Date/Time:  April 18, 2023; 1:00 PM
To register for this event, please click here.

About the Event

Please join Denise Baxter, Vice-Provost of Indigenous Initiatives, to learn how to work towards reconciliation in your organization. Participants will explore ways to demonstrate a commitment to Indigenous relations through their leadership actions, employment initiatives and recruiting activities, business development and relationship building with Indigenous businesses, and through their community engagement.

Date: Wednesday, March 8
Time: 7 to 8 p.m.
Location: OA 1022, Simcoe Hall, Lakehead University | 500 University Ave., Orillia

About the Speaker

Denise has served as Vice-Provost of Indigenous Initiatives since 2017. She also teaches in the Department of Indigenous Learning and Department of Continuing Education. Denise is completing her PhD in Equity and Indigenous Education at York University. As an established education leader, Denise has worked in multiple contexts including public school boards, the Ministry of Education, Lakehead University, and First Nations private schools for the past 28 years. Within each of these contexts, she has built capacity and partnerships with multiple community stakeholders. Her work with the community has involved education conferences, workshop presentations, and traditional pedagogy. She currently serves on three services boards in Thunder Bay, as Trustee for Keewatin Patricia DSB and an EDI advisory committee provincially.

A Marten Falls First Nation member, she maintains that preserving and practicing cultural traditions and ceremony keeps her connected to the community, Indigenous cultures, traditions, and protocols. She works to establish networks, strengthen relationships with Indigenous communities and governments, and build capacity between Indigenous, public, and private partners which have supported multiple initiatives that advance educational outcomes for Indigenous students.

Join Lakehead University on Thursday, March 9, to learn about how it takes a community to be cyber-secure. Regional experts, Dr. Amir Ameli, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at Lakehead University, Detective Sergeant Vern Crowley, OPP Cyber Crimes Investigation Team, and Laura Payne, Chief Enablement Officer and VP Security Consulting at White Tuque, will discuss how to keep yourself, business and community safe.

Sponsored by the Town of Innisfil, County of Simcoe, City of Barrie, City of Orillia, and Georgian College.

About the Event        

The event will feature New Music composed and performed by LU students and faculty. This music presentation showcases creativity as a significant part of the 2023 Research and Innovation Week theme "Improving our Lives through Research.”                                                         

Performers

Lakehead University New Music Ensemble, Dr. Aris Carastathis (Director).

About the Presentation

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are commonly used in electric vehicles (EVs). However, the Li-ion battery performance degrades over time due to problems such as capacity degradation and impedance growth over time. A reliable battery health monitoring and prognostics system is very beneficial to diagnose the battery's state-of-health and predict the remaining-useful-life in order to improve battery performance. This speech presents a new technology to improve battery state-of-health monitoring and remaining useful life prediction. An enhanced particle filter technique is proposed to reduce the impact of sample degeneracy and impoverishment in state estimation. An evolving neurofuzzy predictor is developed to deal with the lack of new battery measurements during the prognostic period.

Speaker

Dr. Wilson Wang received his BSc in Electromechanical Engineering (SIT in China), MSc in Mechanical Engineering (Northeastern University in China), MEng in Industrial Engineering (University of Toronto), and PhD in Mechatronics Engineering (University of Waterloo) in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, he was a Senior Scientist at Mechworks Systems Inc. in Waterloo, Ontario. He joined Lakehead University in 2004, and is currently a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include mechatronics, artificial intelligence, machinery diagnostics, system state prognostics, and smart sensors. He received the LU Distinguished Research Award in 2017, and was a LU Research
Chair from 2019-2022. He has supervised 35 thesis-based MSc students, 16 PhD, and 10 postdoctoral fellows. He is also a fellow of International Society of Engineering Asset Management.

About the Presentation

In the last ten years, particularly in the last five, research involving pre-trained language models has expanded rapidly. These language models are expected to assist in fabricating text devoid of human prejudices and biases, and in order to meet such high standards, it is essential that key application areas are clearly delineated and accepted by subject matter experts. This will help determine whether the results obtained by these models are credible and may be implemented in practical applications.

In this research presentation, I will introduce the applications and novelties of natural language processing based solutions to better tackle the computational, as well as ethical issues arising from the domains of education, political discourses on social media and news channels, and the emotions expressed in conversation. The key areas of research include semantic similarity of words and sentences; sentiment, stance and emotion analysis of text and recognizing despondency in text. Given that these research projects have direct applications in government agencies, I will further discuss the partnership projects with Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre.

About the Speaker

Vijay Mago is an Associate Professor and Faculty-based Research Chair in Computational Ethics for Natural Language Processing at Lakehead University, ON. He received his PhD in computer science from Panjab University, India in 2010, and has worked as a postdoctoral fellow for two years at the IRMACS Centre, Simon Fraser University, BC. Before joining Lakehead University in 2015, he worked as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the United States. His research interests include big data analytics, health informatics, text analysis, natural language processing and modeling and simulation of complex systems. Within the past six years, Vijay’s research lab has received over $2.5m fundings from NSERC, SSHRC, MITACS, Canada Revenue Agency, Ontario Council on Articulation & Transfer (ONCAT) as well as other industry partners. With his students and collaborators, he has published over 100 papers, many of which have been patented and implemented directly by industrial partners. Vijay serves as an Associate Editor for BMC Medical Informatics and PeerJ Computer Science journals and is an active member of IEEE, ACM and the American Medical Informatics Association.

About the Presentation

Enhancing the Prevention of Injury and Disability @ Work (EPID@Work) is a research centre that focuses on increasing workplace health and safety.  This panel will present three current opportunities for employers, employees, students, and researchers to get involved with community-based research.  Come and join us to learn about new and exciting projects on mental health stigma, improving sleep for high risk workers, and an upcoming cohort study.                                                               

Speakers

Kathy Sanderson

Dr. Kathy Sanderson is an Associate Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behaviour in the Faculty of Business Administration.  She is the Assistant Director and theme lead for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion with EPID@Work Research Centre.  Kathy’s research focuses on reducing pain at work, in the areas of emotional abuse, newcomer welcoming, mental health stigma and employee retention in Northwestern Ontario.  She is a Registered Psychotherapist (Ontario) and provides employment-based crisis intervention services.

Deborah Scharf

Deborah Scharf, PhD (University of Pittsburgh, 2009) is a clinical and health psychologist and an Associate Professor of Psychology at Lakehead University. She is also the mental health lead for EPID@Work. Dr. Scharf's research includes studies of healthcare access for poor and underserved groups; behavioural health delivery systems; cannabis and tobacco use, treatment, and policy; behavioural healthcare services for injured workers, military personnel, and veterans; and innovations in in vivo electronic data capture. Dr. Scharf provides psychological services to injured workers in the community and trains graduate students to do the same.

Vicki Kristman

Dr. Vicki Kristman is a Professor in the Department of Health Sciences and Director and Senior Scientist of the EPID@Work Research Institute at Lakehead University. She holds a Lakehead University-Ontario Research Chair in Injury & Disability Prevention. She conducts research to better understand factors associated with health and disability in the workplace to develop and test interventions to improve the lives of workers.

About the Presentation

Media fandom has been an object of academic inquiry since the 1990s, with much of the early theories of fandom describing it as a largely subversive subculture. However, media fandom became increasingly mainstream with the rise of digital culture in the second decade of the 21st century. This has led to conflicts between fans, and between fans and producers, over who gets to speak for fans, and what power they should have to shape contemporary popular culture. I will discuss the history of media fandom and its transformation over time, with a focus on how the mainstreaming of fandom has influenced current political discourse in the U.S. and Canada.

About the Speaker

Dr. Monica Flegel is a Professor in the Department of English and researches in the field of cultural studies, focusing on child studies, animal studies, and fan and media studies. She has developed courses on all of these subjects, covering everything from social media culture to representations of animals in popular culture. Her past SSHRC grant, with Dr. Jenny Roth from Women’s Studies, focused on fanfiction and its relation to legitimate authorship and copyright law.  She has published extensively, both as a single author and with co-authors, in Victorian Literature and Culture, the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Transformative Works and Culture, Continuum, the Journal of Fan Studies, and The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture. Her most recent book, co-authored with Dr. Judith Leggatt, Superhero Culture Wars: Politics, Marketing, and Social Justice in Marvel Comics (2020). 

About the Event

IISD-ELA, in collaboration with Myera Group, Lakehead University and Indigenous communities, has undertaken a multi-year research project to study changes to water quality and fish and aquatic ecosystem health associated with co-culture of fish and wild rice. The project aims to evaluate the capacity for wild rice to bioremediate aquaculture waste products and determine what beneficial effects the plants can receive from this treatment in terms of growth and nutrient composition. The project will develop and implement community-based water quality monitoring, assess the health of resident fish and the quality of aquatic habitats, and allow sustainable practices to be established for the co-culture of fish and wild rice by Indigenous communities.

About the Speaker

Dr. Vince Palace, IISD-ELA

Dr. Vince Palace is the Head Research Scientist at the IISD-Experimental Lakes Area, responsible for coordinating both ongoing research projects and developing and facilitating new research initiatives. He is an aquatic toxicologist with 25 years of experience in determining exposure, evaluating potential impacts and developing mitigation strategies related to chemical and non-chemical aquatic stressors. Working with industry, government and community stakeholders, Vince has led projects on the impacts of agriculture, hydroelectric power, the oil and gas industry, and mining on aquatic ecosystems and has co-authored more than 125 papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

About the Presentation

Lignin has been regarded as an underutilized by-product of the chemical pulping and cellulosic ethanol industries. To improve the financial profit of these processes and prevent a major loss of resources, value-added products could be produced from lignin. Recently, different processes were developed for generating lignin at commercial scales in an effort to facilitate the production of value-added products from lignin. For example, the LignoBoost and LignoForce technologies are commercial processes for producing kraft lignin, while TMPBio technology is employed for producing hydrolysis lignin in a cellulosic enzymatic process. Due to the commercial availability of lignin, extensive research has been conducted on producing altered lignin-based value-added products.

Dispersants and flocculants are water-soluble chemicals with significant worldwide applications. Dispersants are widely used in the mining, oil, textile, and construction industries. Flocculants are widely used in the mining industry for density control in thickeners, or as rheology modifiers in the concentrate thickeners, for instance. They are also used in municipal and industrial wastewater systems. However, the commercial dispersants and flocculants are mainly oil-based, ineffective, expensive, and/or non-biodegradable.

Lignin can be tailored to have diverse charge densities, molecular weights, and degrees of hydrophilicity, all of which are of significant importance for dispersants/flocculants. After chemical modification for dispersant and flocculant production, lignin-based polymers will inherit some unique features from lignin (e.g. hydrophobicity and three-dimensional structure) that are not available in the currently used commercial flocculants/dispersants. In this presentation, Dr. Fatehi will elucidate 1) recent development in the production of lignin-based water-soluble products following polymerization and grafting pathways, 2) fundamental challenges and opportunities associated with the generation, characterization, and use of such products, and 3) the future trend in sustainable material development.

About the Speaker

Dr. Fatehi is a professor, Canada Research Chair (Tier II), and NOHFC Industrial Research Chair of the chemical engineering department at Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada. He is also the Director of the Biorefining Research Institute of Lakehead University. His main research area includes biorefining, lignin, nanotechnology, lignocellulose valorization, waste management, and colloid and interface science. His outstanding achievements were recognized with many awards nationally, such as, the Hatch Innovation award (2019) from the Chemical Institute of Canada, the Emerging Leaders in Chemical Engineering from the Canadian Society of Chemical Engineers (2018) and Early Researcher Award from the Government of Ontario (2014), John C. Smith Award from Pulp and Paper Association of Canada (2011), and regionally, such as the Distinguished Research Award from Lakehead University (2022). Dr. Fatehi was among the top two percent of researchers in the world on both categories of career and annual contributions determined by Stanford University in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Since 2008, he has co-authored more than 250 journal articles (> 6500 citations identified by Google Scholar search engine, Jan 20 2023), 8 book chapters, and more than 100 conference papers. He has been working with many international companies, and he holds 6 patents. Since 2012, he has secured more than $ 9 M in research funds from private sectors and government organizations. He has trained more than 70 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.