SFU Graduate Studies

Congratulations to Deyar Asmaro (above, with his mother at right), who received a prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship this summer from Prime Minister Stephen Harper for his upcoming PhD research: Out of sight, out of mind: Do electrophysiological markers elicited by nicotine-related visual cues predict relapse in a sample of adult smokers?

Deyar’s master’s thesis examined  the brains of marijuana addicts and his PhD research will examine the brains of nicotine addicts who are trying to quit. As we know, tobacco is the number one cause of preventable death in the world today, exceeding the number of annual deaths from car accidents, suicide, murder, AIDS, and illicit drug use combined. He hopes that his research will lead to a better understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying tobacco addiction, which will lead to more effective intervention and prevention programs. All of his research work has been in SFU’s Department of Psychology, as part of Dr. Mario Liotti’s Affective and Developmental Neuroscience Lab.

This isn’t Deyar’s first award by far. As an undergraduate, he received the 2008 Terry Fox Gold Medal and as a master’s student, he received a Arthur and Ancie Fouks Graduate Entrance Scholarship in Public Service and a Fredrick Banting and Charles Best Master Award. He’s also a world-class expert in martial arts.

Scans may help pinpoint addiction centres in the brain

• Deyar’s profile in the Affective and Developmental Neuroscience Lab, SFU Department of Psychology
• Master’s Thesis: The neural correlates of marijuana addiction: Differences in the processing of drug-related and emotional pictures between addicted versus healthy controls
• SFU Release: Overcoming effects of bullying earns Terry Fox medal
• The Province: Special Mentor Helped Rescue Troubled Teen

—

Update: This post is moving to a new home: [See our new website.]

Barbara Lindenberg will be presenting her final MFA dance project for the School for the Contemporary Arts on August 18, 2011, 8 pm, at the WISE Hall in Vancouver. Admission is by donation.

A Thousand Mountains brings Barbara Lindenberg’s choreography to the charming dancefloor of Vancouver’s Wise Hall. From unsettlingly silent lip-synching to slow motion depictions of crowd surfing, each dance creates a world on its own and in relation to others. Best performed in informal environments, Barbara’s dances are short events of a depictive nature. These highly accessible works present a synthesis of simplicity, complexity, absurdity, and optimism.

Barbara Lindenberg is a choreographer/performer who creates contemporary dance for the stage as well as site-specific works. She had the pleasure of carrying forward research and creation as a guest with the Amsterdam Master of Choreography (AMCh) at the Amsterdamse Hoogeschool voor de Kunsten this past spring/summer.

She has worked with songwriters and composers including Jennifer Castle, Dave Chokroun, Eric Chenaux, John Sherlock, Dale Morningstar, Jason Benoit, Jonathan Adjemian, Taylor Rankin and Michael Overton. While she most often creates and performs her own choreography she has also performed dances by Marie France Forcier, Learie McNicolls, Megan English, Aimée Dawn Robinson, Hope Terry, Magali Charrier, Sara Porter, Denise Duric, Allen Kaeja and others.

Her dances have been presented by Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Just for Laughs Street Festival (Toronto), Fringe Shanghai, Series 808 Season Finale, AWOL Gallery’s wHole exhibition, Lab Cabaret, A Month of Sundays, Au Revoir Darling, and Up Darling. Barbara has also presented sets of dances independently at a variety of informal venues in Vancouver and Toronto.

—

Update: This post is moving to a new home: [See our new website.]

The Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies will be presenting two scholarship writing workshops this August for SFU graduate students who would like to apply to the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (for PhD students) or the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship (or any other postdoctoral fellowship).

Topics that will be covered:

Graduate students are invited to form a team of three or more to create a graduate school project around Singapore’s economic activities.

The award is for up to US $10,000 and includes a trip to Singapore for the graduate student team.

The program is open to graduate students of all disciplines, including arts, business, engineering, humanities and sciences. Participants should be graduate students with at least two years of working experience and ideally the project has relevance to their current research interests. Projects may take multiple forms, including research papers, presentations or even presented in alternative media.

The application deadline for the next round of awards is October 31, 2011. For more information, email  singapore@contactsingapore.sg with the subject line “Re: GSP 2011”.

• Graduate School Projects@Singapore
• Project proposal form
• See also: SFU MBAs head to Singapore

—

Update: This post is moving to a new home: [See our new website.]

SFU’s Faculty of Environment has just posted a call for collaborative courses or activities that “enhance teaching and associated environmental education in the broadly defined area of environment.”

Projects must:

• involve tenured/tenured-track faculty or lecturers individually or in teams (may include staff)
• focus on the broadly defined area of environment including humanities, social sciences and natural sciences as well as sustainability
• support teaching or associated activities at either the undergraduate or graduate levels
• involve collaboration with FENV or FENV collaboration with other Faculties

Funding can include graduate student support and faculty buy-out/overload, and projects can be single-term or extended over multiple terms.

Projects will be accepted each term. The first proposal deadline is July 14, 2011. For more information, contact Dan Burns in FENV at dburns@sfu.ca or 778-782-9225.

—

Update: This post is moving to a new home: [See our new website.]

Jesse Cale (fourth from right) received his PhD and the Governor General’s Gold Medal award at Convocation on Thursday afternoon. This award is granted to the two SFU graduate students who achieve the highest academic standing upon graduation from a master’s or doctoral degree program.

His thesis, in SFU’s School of Criminology, was entitled The antisocial trajectories in youth of adult sexual aggressors of women: A developmental framework for examining offending, motivation, and risk of recidivism in adulthood.

Also convocating at this ceremony were Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal award winners Caroline Greaves, PhD, Department of Psychology (thesis: Progression towards sexual re-offence: Detailing the offence cycle and contributing factors in high-risk sexual offenders) and Hayley Jones, MA, School for International Studies (thesis: Conditional cash transfers, labour markets, and poverty reduction: A pilot study of Brazil’s Bolsa Família).

—

Update: This post is moving to a new home: [See our new website.]

Congratulations to Dr. Dennis Storoshenko, who received a Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal at SFU’s morning convocation ceremonies on June 16.

The Convocation Medal recognizes graduating students from each faculty whose cumulative grade-point averages place them in the top five per cent of their class. His doctoral thesis in the Department of Linguistics was A cross-linguistic account of reflexivity using synchronous tree adjoining grammar.

His next stop is at Yale University, where he’ll be doing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Linguistics.

—

Update: This post is moving to a new home: [See our new website.]

This afternoon’s convocation ceremonies is the first of three ceremonies for graduates from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Today’s graduate students were from the Department of History and the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies.

We are delighted to confer a second award on Shadrach Kabango this year for completing his Graduate Liberal Studies degree — his first major award this year was a Juno for best rap recording of the year!

—

Update: This post is moving to a new home: [See our new website.]

The MA in Applied Legal Studies program has received a 2011 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education.

The prestigious award was presented at the association’s national conference in Toronto to John Whatley, the CODE program director who received the award on behalf of SFU’s School of Criminology, Centre for Online and Distance Education (CODE) and, in particular, all the people responsible for the design, implementation and continuing delivery of the program.

Kristy Martin, who completed the program in 2011, says that the innovative delivery of the program was essential: “My favourite experience in this program was e-live, which provided a more interactive learning opportunity without the need for in class attendance. That allowed those of us who do not live in Vancouver an opportunity to have lectures from our professors and to interact with our fellow students.”

Successful completion of the program is required become a Notary Public in BC: BC Notaries Education brochure (PDF).

• MA in Applied Legal Studies
• Society of Notaries Public of BC

—

Update: This post is moving to a new home: [See our new website.]

Congratulations to Doug Blackley, 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 (SCA).

This isn’t his first award by far: he’s received Leo and Sterling awards as well as nominations for Dora, AMPIA and the West Coast Music Awards for his musical compositions for film and the theatre. (The Leo was for the NFB documentary Tokyo Girls, in collaboration with SCA alumna Penelope Buitenhuis.)

Doug is focusing on music composition within the MFA program.  He writes:

After years of working with many different musical sounds, I think it is time to really spend time with notes, chords, melody, harmony, and musical form, all unadorned with timbral colours. As such, I am working with music for the piano.  I am primarily interested in a twentieth and 21st century harmonic palette.  I am interested in composition primarily, but an essential tool for composition remains a study of music theory.  I am paying attention right now to the writings of György Sándor Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, and Karel Janecek.

The MFA has many attractions that seductively beckon my attention. I’d like to spend some time paying attention to current state (and background) of the visual arts.  I’d like to paint some more; the “collaboration class” offered me the opportunity to create a painting with a classmate. I’d like to spend more time looking at Max/msp and other methods of new music/media production.  I’d like to find out what’s really going on today in photography. So many things, so little time.

• Doug Blackley’s website (includes some video demos of his work)
• IMDB: Doug Blackley’s credits
• LinkedIn: Doug Blackley
• School for the Contemporary Arts, SFU

—

Update: This post is moving to a new home: [See our new website.]