also informs our own understanding of the different forces that influence today’s social policies and inform global conflicts.

The arts we enjoy in our leisure – music, visual art and theatre – can also be enriched for us by critical reflection about their origins and techniques, which are again part of humanist study.

What would you advise students who want to study humanities but are concerned about how well their studies will prepare them for the job market?

Alison Keith: As a scholar and chair of classics, I always tell students that in the uncertain economy of the future, they can’t go wrong by strengthening their literacy and analytic skills through study in the humanities: critical reading, critical writing and critical analysis are transferrable skills that will take them far in whatever profession they wish to pursue.

Students in humanities courses are trained to read texts and images closely, write carefully and analytically about complex ideas and synthesize complicated arguments for oral presentation. These remain valuable and relatively rare skills in our society.

I also advise students to make the most of their opportunity to have an academic experience since the opportunity to focus on study for the sake of study, inquiry for the sake of inquiry, and the satisfaction of one’s own intellectual curiosity are not usually available outside of the university context and are worth pursuing if only to learn about oneself and one’s own particular interests. This kind of immersion in academic inquiry ideally helps to focus students’ professional interests beyond the university too.

Then I’d advise that they look at the information on the website of the Education Policy Research Initiative that charts mean earnings by field of study.

Learn more about humanities at U of T

Changing our view of humans’ place in the world could save the planet: U of T environmental humanities prof

ullahnor — Wed, 31 May 2017 15:34:48 +0000

Changing our view of humans’ place in the world could save the planet: U of T environmental humanities prof

ullahnor Wed, 05/31/2017 - 11:34

Cutline

Professor Andrea Most studies and teaches students about environmental humanities (photo by Diana Tyszko)

Kim Luke

Author legacy

Kim Luke

Topic

Global Lens

Humanities

Faculty of Arts & Science

Environment

Books

Andrea Most is engaged in a relatively new field of research – environmental humanities – that re-conceptualizes our relationship to the world in a way that might even save us from ourselves.

She is a professor of American literature and environmental studies in the department of English at the University of Toronto, where she teaches and conducts research in modern American literature and culture, Jewish cultural studies, food studies, and theatre and performance.

Most has students use the lens of literature, history, art and philosophy to explore the human relationship to the environment.

“How we behave in relation to the world around us is shaped first and foremost by cultural values, by the stories we tell about who we are – and who we should be – in the world,” she says.

U of T's Kim Luke spoke with Most about environmental humanities and a new way of thinking.

What role could the humanities play in addressing the environmental crisis?

We have really good science on climate change, environmental toxins, pollution, water issues and so on. The science is essential for explaining what is happening and what we need to do to address these crises.

But for reasons that have mystified scientists, politicians, economists and social scientists, the general public doesn’t pay much attention and certainly isn’t taking action proportionate to the severity of the situation. This is where humanities scholars, writers and artists have a crucial role to play.

How we behave in relation to the world around us is shaped first and foremost by cultural values, by the stories we tell about who we are – and who we should be – in the world.

We need to understand the old stories in order to figure out how we got into this mess, and, most importantly, we need to collectively imagine new stories. Only through creating and living new stories – what I would call new cultural mythologies about freedom, success, health, nature, humanity and ethics – can we begin to change our behaviour in the deep and fundamental ways necessary to allow us to rise to the challenge of the great crisis facing our species. There is a terrific call to action for writers in the Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Humanities journal.

Humanities scholars are uniquely trained for this task. This work can’t happen without us.

Students in Andrea Most’s first-year seminar, The Environmental Imagination, present their final projects, exploring a multilayered celebration of spring (photo by Diana Tyszko)

What exactly are environmental humanities?

On the simplest level, the environmental humanities study environmental issues and especially the human relationship to those issues through the lens of literature, history, art and philosophy. The field is fundamentally interdisciplinary and often includes collaborations with the sciences, social sciences and various areas of the humanities.

In the earlier days of the environmental humanities, scholars focused on championing and explaining environmentalist thought – this is still a part of our agenda – but in recent years, the environmental humanities have begun to challenge environmentalists – and all of us – to think more carefully about our concept of nature and the relationship between nature and culture.

Environmental humanities scholars often straddle the divide between academia and the general public, both responding to and influencing popular representations of current ecological conditions and problems.

How does your first-year seminar course, The Environmental Imagination, introduce students to some of the core concepts of the environmental humanities?

I try to move students from thinking of themselves as “being in nature” when they are out in the country to “being in nature” even within an urban-built environment and finally “being nature” by the end of the year so that they begin to conceive of themselves as part of an ecosystem and not separate from it.

The idea of decentring human beings is central to the course, and students explore a wide variety of creation and apocalypse myths from ancient sources – Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and Anishinaabe traditions. We explore how North American thinkers have represented the human relationship to the world through fiction, essays, poetry, film and new media, and ask how the stories we tell about our relationship to the earth have shaped the way we encounter and enjoy, destroy and restore, and use and abuse the natural world.

We read and study works by Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Andy Goldsworthy and many others. And, we watch films such as Pocahontas, WALL-E and Merchants of Doubt.

This year’s course culminated with an experiential component in which the students told their own nature story by creating a ritual celebration of the seasons using songs, stories and theatre.

Tell us about your own research in environmental humanities?

My main focus right now is The Persephone Project, a research initiative that explores what happens to life writing when individual human beings – shaped by a long-standing cultural mythology that separates mind, body and earth – are reconnected to the world.

Specifically, I am interested in how climate change, species extinction and the discovery of the human microbiome are transforming the way we think – and write – about our lives. The book that is emerging from my research, currently entitled A Pain in the Neck, engages literary and political issues in a deeply personal way, and is intended for a broad general audience. I’m writing it in the first-person, layering stories of individual experience within the more scholarly historical and critical narrative.

A Pain in the Neck begins with the tale of a mysterious neck injury, which becomes a metaphor for the troubled yet life-sustaining connection between our rational and embodied selves. This pain in the neck – and the narrator’s attempts to heal it – leads her from a personal health issue to a wide-ranging exploration of the still powerful but fatally flawed mythology, which assumes that mind is separate from and superior to the body, and human culture is likewise separate from and superior to nature. As she watches this old story unravel around her, she begins to discern the outlines of new strategies for reconnection, and, in the process, re-imagines what it means to be human.

For parts of the book, I am conducting land-based and embodied writing experiments around the ecological design principles of permaculture and new discoveries of the microbiome inside us. I explore the relationship between ecological and literary form and ask how our sense of subjectivity changes when we realize we are actually walking ecosystems, that Walt Whitman’s proclamation “I contain multitudes” is materially true.

Do you ever hear from students/parents who are afraid that studying humanities is not a good way to prepare for the future? What advice do you give them?

Sure, that’s a common concern. What good is reading books and thinking about ideas when what we need is a good job? This is why I really love teaching my first-year course, which tends to attract students in commerce and life sciences who are looking to fulfil a humanities requirement.

I am much more interested in teaching students to read and think critically in whatever field they choose, than in specifically training them to be literary critics or English teachers – we need some very talented people to do that as well, of course, but they tend to be a self-selecting group of those who love books so much they want to spend their lives studying them.

What I try to communicate to my first-year students is that there isn’t a gaping divide between the core ideas of the environmental humanities and their own long-term goals in business, technology or medicine. We discuss questions of what it means to be human, what our responsibility is to one another and the earth, how we can bring these concerns and thoughts into many fields.

For example, we have a unit on time, where we use literary texts like the Sand County Almanac to look at how ideas of productivity have changed over history, or how body/nature time conflicts with industrial time in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times, how our culture has chosen to resolve those conflicts in the past, and how we can imagine new ways of resolving them for the future. And then, I ask them to write stories about this, integrating their own life goals and studies.

See the top 11 reasons to study the humanities

Canada 150: New survey finds big gaps in how we study the country's birth

ullahnor — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 15:16:24 +0000

Canada 150: New survey finds big gaps in how we study the country's birth

ullahnor Wed, 03/29/2017 - 11:16

Cutline

The Charlottetown Conference was held in 1864 for representatives from the colonies of British North America to discuss Canadian Confederation (image courtesy of Library and Archives Canada)

Kim Luke

Author legacy

Kim Luke

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Subheadline

University of Toronto and York University researchers surveyed historians and political scientists about how the 1867 Confederation is studied in Canada

A recent survey of Canadian historians and political scientists, conducted by the University of Toronto and York University, has found that there are important gaps in how Canada’s 1867 Confederation is studied in this country.

The British North America Act was passed 150 years ago today, triggering the process of Canada’s Confederation.

Canada’s 150th anniversary is heralded by some as marking a great moment in the country’s history: a view that reflects the opinion of political leaders at the time. John A. Macdonald, who went on to become Canada’s first prime minister, for example, hailed the union of British North American colonies, predicting “a great nationality, commanding the respect of the world.”

Undergraduate students compete at U of T this weekend to tackle affordable housing challenges

ullahnor — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 20:24:26 +0000

Undergraduate students compete at U of T this weekend to tackle affordable housing challenges

ullahnor Fri, 03/10/2017 - 15:24

Cutline

Regent Park, Canada's oldest and largest social housing development, is being revitalized with a mixture of condominiums, market-rate rental apartments and public housing (photo by the City of Toronto via Flickr)

Kim Luke

Author legacy

Kim Luke

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

The students behind CivicSpark – a University of Toronto group devoted to fostering the next generation of city builders – will bring 13 undergraduate teams from universities across the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area (GTHA) together this weekend to offer solutions to the area’s affordable housing problem.

“With the cost of housing constantly increasing, there is a real concern that people, especially marginalized and vulnerable groups can be pushed out of their homes,” said CivicSpark’s co-founder Edwin White Chacon, a fifth-year Arts & Science undergrad who is majoring in political science, and ethics, society and law.

The competition comes at a time when the University of Toronto is exploring different housing approaches to help make the city more livable and sustainable. U of T President Meric Gertler is working with the presidents of three other GTA universities to tackle affordable housing through a call for research proposals. U of T is also looking into building laneway houses in the Huron-Sussex neighbourhood bordering the St. George campus.

Thanks to K-Pop and Korean dramas, Toronto's Korean speech contest at U of T gets bigger each year

ullahnor — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 22:24:03 +0000

Thanks to K-Pop and Korean dramas, Toronto's Korean speech contest at U of T gets bigger each year

ullahnor Fri, 03/03/2017 - 17:24

Cutline

Students speaking at the Korean Speech Contest 2016

Kim Luke

Author legacy

Kim Luke

Topic

Global Lens

Language

East Asian

Faculty of Arts & Science

Korean

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Subheadline

The competition will be held March 11

The Korean Speech Contest held each year at U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs keeps getting bigger and better since its launch 10 years ago – an upsurge in popularity that mirrors a wider trend in Korean language study.

This year, 45 university and high school students from across Canada will give speeches in Korean on topics ranging from pop culture and food to Korean friends and their own language study experiences.

Female chimpanzees employ babysitters to wean young faster: U of T research

lanthierj — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 15:13:21 +0000

Female chimpanzees employ babysitters to wean young faster: U of T research

lanthierj Wed, 11/09/2016 - 10:13

Kim Luke

Author legacy

Kim Luke

Topic

Global Lens

Research & Innovation

Faculty of Arts & Science

Global

International

Anthropology

A babysitter can make a big difference in a parent’s life. For wild chimps in Uganda, it may even mean that mothers can wean their infants faster, which can allow them to reproduce again more quickly.

A University of Toronto study looked at 42 pairs of chimpanzee mothers and infants at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda. Researchers wanted to better understand the impact of “alloparenting” – or babysitting – when individuals other than the mother assisted with infant care.

In a paper published in the Royal Society Open Science (RSOS), they describe looking at two particular aspects of care that these other individuals provided: infant handling – carrying and holding the infants, and natal attraction – the interest in infants demonstrated through behaviours like grooming and playing.

Read the CBC story about the research findings

The researchers compared whether the extent of involvement of these individuals impacted the proportion of time that mothers spent foraging, the rates that infants nursed, and the contribution of milk to infants’ diets.

“Infants who were held and carried more by babysitters, nursed less often and drank less milk,” said Iulia Bădescu, a PhD candidate in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Toronto, and lead author of the study. “This means that they were becoming more nutritionally independent compared to infants of the same age who were babysat less or not at all. They were going through the weaning process quicker, and would likely be done weaning at a younger age.”

Babysitting may benefit mothers by enabling females to invest in their next offspring sooner through this accelerated weaning.

“But not all chimpanzee mothers relied on babysitters and, in fact, in other chimpanzee communities, babysitting may be a behaviour that rarely occurs. Our findings emphasize the significance of babysitting as a flexible component of female reproductive strategies in some species.”

In a separate study, Bădescu (pictured below) and her colleagues found that chimpanzee mothers let their “toddlers” nurse for comfort, even after lactation was over and they were receiving no milk.

“The young chimps were already weaned but continued to make contact with their mothers’ nipple not for nutrition, but presumably for emotional purposes, when they needed to be comforted,” said Bădescu of the related study published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology last month.

The researchers employed a novel method in both studies to arrive at their conclusions, analyzing fecal samples to determine what the contribution of maternal milk was to the diet of the chimpanzee infants. Until now, it has been very difficult to actually measure what animal infants eat in the wild, and Bădescu and her colleagues are the first to use this non-invasive method with wild primates in large numbers.

”This novel method quantifies infant diets for us, so that we can know more precisely when weaning occurs for wild mammals, and also provides a biological way to determine if some infants are developing quicker than others” Bădescu said.

Two of U of T's University Professors honoured by Royal Society for exceptional contributions

ullahnor — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 16:01:48 +0000

Two of U of T's University Professors honoured by Royal Society for exceptional contributions

ullahnor Thu, 09/29/2016 - 12:01

Cutline

Barbara Sherwood Lollar, left, and Linda Hutcheon, right, have been awarded medals by the Royal Society of Canada (photo composite by Diana Tyszko)

Kim Luke

Author legacy

Kim Luke

Topic

Barbara Sherwood Lollar

The Royal Society of Canada is honouring two U of T scholars, Linda Hutcheon and Barbara Sherwood Lollar, both holders of the prestigious distinction of University Professor, a title held by only two per cent of the tenured faculty.

Hutcheon, University Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, will receive the 2016 Lorne Pierce Medal for achievements in critical literature which have transformed understanding of “Canadian identity.”

Sherwood Lollar, University Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences, has been selected to receive the Bancroft Medal, a prize for work that contributes enormously to public understanding and appreciation of the earth sciences.

“Both Linda Hutcheon and Barbara Sherwood Lollar are enormously respected in the international community as influential leaders in their fields,” said David Cameron, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science. “This latest accolade reminds us how highly they are both valued by their home country as well.”

Hutcheon became a scholar of Canadian literature following her training in comparative European literature, a step she describes as “natural for a Canadian watching the exhilarating post-Massey Report flowering of our literary culture. In the '70s, the excitement was palpable, and continues to be so.”

The 1951 Massey Report had warned that Canadian culture was becoming invisible in the shadow of the American invasion of film, radio and periodicals, leading the government to require Canada’s mass media to encourage Canadian content.

"Being awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal, with its emphasis on the study of the literature of Canada, is an immense honour for me, and not only because of the many brilliant Canadianists who have won it before,” said Hutcheon. Previous medallists include Alice Munro, Rudy Wiebe and Rosemary Sullivan.

Hutcheon has achieved broad international recognition as a literary theorist, a major critical voice on Canadian writing and culture, and as an interdisciplinary collaborative scholar. The author of nine books and co-author of four in collaboration with physician Michael Hutcheon, she has also edited 16 books or special issues of journals and published 300 articles and book chapters.

A translator of Québec writers, Hutcheon also co-edited a book of interviews and fiction on what was for her a defining part of Canadian culture: its multicultural as well as bicultural/bilingual identity. Her Other Solitudes (1990) grew out of what she calls her “crypto-ethnic” experience: her married name conceals her cultural identity as an Italian Canadian.

“I was driven by a desire to understand why culture matters, how Canadian culture helps shape individual, regional and national senses of self, and how cultural and linguistic diversity can and should be seen and practiced as forms of enrichment and invigoration rather than abrasion and instability,” she said.

For Sherwood Lollar, being selected as the recipient of the Bancroft Award marks an important tribute to the depth and breadth of the earth sciences.

Sherwood Lollar’s research ranges from projects that inform public policy and improve remediation of groundwater resources globally, to spearheading international research collaborations to uncover the most ancient water on earth, a discovery with potential implications for life on other planets.

These deep waters, found three kilometres beneath the Canadian Shield, were reported in the prestigious journal Nature and has captured both the scientific community’s attention and the public’s imagination with several news outlets noting the discovery as one of the top 10 science stories of 2013.

A second paper, also published in Nature on the hydrogen and methane-rich waters of the deep crust sparked similar attention for its implications not only for expanding our understanding of Earth’s subsurface life and habitability but for insights to the origin of methane – and possibly life – on Mars.

Sherwood Lollar’s research in groundwater quality and remediation – investigations of bioremediation of toxic organic compounds using compound specific stable isotope analysis (CSIA) – revolutionized approaches to remedy environmental contamination.

While the scientific community was aware that certain organic contaminants – particularly petroleum and chlorinated hydrocarbons – could be remediated by naturally occurring microbial communities, there was no solid “in situ” evidence of the effectiveness of the process and this, understandably stood in the way of regulatory approval and support.

Sherwood Lollar provided the necessary proof. In the words of research microbiologist John Wilson of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, CSIA was like “turning the lights on” by providing one of the few convincing means of demonstrating the effectiveness of natural microbial alternatives. The scientific approaches and research field Sherwood Lollar pioneered are now in widespread use throughout the world.

In 2000, Sherwood Lollar was selected by Time as one of 25 “Leaders for the 21st Century,” and in 2013 Canadian Geographic named her one of the “Top Canadians Changing the World.” In 2012, she received the Eni Award in Protection of the Environment, a prestigious international prize for outstanding research in fields of energy and the environment.

Most recently, she entered the Order of Canada at its highest level: Companion of the Order of Canada, was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and won the NSERC John C. Polanyi Award, one of Canada’s highest honours in science and engineering.

Hutcheon and Sherwood Lollar will receive their awards at a ceremony at the Royal Society of Canada’s Annual General Meeting on Nov. 18, 2016.

U of T’s Deborah Cowen receives Trudeau Fellowship for boundary-busting research

lavende4 — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 16:09:49 +0000

U of T’s Deborah Cowen receives Trudeau Fellowship for boundary-busting research

lavende4 Tue, 09/20/2016 - 12:09

Cutline

Deborah Cowen will receive a $225,000 Trudeau Fellowship (photo by Diana Tyszko)

Kim Luke

Author legacy

Kim Luke

Topic

Our Community

Trudeau Fellowship

Awards

Faculty of Arts & Science

Deborah Cowen, a University of Toronto scholar whose work spans urban planning and politics, citizenship, contested spaces and social justice, has been selected for a prestigious Trudeau Fellowship.

The $225,000 fellowships, awarded by The Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation to up to five individuals each year, recognizes and supports the work of humanists and social scientists who venture beyond the boundaries of their disciplines to find new solutions to complex issues of major importance to Canadians.

An associate professor in the department of geography & planning in the Faculty of Arts & Science, Cowen looks at how conflicts over infrastructure have come to define our political landscape. She will use the fellowship to pursue an ambitious three-year project entitled Reassembling the Infrastructures of Citizenship.

“Infrastructure is arguably at the centre of political life today,” says Cowen.

“When they work, infrastructures bring us food, water, power, resources, consumer goods, information, security, and connections to loved ones. But the same structures and systems that enable greater mobility for some also often disconnect and dispossess others.”

One clear example is the Alberta tar sands. Industry pressure to get bitumen to transnational markets has provoked controversial pipeline construction with social, environmental and Indigenous groups fighting the projects. At the centre of these struggles are questions of competing sovereignties on lands that remain unceded or contested.

With an ultimate goal of finding ways toward a more just and sustainable future, Cowen’s project aims to rethink policy and political community from precisely the points of conflict, injury, and difference that lie at the heart of infrastructure crises in Canada. Central to her approach is engagement and learning from the communities whose lives are profoundly affected by infrastructure decisions but who are often at the margins of contemporary political life.

Through four case studies in energy, transportation and security, Cowen will work with social movements and communities who contest the injustice of infrastructure and identify alternatives.

Pipelines and Power will explore how contemporary Indigenous sovereignty and histories of settler colonialism might be negotiated in the context of energy pipeline projects and investigate how energy infrastructures may be re-imagined to cultivate just and sustainable social and ecological futures.
Bordering Belonging will ask how to rethink national borders in an era of global migration and crises of asylum and whether border infrastructures could be recast to sustain rather than contain citizenship.
Policed People will look at how the social infrastructures of the city could undermine rather than intensify experiences of racial and gendered inequity.
Carrying Cargo will investigate how infrastructures of transnational trade could be governed so they may also support local livelihoods and how the connectivity they foster could also enrich collective deliberation

“Deborah Cowen is a brilliant young scholar of the first rank, and it is wonderful to see her work being recognized in this way by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation,” said U of T president Meric Gertler. “As she analyses and rethinks the infrastructures that underpin local and national communities, she is at the same time critically theorizing a much-needed new vision of how these infrastructures can undermine or enhance citizenship. Her new project promises to be pathbreaking.”

Cowen’s most recent book, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, received the 2016 International Political Sociology Book Award. She also has worked with the National Film Board of Canada, to co-create the international award-winning Universe Within, a digital documentary that reveals the hidden digital lives of highrise residents around the world. Cowen’s research and policy recommendations have had a concrete impact in Canada: both the City of Toronto and the United Way have used her work on social infrastructure in their redesign of urban social policy.

Cowen is the seventh Trudeau fellow from the University of Toronto. Previous recipients include: George Elliott Clarke, Sujit Choudhry, Joseph Heath, Kent Roach, Janice Stein and Rosemary Sullivan.

U of T scientists solve puzzle of converting CO₂ emissions to fuel

lavende4 — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 13:34:46 +0000

U of T scientists solve puzzle of converting CO₂ emissions to fuel

lavende4 Thu, 08/25/2016 - 09:34

Cutline

Geoffrey Ozin and his colleagues believe they have found a way to convert CO₂ emissions into energy-rich fuel (Brian Summers photo)

Kim Luke

Author legacy

Kim Luke

Topic

Our Community

Research

Every year, humans advance climate change and global warming – and quite likely our own eventual extinction – by injecting about 30 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere.

A team of U of T scientists believes they’ve found a way to convert all these emissions into energy-rich fuel in a carbon-neutral cycle that uses a very abundant natural resource: silicon. Silicon, readily available in sand, is the seventh most-abundant element in the universe and the second most-abundant element in the earth’s crust.

The idea of converting CO₂ emissions to energy isn’t new: there’s been a global race to discover a material that can efficiently convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water or hydrogen to fuel for decades. However, the chemical stability of CO₂ has made it difficult to find a practical solution.

“A chemistry solution to climate change requires a material that is a highly active and selective catalyst to enable the conversion of CO₂ to fuel. It also needs to be made of elements that are low cost, non-toxic and readily available,” said Faculty of Arts & Science chemistry professor Geoffrey Ozin, the Canada Research Chair in Materials Chemistry and lead of U of T’s Solar Fuels Research Cluster.

In an article in Nature Communications published August 23, Ozin and colleagues report silicon nanocrystals that meet all the criteria. The hydride-terminated silicon nanocrystals – nanostructured hydrides for short – have an average diameter of 3.5 nanometres and feature a surface area and optical absorption strength sufficient to efficiently harvest the near-infrared, visible and ultraviolet wavelengths of light from the sun together with a powerful chemical-reducing agent on the surface that efficiently and selectively converts gaseous carbon dioxide to gaseous carbon monoxide.

The potential result: energy without harmful emissions.

“Making use of the reducing power of nanostructured hydrides is a conceptually distinct and commercially interesting strategy for making fuels directly from sunlight,” said Ozin.

The U of T Solar Fuels Research Cluster is working to find ways and means to increase the activity, enhance the scale, and boost the rate of production. Their goal is a laboratory demonstration unit and, if successful, a pilot solar refinery.

In addition to Ozin, collaborators on the paper include:

Le He, Chenxi Qian, Laura Reyes, Wei Sun and P.Y. Wong – Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Arts & Science;
Abdinoor Jelle and Jia Jia – Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Arts & Science and Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering;
Kulbir Kaur Ghuman, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering;
Chandra Veer Singh – Department of Materials Science & Engineering and Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering;
Charles A. Mims, Paul G. O’Brien and Thomas E. Wood – Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, and Solar Fuels Research Cluster;
Amr S. Helmy – Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.

Kim Luke

U of T's Mark Lautens and the art of being a great doctoral supervisor

Read Better Living Through Chemistry, a Q & A with Lautens

Highlighting humanities: U of T's Jackman Humanities Institute celebrates 10 years, welcomes new director

Learn more about humanities at U of T

Read more humanities stories

Changing our view of humans’ place in the world could save the planet: U of T environmental humanities prof

Read more about humanities at U of T

See the top 11 reasons to study the humanities

Canada 150: New survey finds big gaps in how we study the country's birth

Read more at The Globe and Mail

Undergraduate students compete at U of T this weekend to tackle affordable housing challenges

Read more about the call for research proposals on affordable housing

Read more about laneway housing initiatives

Thanks to K-Pop and Korean dramas, Toronto's Korean speech contest at U of T gets bigger each year

Read more at CBC News

Female chimpanzees employ babysitters to wean young faster: U of T research

Read the CBC story about the research findings

Two of U of T's University Professors honoured by Royal Society for exceptional contributions

U of T’s Deborah Cowen receives Trudeau Fellowship for boundary-busting research

U of T scientists solve puzzle of converting CO₂ emissions to fuel