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

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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).

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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.]