Due to increasing rates of childhood obesity, it is important to investigate the relationship between motor skill development, physical activity, body composition and sleep patterns. Previous research in this area has focused on school-aged children and adults, when daily habits have already formed and are difficult to modify. The purpose of this project is to […]

Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC) hold promise as cell-therapy candidates for numerous diseases such as Graft v. Host disease due to their ability to influence the immune system. MSCs have been shown to be capable of a broad range of immunomodulatory effects, including the production of factors that allow them to serve as Medicinal Signaling Cells […]

My research project aims to study the notion of ‘expertise’ (techne) in the philosopher Plato who wrote many influential works during the 5th and 4th century Classical Greece. During his lifetime, Greece was undergoing radical transformations both intellectually and politically. As a response, Plato engaged with many issues concerning democracy, education and morality, the insights […]

Evaluating the medicinal use of cannabinoids represents an area of massive untapped potential, especially considering its upcoming legalization in Canada. Currently, a significant proportion of medical cannabis research is based on self-reported use and outcomes, rather than carefully-designed research studies. Here, we aim to better understand the impact of cannabis administration in adults with obesity […]

The phenomenon of near-limit detonation propagation, where detonations have been experimentally observed to propagate at average speeds smaller than the ideal Chapman-Jouguet (CJ) detonation speeds, has attracted extensive efforts on determining the influencing mechanisms through application of simple models for predicting such velocity deficits. Despite the large number of attempts to experimentally investigate the dynamics […]

Memristor, as the name suggests is a contraction of “memory resistor”, a novel device that was proposed almost fifty years but only realized recently for the first time. Memristor, the missing link in the manifold of circuit elements, is expected to usher a wave of innovative integrations in electronics and yield novel functionalities. Memristors would […]

This project involves an ethnographic investigation of the ongoing confrontations at the Western Wall in Jerusalem regarding Jewish women’s practices of worship. Through fieldwork and theoretical study, the aim is to examine contrasting spiritual practices and the processes by which religious and legal change is enacted. I hypothesize that prayer, for those engaged in this […]

The project is centered around the need for procedures in classical relativistic field theories. The idea is to determine the minimal amount of rules (postulates) such that a classical field theory can be uniquely determined. More specifically, determining a set of rules such that a unique set of models will follow from Noether’s theorem. The […]

The proposed research aims to develop methods for efficiently computing visually realistic turbulent flows around solid objects for graphical applications in the film and video game industries. These methods would extend traditional techniques employed in aerodynamics to compute flows around airfoils. The extended method would address general solid objects in cases where the traditional techniques […]

Inhalation exposure to mercury continues to be a concern in a number of workplaces. Examples are facilities handling mercury-containing electronic waste or so-called “gold-shops” processing the amalgams from artisanal and small-scale gold mining operations. We are exploring the feasibility of using a passive air sampler recently developed for recording long term average mercury concentrations in […]

Cross border political performance art and pedagogy are the focal point of my research—a topic more relevant and urgent than I could have anticipated with the Trump Administration’s proposed wall, immigration policies, and legislation which forcibly separates migrant families caught attempting to cross the Southern border as well as controversies surrounding Canada’s ‘Safe Third Country […]

Recent progress on deep architectures has enabled efficient representation and learning of complex high dimensional probability distributions over rich sensory data. In particular, deep mixture models and deep generative models have emerged as the most powerful techniques for this task. The proposed research aims at addressing some of the fundamental questions in this field: What […]