SFU Graduate Studies

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:

Michael Steger, a PhD student in Mike Thewalt’s Semiconductor Spectroscopy Lab in SFU’s Department of Physics, has had a great year using optical spectroscopy to study the fundamental properties of semiconductors.

His research into highly isotopically enriched silicon, which enables optical spectroscopy at much higher resolution than natural silicon, led him to become first author on an invited paper presented at the International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors in Seoul. This paper describes a novel method for studying nuclear spins in silicon, which might lead to a new approach for a silicon-based quantum computer.

Michael has also just wrapped up an invited review for the Journal of Applied Physics, which will form the core of his PhD thesis. This work describes a new technique of ‘isotopic fingerprints,’ which has led to a surprising reevaluation of what were thought to be very well known luminescent defect centers in silicon.

Michael is also a budding entrepreneur. In his free time, he developed PhotoPosterMaker, a tool to quickly make professional collages out of photos. It’s now available for sale in the Mac App Store.

• Semiconductor Spectroscopy Lab
• Links to Mike Steger’s published papers
• PhotoPosterMaker for Mac

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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

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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

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Congratulations to Michel Trottier-McDonald, who has received an Alexander Graham Bell Graduate Scholarship (NSERC) for $105,000 to support his PhD program in high energy physics at SFU’s Department of Physics.

Michel has been involved for the last three years in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. His work is aimed at finding experimental evidence of the mechanism that gives mass to the fundamental particles making all the matter in the Universe. The favorite explanation is called the Higgs mechanism, and particle physicists have been on the hunt for many decades to find its elusive manifestation: the Higgs boson.

With the ever increasing amount of data collected by the ATLAS detector, it is becoming clear that the hunt for the Higgs boson is coming close to an end. Within a year or so, particle physicists should be able to tell if the Higgs mechanism is real or not.

Michel works on developing new techniques in order to increase the sensitivity of the search for the Higgs boson. For this, he is testing the limit of what the ATLAS detector can see. There is a chance that such techniques enable him and the ATLAS collaboration to see the Higgs before anyone else.

• ATLAS collaboration
• Physics Department, SFU
• High Energy Physics Group
• Michel’s Facebook page
• Michel’s blog: The Large Idea Collider
• Michel’s musical project: Motionthink

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President Andrew Petter, on behalf of SFU, has just signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the China Scholarship Council which will enable top Chinese graduate students to receive scholarship funding to attend SFU.

The number of SFU graduate students from China has grown from 79 in 2001 to 238 in 2010. Of those 238, 64 are in the Applied Sciences, 54 are in Business, 47 are in Science and 45 are in Education, with the rest in SFU’s other Faculties.

SFU’s School of Computing Science has both a Master’s and a PhD dual degree program in partnership with Zhejiang University (ZU), China.

• SFU Press release: SFU becomes a preferred destination for Chinese graduate students

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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.

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The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) has opened the 2011 Canada-Latin America and the Caribbean Research Exchange Grants (LACREG) program, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

Projects must address one or more of the Centre’s following research themes:

• agriculture and the environment
• science, technology, and innovation
• social and economic policy
• health and health systems

The LACREG program applies to collaborative research between Canada and the following LAC countries: Argentina, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago , Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Value: Support through this program will be cost-shared on a 2:1 ratio by the program and the partner institutions, respectively. The maximum value of each grant under this program will be $15,000 CDN.

Download the application guidelines and forms. Applications are due by Thursday, October 6, 2011.

For additional information please email lac@aucc.ca

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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

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This morning’s convocation saw a parade of SFU’s new PhDs in the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology and the Faculty of Science.

Their red gowns with blue Cambridge bonnets are regalia which which originated in the monasteries of the middle ages.

At the morning convocation, Dr. Karel Lucien Casteels received his doctorate from the Department of Mathematics and was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal for achieving the highest academic standing upon graduation from a graduate program. His thesis was The combinatorial structure of the prime spectrum of quantum matrices.

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