Black carbon (BC), generated from incomplete combustion of carbonaceous fuels, is one of the two major airborne pollutants that drive climate change and degrade regional air quality. With a warming potential second to CO2, BC contributes the most uncertainty to climate modeling due to its short retention time in the atmosphere and poorly understood mixing, […]

Laure Aymé is a PhD student focusing her research on a plant protein family involved in lipid biosynthesis and important for oil accumulation and biotechnological purposes. Laure recently published an article describing the function and localization of a protein inserted in two distinct cellular compartment membranes, a rather unique situation with few available data. During […]

Global population growth, urbanization and changing climate patterns have increased the demand for potable water, wastewater reuse and value recovery from wastewater, and treatment of industrial process water. Population growth also results in increased demand for the shipping of goods by ocean freight, with the associated risk of the transport of unwanted marine life from […]

My proposed project focuses on the translation and reception in France of works by the Chinese-French writer, Gao Xingjian, the laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000. I will use Gao’s novels in French translation as a case study to problematize the pessimistic views on the untranslatability between Chinese and Western languages as […]

Biobased products, mostly derived from plant biomass, have the potential to improve the sustainability of Canada’s natural resources and environmental quality while competing economically. Plant biomass, composed primarily of cell walls and modification of cell wall properties has the potential to improve biomass conversion to biobased products such as biofuels. Progress towards achieving this goal […]

Cities emit approximately 70% of the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change. It is therefore important to study how urban energy infrastructures can be transformed to lower carbon emissions. But this transformation is not simple for two reasons: (1) it involved variousactors with conflicting interests and visions on what the energy transition should be, […]

Endospores of thermophilic, sulfate-reducing bacteria (TS-SRB) are widespread in the marine rare biosphere and have been proposed as model organisms for studying microbial dispersal. Hot subsurface oil reservoirs could potentially be ‘deep biosphere’ source environments for these organisms, whereby TS-SRB are transported into the cold seabed through natural hydrocarbon seeps. Thus these endospores could be […]

In order for Canadian industry to continue to meet the high demand for energy they must adhere to the social and environmental pressures to reclaim and restore the extraction sites to fully functioning ecosystems, and to offset environmental destruction when appropriate. Recent changes to Canada’s Fisheries Act in 2012, have enshrined offsetting strategies as a […]

Our intended research will be focused on rumor spreading protocols, also known as randomized broadcasting. In the randomized rumor spreading problem, the goal is to broadcast a message that is initiated at one node to all nodes in a given network, by means of nodes choosing uniformly at random a neighbor and exchanging the message […]

This project explores the design of different manual and semi-automatic instruments to support interaction with token-based physical data visualizations (or physicalizations). The recent advance in digital fabrication has made data physicalization – encoding data in the geometry or material properties of a physical artifact – a growing research interest in the information visualization community. However, […]

The building blocks of multicellular organisms such as humans are cells, vessels and protein fibers. Cell migrations are instrumental in the development and maintenance of multicellular organisms (such as wound healing). Aberrant cellular migrations are important in many pathological conditions, for instance in cancer. The majority of cancer related deaths (80-90%) are caused by spread […]

Biosolids, the materials produced during treatment of sewage sludge, are produced in extremely large amounts each day in every town and city across the globe. This material contains significant amounts of bacteria, viruses, and parasites that can be detrimental to human heath and must be carefully disposed. Added to this, there are currently few uses […]