Lakehead University's Student Juried Exhibition and Honours Graduating Show will open to the public on the afternoon of Friday, March 27 at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. 

The Department of Visual Arts invites you to join us for the opening and award ceremonies on March 27 at 7 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 pm.

The Juried Student Exhibition will run until April 5. The honours exhibition will run until April 12. 

More information can be found here: https://theag.ca/tc-events/2026-lakehead-university-juried-student-exhibition/.

The Faculty of Science and Environmental Studies proudly presents Dr. Grant Zazula, Paleontologist with the Government of Yukon, for the talk, "Frozen woolly mammoths and Ice Age megafauna from the Yukon permafrost".

Frozen fossils of woolly mammoths, cave lions, giant bears and other incredible Ice Age megafauna have been unearthed from the permafrost in the Traditional Territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in by Yukon gold miners for over a century. These fossils provide evidence of how populations of ancient animals responded to past periods of climate change and how present-day ecosystems were established in the North. This presentation will discuss the relationships between Klondike gold miners, First Nations communities and scientists in the collection, study and interpretation of internationally significant, Ice Age fossils from the Yukon. Recently uncovered, permafrost preserved mummified bodies of ancient animals will be highlighted for their role in how palaeontology is advancing reconciliation efforts with Yukon First Nations.

About the Speaker
Since 2006, Dr. Zazula has played a key role in advancing the understanding of Ice Age ecosystems in northwestern Canada, specifically Ice Age Beringia. He has also brought attention to the role of climate change impacts on northern environments in Canada and beyond. His research has been fundamental in unravelling major research questions surrounding Ice Age Beringia. With over 80 published papers in top scientific journals, his work has provided crucial insights into the extinctions, extirpations, and functioning of northern Ice Age ecosystems during the Late Pleistocene. Dr. Zazula is committed to sharing his knowledge with the public. His work in exhibit development, including the redevelopment of displays at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre in 2023, public presentations, popular books, and media interactions have helped bring complex scientific concepts to diverse audiences. He has received multiple awards for his research, including the 2024 Bruce Naylor Award from the Alliance of Natural History Museums in Canada.

The exhibition is part of a course titled Sexual Activism and Politics, where students examine how social movements related to gender and sexuality have used art, storytelling, and public expression as tools for advocacy and social change. As part of the coursework, students translated their learning into creative pieces that communicate messages about inclusion, dignity, and feminist social justice. It provides a platform for people to reflect on issues related to sexuality, identity, and human rights through art. The exhibition invites members of the campus and broader Thunder Bay community to engage with students’ perspectives on activism, belonging, and social change.

Join us for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities’ Graduate Speaker Series!

MA History student, Joshua Wetendorf presents "Propaganda at the Lakehead: Ukrainian Canadian Political Rivalries in the Thunder Bay Press During the Second World War".

Date: Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Location: Graduate Student Lounge (CASES Building)

Don’t miss this presentation followed by Q&A period. Refreshments (coffee and cookies) provided.

The unofficial follow-up to Dr. Todd Dufresne's influential book The Democracy of Suffering, this new book is directed at everyday readers worried about climate catastrophe and what has to be done to fight it. Short, punchy, and accessible, David McNally calls The Future Belongs to Those Who Fight "an urgent and important book," while Kohei Saito assures us that it "is not a book of despair but a manifesto for utopian realism."

Dufresne is a professor of philosophy at Lakehead University, internationally-known cultural critic, and a public intellectual often featured on CBC Ideas and elsewhere.

Join us in the Makerspace@Paterson to learn the ins and outs of 3D printing on the Makerspace printers. This 45-minute session will include a general introduction to 3D printing, basic features and operation of the printers and safety guidelines. Attendance at a 3D Printing Orientation is required for anyone wanting to use the 3D printers in the future.

Registration in advance is required.

Register at: https://libcal.lakeheadu.ca/event/4007793

Join us in the Makerspace@Paterson to learn the ins and outs of 3D printing on the Makerspace printers. This 45-minute session will include a general introduction to 3D printing, basic features and operation of the printers and safety guidelines. Attendance at a 3D Printing Orientation is required for anyone wanting to use the 3D printers in the future.

Registration in advance is required.

Register at: https://libcal.lakeheadu.ca/event/4007795

The Lakehead Town & Gown brings Orillia faculty together with members of the surrounding community. Meetings occur monthly to discuss topics of broad interest—such as AI, education, loneliness, and citizenship—and have easy but engaged conversation. The group is co-run by Ryan McVeigh, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Anderson Charters, retired publisher and champion of Lakehead’s Orillia campus.

The next session will occur on Friday, March 27th, from 12:30–2:30 p.m. in OA 2005. The topic for discussion is Canada's (De)Population. Please see the Town + Gown website for resources and more details:
https://towngown.lakeheadu.ca/home

The Department of Veterinary Science invites students interested in veterinary medicine to attend an information session exploring pathways to veterinary school and careers in the profession. Dr. Terri O’Sullivan will speak about the veterinary profession and reflect on her own journey from veterinary student to veterinarian, researcher, and faculty member. The session will also include an overview of the admissions application process and time for questions.

Please join the Computer Science Department for the upcoming thesis defense:

Presenter: Mohammed Maaz Inayatullah Sibhai

Thesis title: Uncertainty-Guided Transformer Learning for Trustworthy Medical Image Classification

Abstract: Reliable medical image classification is fundamental for the safe use of deep learning in clinical decision support. The state-of-the-art deep learning models, such as medical vision Transformers perform well in medical image segmentation. These models often present unreliable probability estimates and do not have built-in ways to explicitly handle uncertainty or interpretability. These issues become especially problematic when inputs are ambiguous or datasets are not uniformly distributed, which are common in real-world clinical settings.

This study contributes in extending the architecture of Medical Transformer (MedFormer), a hierarchical medical vision Transformer guided by uncertainty and prototypes, to improve trustworthiness without reducing feature representation. The model uses per-token evidential uncertainty estimation via a Dirichlet approach, enabling explicit measurement of uncertainty and spatial localization. Instead of just acting as a post-hoc diagnostic tool, uncertainty actively guides feature routing and refinement during training, decreasing unreliable updates in uncertain regions. Additionally, prototype-based learning is incorporated to maintain a structured, class-specific geometry in the embedding space and support similarity-based, interpretable decisions grounded in visual patterns.

The proposed model has been tested on various medical imaging types, including mammography, breast ultrasound, brain tumor MRI, and breast histopathology, providing a thorough testing across different dataset contexts. Experiments show that, while classification accuracy improvements vary across datasets, the method reliably improves calibration, reduces overconfidence, and enhances selective prediction compared to the baseline MedFormer. These results indicate that integrating uncertainty estimation and prototype-based regularisation into Transformer-based representation learning can greatly boost the reliability and explainability of medical image classifiers, supporting the development of trustworthy AI systems for clinical use.

Experimental results show that the proposed model improves calibration, reduces overconfidence, and enhances selective prediction across all evaluated datasets compared to the baseline MedFormer. The accuracies are reported in the selected benchmark datasets, with larger improvements in modalities with clearer visual cues and more modest changes in mammography due to inherent ambiguity. Overall, uncertainty-guided routing and prototype-based learning improve trustworthiness without sacrificing discriminative performance.


Committee Members:
Dr. Saad B. Ahmed (supervisor, committee chair), Dr. Abedalrhman Alkhateeb (co-supervisor), Dr. Garima Bajwa, Dr. Farhan Ghaffar (Electrical & Computer Engineering)

Please contact grad.compsci@lakeheadu.ca for the Zoom link. Everyone is welcome.