SFU Graduate Studies

The Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW/FCFDU) offers a number of scholarships to women in graduate studies.

Awards range in value from $2,000 to $11,000 and applicants must be women who are Canadian citizens. Different awards have different criteria, such as enrollment in a history program, enrollment in a PhD program, enrollment in a fine arts program or returning to academia after years away.

The application deadline for the 2012–2013 academic year is November 1, 2011.

• CFUW Fellowships and Awards Competition Guidelines and Instructions for 2012–2013 Academic Year
• CFUW Fellowship and Award Application Form for 2012–2013
• CFUW Fellowship and Award Filing Fee Payment Form 2011
• CFUW Reference Letter Form 2011

—

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

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.]

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers  (IEEE) is holding a symposium in Vancouver this July 24–27: The 20th IEEE International Symposium on Applications of Ferroelectrics, jointly held with the International Symposium on Piezoresponse Force Microscopy & Nanoscale Phenomena in Polar Materials.

Graduate students are invited to participate in the short courses on Sunday, July 24 and in the poster competition. Some financial assistance may still be available.

They’re also looking for student volunteers to help out at the symposium. Volunteers can request to be an attendant at specific sessions and will receive full admission to attend lectures and sessions around their volunteer schedule.

For information on how to get involved, contact Regan Belan, MSc candidate in chemistry, by email to rab11@sfu.ca

—

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

Congratulations to the recipients of the first round of professional development grants awarded by SFU’s Graduate Student Society.

• Sarah Carr‐Locke, Archaeology
• Csilla Egri, Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology
• Ben Gehrels, English
• Jasmine Kastner, Health Sciences
• Helen Lalancette, Education
• Erica Olson, REM
• Kirk Plangger, Business
• Masha Tkatchouk, Criminology
• Cheng Zhang, Engineering

Students each received $500 to support their conference and research travel. See full press release.

SFU graduate students who are planning to travel for conferences or research between September 1 through December 31, 2011 are invited to apply for the next round of awards. For more information, see www.sfugradsociety.ca or email Sarah Chown, GSS Professional Development Coordinator, prof‐dev@sfugradsociety.ca.

Application deadline: August 2, 2011.

—

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is now accepting applications for Junior Fellows at the Janelia Farm Research Campus. This is a post-doctoral fellow position with an appointment period of up to three years which may be renewed for an additional two years.

In particular, they’re looking for researchers in to perform interdisciplinary research in these key areas:

the identification of general principles that govern how information is processed by neuronal circuits, using genetic model systems in conjunction with imaging, electrophysiological, and computational methods; and the development of imaging technologies and computational methods for image analysis.

Application deadline is July 1, 2011 at 2 pm. Apply online.

See also: HHMI Graduate Program (PhD), which will reopen later this year. If you’re close to completing your Master’s degree and you’re interested in applying to this PhD, please consider beginning the process now as it is an unconventional application process.

—

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

The Malaysia International Scholarship (MIS) is an initiative by the Malaysian Government to attract top students to pursue post-graduate and post-doctoral studies at twenty public and four private universities in Malaysia.

Priority fields of study include science and engineering; agriculture and fisheries; economics and Islamic finance ; information and communication technology; biotechnology; biosecurity and food safety; infrastructure and utility; environmental studies; and health (including but not limited to, nursing, medicine, clinical pharmacy).

Each scholarship consists of air tickets to Malaysia, tuition fees, monthly living allowance, annual grant for books and internal travel and more.  PhD and post-doctoral students will also receive a thesis allowance, a conference travel grant and a journal publication grant.

Applications must be submitted through the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia’s online application system. The application deadline is June 15, 2011

• Applicant Guidelines PDF
• List of Malaysian Universities PDF

—

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

Congratulations to Andrew Au, an engineering graduate student, for taking first place in this year’s BCNET Digital Media Challenge Competition for his video (linked above), entitled Veaver, an Interactive Multiview Video System.

It was a good year for the university: A team of undergraduate students from SFU’s SIAT program took the second place spot in the competition.

—

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

Congratulations to Evgeniy Lebed, PhD candidate in Biomedical Engineering. He’s just been awarded the Canadian Bureau for International Education, Embassy of France Scholarship to continue his research in computational anatomy for eight months in Paris, France. There, under the supervision of a world-leading expert in the field, he hopes to gain more insight into the physiological processes that help shape a healthy brain versus a diseased one.

After completing a B.Sc (SFU) and M.Sc (UBC) in applied mathematics, Evgeniy came back to SFU to complete his PhD in Biomedical Engineering. His research is based on computational anatomy and involves developing advanced mathematical and statistical methods for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease. He says, “This is a very important avenue of research as one in eleven Canadians over the age of 65 will develop Alzheimer’s, and billions of dollars will be spent on treatment. Early detection of this debilitating disease can significantly increase the chances of a speedy recovery.”

Evgeniy’s other research project draws from new concepts in information theory and applied mathematics to develop the necessary hardware for rapid Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) image acquisition. OCT is a 3D imaging modality that is used in diagnosing macular degeneration related to diseases like Glaucoma. Reducing the scan time of OCT will significantly decrease patient’s discomfort during a scan. He already has several publications and international conference presentations on his CV and is well on track to finishing his PhD.

• Medical Image Analysis Lab
• Biomedical Optics Research Group
• Automated Brain Mapping
• Evgeniy Lebed on LinkedIn
• Evgeniy Lebed on Academia.edu

Previous blog post: Foreign Government Awards. See also Government of Canada’s list of Scholarships for Canadians who wish to study abroad.

—

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