SFU Graduate Studies

The graduate students in SFU’s Department of English invite you to attend their conference: Times Out of Joint: Temporalities of Literature, Culture and History, June 16–18, 2011, at SFU Vancouver.

There is no admission fee and all are welcome.RSVPs are not required.

Check the conference schedule for more details on the presentation topics and presenters’ biographies.

The keynote address will take place on Friday, June 17, and features Marie Clements and Ryan Knighton. Marie Clements is a performer and writer whose recognition includes the 2004 Canada-Japan Award, being shortlisted for the 2004 Governor General’s Literary Award, Jessie Richardson Awards and a Jack Webster Journalism nomination. Ryan Knighton is author of Cockeyed, which was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock medal for humour, called one of the year’s hottest reads by People magazine.

• Times Out of Joint website
• Times Out of Joint Facebook page
• Department of English, SFU

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The CAPE Scholarship provides scholarships to students from low-income and minority backgrounds who are pursuing professional studies such as medicine, law, and management.

CAPE Scholars must be eligible for financial assistance, loan and grant programs, and must be involved in a professionally-relevant community service projectwhile pursuing their degrees.

The award value is expected to be $5,000 and may be renewable for the duration of the recipient’s program.

Application deadline: June 30, 2011.

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You are invited to a lecture by Ray Zahab, a global explorer who specializes in completing impossible tasks, including running across the Sahara desert and to the South Pole. He’s delivered inspiring presentations at conferences around the world, including TED, the Apple Distinguished Educator conference and Economist World. He’s an accomplished speaker who will entertain you and inspire you to reach for the impossible in your life.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011, 1:30-3 pm
Due to popular demand, this event has now been moved to Saywell Hall 10081 and reservations have been re-opened.

To reserve your seats:

https://websurvey.sfu.ca/cgi-bin/WebObjects/WebSurvey.woa/wa/survey?83424652

Ray Zahab is the founder of impossible2Possible (i2P), an organization that sponsors youth expeditions with academic themes investigating pressing world issues. In the last three years, expeditions have taken Youth Ambassadors to Baffin Island, Tunisia, the Amazon basin, and the Bolvian Altiplano.

Ray has been honoured to speak at events such as the Apple Distinguished Educator conference, Economist World in 2010 and 2011, World Affairs Council, TED Long Beach, numerous TEDx events, Royal Geographical Society and others all over the world on the work of impossible2Possible.

His visit to SFU will introduce the mission of i2P and invite you to contribute to developing a participation model where SFU students and faculty members might participate in authoring i2P expeditition curricula, become expert panelists in global satellite conferences, and get involved in applying academic skill sets in a high-intensity setting.

Visit the Graduate Studies website for more information about Ray Zahab and the i2P project at SFU.

This event is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies, with support from the IRMACS Centre.

More links about Ray Zahab:

• impossible2Possible
• CNN video: i2P youth ambassadors begin Amazon run
• Ray Zahab’s website
• Wikipedia on Ray Zahab
• Speakers Spotlight biography

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Abhishek (Abhi) Nanjundappa is a PhD student at SFU’s Surrey campus, studying mechatronics systems engineering (MSE). He’s collaborating with industry partner Ballard Power Systems and his PhD research focuses on the development of new simulation tools for next generation PEM fuel cell systems. This line of research could potentially result in a major scientific breakthrough towards the development of cost-effective fuel cell systems with improved performance and durability.

Abhi received his first mechanical engineering bachelor’s degree in Bangalore, India, and his Master’s degree in computational and experimental turbulence from the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, with research based at the German Aerospace Center, Gottingen.

He’s well-travelled, and he believes in contributing to his community. He’s a student representative in the Engineering Graduate Student Association at SFU, and this June, he’ll also participating in a heroic fundraising effort to contribute to the Canadian community — he’ll be cycling on the Ride2Survive from Kelowna to Vancouver in one day, to help raise funds for the Canadian Cancer Society.

It’s a punishing effort, covering two mountain passes and cycling on the Coquihalla. The riders pay their own way to do it, so that all of the funds they raise go to cancer research, nothing to adminstrative costs. If you’d like to donate a few dollars towards his fundraising goal (and get a tax-deductible receipt), please visit his fundraising page at the Canadian Cancer society.

He’s doing this to help eradicate cancer as well improve the quality of life for those already affected by cancer.

• Abhi’s LinkedIn profile
• Erik Kjeang Lab Team, Mechatronic Systems Engineering, School of Engineering Science
• Ride2Survive fundraising page

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Congratulations to Casey Wei, one of this year’s recipients of a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship for her work in SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

Casey Wei is an interdisciplinary artist working through a multi-genre approach of video, text, collage, installation, and music to explore the methods in which identity unfolds as a process of consuming other identities. She often places herself in the work as a performer and/or through diaristic means, weaving together a multiplicity of truths to destabilize any univocal understanding (and therefore complacency) of the art object. She is currently working on her thesis project tentatively titled, Murky Colors, a feature length experimental video/film.

Recent exhibitions include The Dark Arts: SFU MFA Spring Review, and I Could Be Wrong at the Audain Gallery. Other recent works include a performance of a collaged-monologue at Emily Carr’s Student Symposium: Liminal Positions in 2011, and “White Light,” a short story published in inter/tidal.iv, a literary journal.

• Casey’s blog: Nothing Reasons
• Georgia Straight review of Casey’s band: “Kick Evrything refuses to mellow on Stay In/Slow Now“
• Georgia Straight review: “The weirdness is compelling on Kick Evrything’s This I Is Demented and Possibly Deceased“
• Myspace: Kick Evrything

Kick Evrything – “WANNA DO” from Kick Evrything on Vimeo

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Joshua Tanenbaum is working on his PhD at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in the next year, and is enthusiastic about his experience at Simon Fraser University:

I came to graduate school after being inspired by the work of SIAT researchers at the SIGGRAPH conference. I’ve always had too many interests and hobbies and not enough time to focus on them; graduate school has allowed me to sharpen my skills as a designer, an artist, and a scholar.

In my five years here I have learned how to shape my interests into projects and ideas that are contributions to global research communities. Since coming to SFU I have made films, written music, designed games, created props and costumes, and developed new storytelling technologies. I have traveled around the world and interacted with some of the great minds in games, narrative, design, and technology.

This photo shows me as Captain Chronomek, my winning entry into the student design competition at this year’s Tangible and Embedded/Embodied Interactions conference. These days, when I’m not being a superhero, I am working on a project with the City of Vancouver to engage families in emergent dialogues about sustainability issues using a tabletop game that I helped design; editing a book on nonverbal communication in virtual worlds; co-chairing a conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling; and, lastly but most importantly, writing my dissertation.

He’s also the winner of the Office of Graduate Studies’ 40th Anniversary contest, and will be taking home an iPad 2 for this creative and fun winning contest entry.

• Joshua and Karen Tanenbaum’s website and blog: The Geek Movement
• EMIIE (Engage Me In Interactive Experiences) Lab profile
• MA Thesis: Believability, adaptivity, and performativity : Three lenses for the analysis of interactive storytelling
• CAT Games
• Current research: GRAND Greenest City Conversations Project
• YouTube: The Reading Glove
• Vancouver Observer: Technology and art captivate at Mini Maker Faire (with bonus interview on YouTube)
• The Express profile of Josh and Karen Tanenbaum on Youtube.

And last, but not least, on YouTube, the design process of Captain Chronomek!

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The SFU Graduate International Community Program (Grad ICP) invites all grad students and their partners and families for an afternoon of coffee, tea, snacks … and an opportunity to build friendships with others from diverse backgrounds.

June 2, 2011 (Thursday)
Snacks and mingling throughout from 4 – 5:30 pm
AQ 2013 (next to Simon C’s Convenience Store), SFU Burnaby
Cost is a loonie ($1) for yourself, a toonie ($2) if you bring along your spouse/partner, and kids are free! This small commitment fee supports their program costs.

As space is limited, and to ensure adequate refreshments, please RSVP to Mari Ng Mizobe, Program Coordinator at intl_community@sfu.ca. Please include number of attendees.

You’re also invited to their next iCafé on Thursday, July 7, 2011.

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Congratulations to this year’s Convocation Medal Winners who will receive their awards at our Spring Convocation, June 14–17, 2011.

Governor General’s Gold Medals
The Governor General’s Gold Medals are awarded to the two SFU graduate students who achieve the highest academic standing upon graduation from a master’s or doctoral degree program.

• Jesse Cale, PhD, School of Criminology. Thesis: The antisocial trajectories in youth of adult sexual aggressors of women: A developmental framework for examining offending, motivation, and risk of recidivism in adulthood
• Karel Lucien Casteels, PhD, Department of Mathematics. Thesis: The combinatorial structure of the prime spectrum of quantum matrices

Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medals
The Convocation Medals for graduate studies recognize graduating students from each faculty whose cumulative grade-point averages place them in the top five per cent of their class.

• Colin Campbell, PhD, Faculty of Business Administration. Thesis: Consumer motivations for creating and consumer responses to consumer generated advertising
• Stephanie Campbell, PhD, Department of Geography. Thesis: Productive consumption of the ‘livable’ neighbourhood: The case of Commercial Drive, Vancouver, BC
• Angela Cescon, MPH, Faculty of Health Sciences. Thesis: In search of reason: Prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) failures in the era of programmatic scale-up in Soweto, South Africa
• Caroline Greaves, PhD, Department of Psychology. Thesis: Progression towards sexual re-offence: Detailing the offence cycle and contributing factors in high-risk sexual offenders
• Hayley Jones, MA, School for International Studies. Thesis: Conditional cash transfers, labour markets, and poverty reduction: A pilot study of Brazil’s Bolsa Família
• Zaid Jumean, PhD, Department of Biological Sciences. Thesis: Communication of codling moth larvae: Identification and functional role of their aggregation pheromone
• Neil (Anil) Narine, PhD, School of Communication. Thesis: The cinematic network society: Ethical confrontations with new proximities to human suffering in the information age
• Kathryn Ricketts, PhD, Faculty of Education. Thesis: The suitcase, the map, and the compass: An expedition into embodied poetic narrative and its application toward fostering optimal learning spaces
• Kathleen Ross, EdD, Faculty of Education. Thesis: The effect of institutional merit-based aid on student aspirations, choice and participation: A mixed methods approach
• Dennis Storoshenko, PhD, Department of Linguistics. Thesis: A cross-linguistic account of reflexivity using synchronous tree adjoining grammar
• Michel Trottier-McDonald, PhD, Department of Physics. Thesis: Identifying hadronic tau decays using calorimeter topological clusters at ATLAS
• Jing Wang, PhD, School of Engineering Science. Thesis: Cooperation and joint source-channel transmission in wireless networks

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Congratulations to Steven Hubert (with daughter above), one of this year’s recipients of a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship for his work in SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

Steven graduated from Emily Carr in 2007 and has exhibited at CSA Space, Or Gallery, Helen Pitt Gallery, Shudder Gallery, LES, Emergency Room Strathcona, Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax), Jeffrey Boone Gallery, Cafca, and the Ministry of Casual Living (Victoria). His work has also appeared in Pyramid Power and The Fillip Review. As an incoming student at SFU, he was the recipient of the C.D. Nelson Scholarship.

Bearing the imprint of previous study in English literature and history, his work in painting, sculpture, drawing, and video takes cues from the process of writing, in the sense that it develops like an obsessed-over sentence, full of negation and modified by clauses, and with a great deal of effort. It is logical, partly mystical, and perforated by alternating bouts of the simple and the complex. It is often absurdly expansionistic and lacking in apparent clarity due to its chronic and programmatic mistaking of one idea for another. There is also the notion between all the works of an apparently unified plot playing out as a tension between “out there” and “in here”—a psychic dimension which sets a limit on the question of form in painting and invites a consideration of subject matter as emergent from a series of inevitable complications arising from the theatrics of expression.

• Steven’s profile at the Contemporary Arts MFA blog
• Review of one of The So-Patternistic, one of Steven’s pieces
• The Dark Arts show, April 29, 2011, where the piece pictured above was premiered
• Youtube: Recording of Steven’s show at Ministry of Casual Living
• Youtube: Interview with Steven at Ministry of Casual Living

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The Canadian Council on Animal Care welcomes your application to their Fellowship in Animal Policy Development.

This year’s fellowship focus will be in their Guidelines program and will be related to developing guidelines, interacting with the scientific community and the animal welfare community, and contributing to the international harmonization of guidance on animal use in science.

The fellowship is valued at $40,000 per year and is based at the CCAC Secretariat office in Ottawa.

Application deadline: May 31, 2011.

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