INSPIRING MINDS | Yilong Li, MSc candidate, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry

Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community. 

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Yilong Li
MSc candidate, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry

How do the kidneys repair themselves?

Kidneys are among the most complex organs in the human body. Each kidney is made up of a million tube-like filters called nephrons that filter over 150 liters of blood per day! The complex architecture of the kidney enables most of the filtered water and substances to be recycled while excreting those in excess as urine. However, the kidneys are injured commonly, and this can be extremely messy. Imagine having millions of USB cables tangled up in your wallet, and you have to find the one that is broken. Luckily, kidney cells have a remarkable capacity to repair themselves by quickly removing any damaged cells. To study this important function, we simulated the injury state and identified signalling switches that can potentially regulate this process in kidney cells. Our knowledge will help you better understand the self-repairing function of the kidneys and potentially lead to novel therapeutics for kidney injuries.

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INSPIRING MINDS | Arman Hassanpour Aslishirjouposht, PhD candidate, Faculty of Health Sciences

Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

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Arman Hassanpour Aslishirjouposht
PhD candidate, Faculty of Health Sciences

Auditory testing using smart speakers and automatic speech recognition

More than 500 million individuals experience hearing loss globally. During the COVID pandemic, significantly, people could not access to monitor their hearing or fit their hearing aids, causing the restriction, or long waiting to see an audiologist. To this aim, the focus of my study is to develop and validate a machine learning application to assist audiologists in testing users’ hearing remotely via smartphones or smart speakers. The developed application will save users’ commuting time and costs and particularly help users with disabilities. The different environments can be generated by utilizing multiple smart speakers in the living room. Besides, improving algorithms of automatic speech recognition (ASR) converting verbal commands to texts will help evaluate the response voice of impaired listeners. Then, presented ASR will be implemented in a smart speaker or smartphone. Thus, the results of this study lead to assessing users’ hearing and help audiologists recommend a better diagnosis.

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INSPIRING MINDS | Qianhui Ma, MA candidate, Faculty of Education

Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

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Qianhui Ma
MA candidate, Faculty of Education

The Use of Digital Storytelling in Bilingual/Multilingual Students' Meaning-making: A Systematic Literature Review

My study is a systematic literature review regarding the use of digital storytelling in bilingual/multilingual students’ meaning-making at different educational levels. This review demonstrates how digital storytelling can empower these students’ voices across sociocultural and educational boundaries. The review asks: (1) What are the reported uses of digital storytelling for bilingual/multilingual students? (2) What are the reported benefits and challenges of using digital storytelling for bilingual/multilingual students? (3) What are the pertaining curriculum and pedagogical implications of using digital storytelling in bilingual/multilingual education? 24 studies from five ProQuest Education databases are reviewed. These studies were empirical and published from 2013 to 2022 in English. The review is informed by the theoretical lenses of multiliteracies, multimodality, and translanguaging. Because this review foregrounds that digital storytelling would be a powerful tool for students from minoritized communities to employ their heritage languages in literacy learning, it has the potential to enact educational equity.

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INSPIRING MINDS | Justin Kim, PhD candidate, Faculty of Engineering

Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

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Justin Kim
PhD candidate, Faculty of Engineering

Solidifying batteries for safe and reliable electric vehicles

The paradigm shift towards renewable energy sources has sparked the development of various technologies reliant on clean energy. In recent years, the global surge of battery-powered electric vehicles has revolutionized the transportation industry by mitigating environmental concerns inherent to gasoline-powered vehicles. Currently, every mass-produced electric vehicle utilizes lithium-ion batteries, which are a critical component of electric vehicles that dictates factors such as driving range and cost. Though lithium-ion batteries have played a pivotal role in facilitating the electric vehicle revolution, they pose a severe safety risk due to their highly flammable liquid component. My research focuses on replacing this liquid component with a solid one, which requires new materials discovery and engineering design. By using a solid-state battery configuration, we can enable electric vehicles with fast charging time, long driving range, low cost, and safe operation.

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INSPIRING MINDS | Moheem Halari, PhD candidate, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry

Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

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Moheem Halari
PhD candidate, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry

Trauma Patterns Among Pedestrians and Cyclists Involved in a Motor Vehicle Collision

Of the 1.35 million deaths that occur annually worldwide due to motor vehicle collisions (MVCs), more than half of these involve pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists. In Canada, there is an increasing number of motor vehicle pedestrian (7%) and cyclist (2.5%) collisions compared to previous years. In Ontario, these MVCs involving pedestrian and cyclist deaths are investigated by the Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario which include autopsies done by pathologists who document the injuries sustained. My research involves collecting injury data from the pathologists’ reports and crash data (vehicle type, speed, impact zone, location) from the police report to understand the injury mechanisms. Using this information, I plan on creating a predictive model using machine learning that can be used not only by pathologists to assist coroners and police investigators in collision reconstruction (especially hit and run’s), but also provide evidence-based data to emergency or trauma centers for triage.

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INSPIRING MINDS | Carol Dyck, PhD candidate, Faculty of Law

Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

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Carol Dyck
PhD candidate, Faculty of Law

Deep Seabed Mining versus Marine Conservation: Closing High Seas Governance Gaps in the Arctic Ocean

The current push to electrify transportation in response to climate change has sparked growing interest in deep seabed mineral resources. Commercial exploitation is now imminent. Scientists and policy-makers warn that gaps in international law and governance leave highly biodiverse and poorly understood ecosystems unprotected and species at risk of extinction. My research will analyze the Draft Exploitation Regulations of the International Seabed Authority’s Mining Code governing deep seabed mining, and their relationship to the forthcoming Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement. I will focus on the Arctic region, where melting sea ice is rapidly altering the marine environment, opening the area to new economic activity. My geographical approach is intended to contribute to wider discussions regarding the appropriateness of deep seabed mining, and will include policy recommendations to establish high seas marine protected areas in the Central Arctic Ocean.

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INSPIRING MINDS | Jeanette Adjei, PhD candidate, Faculty of Science

 

Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

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Jeanette Adjei
PhD candidate, Chemistry, Faculty of Science

Finding Radical Ways to Synthesize Phosphorus Containing Molecules

Phosphorus-containing (organophosphorus) molecules are ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for animals and plants, and it cycles through rocks, water, soil, sediments, and organisms. Phosphorus compounds have found applications in pharmaceuticals, antimicrobial agents, pesticides, flame retardants, high tech plastics, and more. Phosphorus has had a profound impact on industries and is relied upon to produce valuable consumable products. There is considerable interest in developing new and efficient methods to make organophosphorus molecules. My research focuses on modifying organic small molecules to include a phosphorus atom in their structures. I use a reaction that is driven by light or heat to form phosphorus carbon bonds. While I create my targeted molecules, this reaction generates little to no by-products. In the future, the organophosphorus molecules I make will be studied and used to speed up the rate of chemical reactions.

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INSPIRING MINDS | Denise Kamyuka, PhD candidate, Faculty of Health Sciences

Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

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Denise Kamyuka
PhD candidate, Kinesiology (Global Health Systems in Africa), Faculty of Health Sciences

Before a woman can enterprise in sport, she must feel safe in sport

As Batswana and women in sport, my research team and I know how difficult it is for women in Botswana to build sustainable careers in sport. Social entrepreneurship is lauded as an effective way for African women to achieve economic empowerment and fulfil social deficiencies in their communities. Namely, social entrepreneurship in sport (SES) allows women to circumvent the lack of support they receive from the government and the male-dominated sport industry. Our research sort to explore the environment of SES for Batswana women, but we quickly discovered that ‘before a woman can enterprise in sport, she must feel safe in sport’. Our research shows that for Batswana women in sport, ‘safety’ is not just protection from physical harm. Safety is ‘security’ – feeling a sense of belonging and acceptance. We therefore propose a gender-specific safe-guarding policy that promotes a safe environment for the cultivation of SES for Batswana women.

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INSPIRING MINDS | Claudia Morales Valiente, PhD candidate, Faculty of Social Science

Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

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Claudia Morales Valiente
PhD candidate, Psychology, Faculty of Social Science

Future thinking: between what we know and what we expect to happen

I study future event thinking: the ability to project the self forward in time to pre experience an event. Future event thinking is relevant for behaviour regulation and involves gathering information to anticipate future events. It also involves placing these events in a coherent autobiographical context to be perceived as likely occurrences. Since our futures are individual phenomena, I take a tailored approach to assess how people simulate future events, what details they use in the description, and the phenomenological experience. Thus far, my findings show that likely events are experienced as sensorily real and with a lot of details, but only if associated knowledge is available. If events are unknown but likely to happen, people can still simulate them, but in broad ways. These results may be of interest for the understanding of mental health issues associated with unfamiliar future-prolonged situations such as culture shock, immigration, or the COVID pandemic.

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INSPIRING MINDS | Mara Bordignon, PhD candidate, Faculty of Education

Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

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Mara Bordignon
PhD candidate, Faculty of Education

‘Opening Up’ Higher Education in Canada

Whether academia should be ‘opened’ is a contentious and evolving issue globally. Open education (OE) – as the sharing, use, and reuse of resources, pedagogies, and teaching practices – has gained momentum by challenging, transforming, and even displacing systems which exclude, disenfranchise, and marginalize members of both the public and academic communities. Traditional, dominant systems rooted in the corporatization and monetization of educational processes are problematic because they create barriers that restrict access, agency, ownership, participation, and experience. OE approaches include wide ranging solutions from free open educational resources to open access of scholarly research. A shifting landscape between open and closed, coupled with flaws and weaknesses in OE solutions themselves, create issues and tensions needing closer interrogation. My study identifies a research gap in how OE is conceptualized within Canadian higher education policy discourse and aims to provide critical insight into power relations, equity, and social justice.

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