Table 1: Carolyn McGregor, Ph.D., S.M.I.E.E.E., Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
The Next Generation in Critical Care Computing: Can And Will Clinical Judgment Be Replaced?
Critical care units boast state-of-the-art medical equipment that constantly monitors vital organs. However, the ability to gather this information has outpaced the ability to aggregate and interpret it in a clinically meaningful way. New computing approaches may prove beneficial, but can and will clinical judgment ultimately be replaced?
Dr. McGregor. the Canadian Representative for the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) and the IEEE EMBS representative for IEEE Women in Engineering. has over 20 years of experience looking for new behaviours in organizational information. Over the last ten years she has proposed new approaches to support critical care patient monitoring. Her most recent research, in partnership with IBM, utilizes high frequency monitoring techniques to provide earlier detection of significant changes in a patient’s condition.
Table 2: David McKeown, MDCM, MHSc, FRCPC, Medical Officer of Health, City of Toronto
Public Health in 21st Century Toronto
Public health has been a key ingredient in the development of modern cities since the advent of water treatment and sewage disposal in the late nineteenth century made it possible for large populations to live together without major waterborne epidemics. Today's public health headlines are still dominated by infectious diseases such as SARS and the H1N1 pandemic, but the most important threats to Toronto's health in the 21st century lie in chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart and lung disease, cancer, and in the striking disparities in health status between rich and poor.
Dr. McKeown is a physician specialist in Community Medicine. He received his medical and public health training at McGill University and the U of T and is an adjunct professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He has a wealth of experience in the public health field, having also served as Medical Officer of Health in the Borough of East York and the Region of Peel.
Table 3: Suzanne Corbeil, Director, Global Outreach, The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
From Motivation to Innovation: How Science Can Change the Face of Africa
Jules escaped a war-torn Eastern Congo, only to be ejected from two countries and arrested. His journey ended in a UN refugee camp. Somehow he found the courage to apply to university in Namibia where he graduated with a degree in maths, then worked as a tutor before gaining his diploma from the African Institute for Mathematical Science (AIMS) in Cape Town. Today he is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Stellenbosch
University. The Perimeter Institute's global outreach program is supporting an initiative to open 15 new AIMS centers across Africa and creating a network for progress across the continent. Is there a role to play for Canadian institutions? How can this program help achieve our objectives for internationalization?
Suzanne Corbeil has led several initiatives in building strong partnerships, and promoting science culture and outreach in science and technology in Canada for over more than a decade. She has promoted scientific activities across the country, been a key player in advancing the public agenda in S&T and been instrumental in building strong relationships among a variety of governmental, academic and non-profit partners. She is also the Founding Chair of the Science Media Centre of Canada.
Table 4: Pierre Savard, Ph.D., Associate Professor and TRIUMF Scientist, Department of Physics, U of T
The Science Program of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN
Particle physics is entering a new era with the startup of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. This revolutionary new instrument will open the door to many new discoveries that will shed light on the structure of the Universe at the highest energies ever studied.
Pierre Savard is an experimental particle physicist working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and a scientist at TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for subatomic physics. He is currently convener of a research team of over 200 ATLAS physicists who are looking for new fundamental forces and particles that could be revealed in LHC collisions.
Table 5: Monique Frize, Ph.D., P. Eng., O.C., Professor of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University and University of Ottawa
Engineers in Medicine: An Exciting Career
Biomedical engineering is a very broad field. Some engineers work in hospitals managing the medical technologies, ensuring that all equipment functions as it should and is safe for patients and staff. Others develop new technologies to help doctors make a diagnosis, plan a treatment, or monitor patients for some period of time. My research group aims to develop decision-aid tools to help doctors make better and faster decisions for the patients under their care.
Dr. Frize has worked in hospitals for 18 years and has been an active researcher and teacher in various university settings for over 20 years. She has published over 200 articles and book chapters in her field; her new book, The Bold and the Brave: A History of Women in Science and Engineering, was released in December by the University of Ottawa Press. She was a founding member and President of the International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists (INWES) and is now its past president. She also founded the INWES Education and Research Institute and is its current president.
Table 6: Josh D. Neufeld, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, University of Waterloo
The Wonderful World of Microbes
Microbial communities are responsible for the cycling of trace gases, the fertility of soils and aquatic environments, the healthy function of the body, production for the food industry and countless applications in biotechnology. Surprising new discoveries have changed the way we think about our health and its relationship to our microbial world. Who are we, really? What microorganisms share our homes and our bodies? What major new discoveries can we anticipate in microbiology this coming decade?
Dr. Neufeld has over 30 peer-reviewed publications in the area of microbial ecology. His research combines engineering and biology to develop and apply innovative new techniques for unraveling the diversity and function of complex microbial communities. He has recently established a research facility for microbial community genomics.
Table 7: Dérick Rousseau, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biology, Ryerson University
The Sweet Science of Chocolate
Unlike flower buds in the spring, when chocolate “blooms”, it’s not considered a good thing. Dr. Rousseau’s research efforts centre on developing processes that minimize and ideally eliminate bloom in chocolate. In particular, his work examines the microscopic appearance (the “microstructure”) of chocolate and the physical and chemical factors that negatively affect its quality and shelf life.
Dr. Rousseau obtained his B.Sc. in Food Science and Technology from Université Laval in 1993 and his Ph.D. in Food Science from the University of Guelph in 1997. Besides his work on chocolate, his current research efforts focus on salt reduction in processed foods and emulsion stability. Funding for his research has come from many sources, including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Dairy Farmers of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award (PREA) and the Advanced Foods and Materials Network (AFMNet). He has established significant university-industry research partnerships in the area of food and colloid stability.
Table 8: Giuseppina D’Agostino, LL.M., D.Phil., Assistant Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Challenges to the Commercialization of Intellectual Property
The commercialization of intellectual property (IP) is often said to be indispensable for fostering a vibrant, creative and innovative economy. Yet many challenges remain before you can bring an invention from the lab into the marketplace. For instance, universities bring together collaborative environments not often found in pure industry settings, but the road to patent protection is full of hurdles. We will unpack some of these challenges so that we might begin to unearth IP’s untapped potential.
Dr D’Agostino joined the Osgoode faculty in 2006 and is the Founder and Director of IP Osgoode, Osgoode’s first IP and technology program (www.iposgoode.ca). Before her appointment, she was recruited by the Federal government’s Recruitment of Policy Leaders (RPL) program for the Department of Canadian Heritage. She is a Research Associate of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre (OIPRC) and previously was an associate at a large Toronto law firm working on IP commercialization issues. As the recent recipient of the Ontario Law Commission’s Visiting Scholarship Program and the Borden Ladner Gervais LLP Fellowship, she is currently investigating the intellectual property and privacy aspects of the electronic health record in Canada.
Table 9: Bernard Lightman, Ph.D., Professor of Humanities and Director of the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies, York University
Who, Exactly, Was Charles Darwin? The Making of a Cultural Icon
Darwin is one of the best-known scientists of all time. During 2009, the year when we celebrated the 200th anniversary of his death and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species, his image was ubiquitous. But what we usually saw was Darwin as the wise, old sage, complete with a full, white beard and piercing eyes. How did this particular image of Darwin come to be so widespread? And what was the cultural significance of the Darwin celebrations that took place in 2009?
Dr. Lightman is the editor of the history of science journal Isis. He has published widely on the cultural history of Victorian science. His early work, summed up in his Origins of Agnosticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), centred on the birth of a new form of unbelief in the wake of the debates over evolutionary theory. More recently he has tackled the issue of how science was popularized in the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain. In Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007) he explored the world of the first generation of science writers and how their agenda differed so profoundly from that of the emerging professionals of science, like T. H. Huxley. His current project is a biography of the eminent Victorian physicist, John Tyndall.
Table 10: Andrew D. Miall, Ph.D., F.R.S.C., Professor of Geology,
U of T
Energy: Its Importance and Complexity in Our Changing World
Fossil fuels have been the foundation of the modern economy, but are finite in quantity; conventional liquid crude oil will probably approach an all-time production peak within a few decades. Natural gas probably has a longer future. Supplies of coal are also large, but all fossil fuels emit greenhouse gases, and coal is associated with numerous pollutants. Unfortunately, substitutes such as wind and solar power cannot match the reliability or scale of fossil fuels. The energy dilemma is in many respects a more serious problem than climate change. Measures to conserve energy and improve efficiencies, such as greater use of public transit, involve costs and social changes that the public is currently not prepared for.
Dr. Miall spent eleven years as a regional petroleum geologist researching the Canadian Arctic, based mainly in Calgary. He has been at the U of T since 1979. He is Past President of the Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada.
Table 11: Thomas J. Hudson, M.D., F.R.S.C., President and Scientific Director, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Personalized Medicine and Cancer Genomics; Promise for the Future
New technological advances, especially in DNA sequence analysis, have brought exceptional and exciting advances in studies of human genomes. These include bringing the promise of personalized medicine to reality and the already realized analysis of a number of cancer genomes. We will discuss these technological advances and the implications for these studies in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
Dr. Hudson is President and Scientific Director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, a new Institute created to support multidisciplinary teams needed to effectively translate research discoveries into interventions for better prevention, detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Dr. Hudson is internationally renowned for his work in genomics and human genome variation. He was a founding member of the International Haplotype Map Consortium, the Public Population Project in Genomics and the International Cancer Genome Consortium. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Human Genetics and has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications.
Table 12: Allan I. Carswell, C.M., Ph.D., F.R.S.C., P.Eng., F.C.A.S.I., Emeritus Professor of Physics, York University
Canada Goes To Mars
Dr. Carswell and a Canadian team provided a lidar (laser radar) on NASA's 2007 Phoenix mission to Mars as part of a meteorological station, MET, for studies of the Martian atmosphere. After the landing in May of 2008, it provided measurements of outstanding value, including the discovery of snowfall on Mars.
Dr. Carswell is an internationally recognized leader in the lidar field. Optech, founded by him in 1974 to develop commercial lidars, is now the leading provider of lidar systems for digital terrain and marine mapping, 3D imaging and space applications. Dr. Carswell has served as President of the Canadian Association of Physicists, Vice-President of the Canadian Academy of Science, and as a board member of a number of industrial corporations and public institutions. He has received awards for achievements in R&D, Innovation, Photonics, Space Science and was named the 2009 Ontario Entrepreneur of the Year.
