SFU Graduate Studies

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.

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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

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

When Lorna Fadden received her PhD, she entered the specialized field of forensic linguistics.

Her PhD research was on linguistic patterns in police interviews, and since then, she’s gone on to do more work in the legal system.

Her most recent case involved determining whether a set of text messages sent before a deadly car accident could be seen as suicide notes. (They weren’t.) The ongoing investigation will determine the course of  a young woman’s life.

In another case, she studied a menacing letter which was sent to a company’s board of directors. She performed the linguistic analysis in collaboration with a document analyst who performed handwriting and paper analysis. They were able to match the author of the menacing letter with emails sent by a vice president of that company.

She says, “It’s an interesting time to come out of grad school. In the past, new PhDs became professors. Today, we can straddle academic and professional worlds, finding innovative ways to put research in practice.”

Dr. Fadden’s future research is into the language of internet luring.

For more information:

1. Linguistic cues catch deceivers, not liars
2. The Prosody of Suspects’ Responses During Police Interviews
3. Lorna Fadden’s research page
4. Lorna Fadden’s consulting company
5. Vancouver Sun: “B.C. Corrections using ‘truth verification’ device to screen job applicants Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Corrections+using+truth+verification+device+screen+applicants/4447644/story.html#ixzz1GmPjgJEk“

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