The new Centre of Excellence will bring together multiple disciplines across the University to develop and deploy artificial intelligence systems to improve health care

TORONTO, April 9, 2026 – As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly important, especially in the health-care field, 91��ɫ continues to play an outsized role. Today, the University announced the launch of a new Centre of Excellence – Artificial Intelligence for Public Health Advancement (AIPHA) funded through an Ontario Research Fund – Research Excellence program.

Director General, Applied Public Health Sciences Pamela Ponic of the Science and Policy Integration Branch, Public Health Agency of Canada, Chief Medical Officer of Health for the Ontario Ministry of Health Kieran Moore, and MPP for Whitby Lorne Coe, Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security all spoke at the lunch-time event.

As a key player in supporting health-care decision making, AIPHA will strengthen external partnerships and accelerate the transfer of knowledge from research to policy and practice, where hospitals, medical practitioners, policymakers and leaders can use it. It will also help bridge the gap between health analytics and real-world socioeconomic conditions further positioning 91��ɫ as a national and global leader in AI-integrated public health solutions through research and innovation.

"The launch of AIPHA marks a defining moment for 91��ɫ and for the future of public health in Canada. By bringing together expertise across disciplines, from mathematical modelling and AI to health policy and social equity, we are creating something truly transformative: a hub where research doesn't just advance knowledge but directly shapes the decisions that protect and improve people's lives,” says 91��ɫ Interim President and Vice-Chancellor Lisa Philipps. “91��ɫ has long been committed to addressing society's most pressing challenges, and AIPHA reflects that mission at its fullest. We are proud to be building the next generation of AI-adept public health leaders right here, and to be positioning Canada as a global force in equitable, evidence-informed health innovation."

As a dedicated, multi-disciplinary and national hub, AIPHA will bring together expertise from across faculties, including in advanced mathematical and computational modelling, precision analytics and multi-source databases. The goal is to integrate epidemiological, clinical, environmental, climate and socioeconomic indicators in newly created AI models, while training the next generation.

“Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly being used in health-care settings but a coordinated, ethical and equitable approach to ensure the tools use integrated data sources, and that they are being properly tested and deployed for patient good is lacking. The current speed of newly developed AI models is at times outpacing governance,” says Faculty of Science Dean Maydianne Andrade. “As a new Centre of Excellence in the Faculty of Science, AIPHA will lead the way toward better integration of these new technologies in a cohesive manner that will help advance public health care.”

Two projects already underway include: Integrating AI with disease transmission dynamics models for informed prevention and control of outbreaks in indoor and mass gathering settings (2025 to 2031) and Advanced mathematical technologies for respiratory infection risk assessment and pharmaceutical intervention scenario analysis (2024 to 2028), both led by AIPHA’s inaugural director Jianhong Wu.

“The AI for Public Health Research Centre is a coordinated innovation hub that will help improve health-care efficiency and outcomes, as well as ensure coordinated, ethical and equitable transformation of public health systems,” says AIPHA Director and University Distinguished Research Professor Jianhong Wu of the Faculty of Science. “This kind of central hub is much needed in the health-care sector today to ensure emerging AI tools are properly integrated and decision and policy makers are provided with robust information toward developing a more cohesive, ethical and equitable public health-care system.”

AIPHA will integrate epidemiological, clinical, environmental and socioeconomic data into the AI-enabled decision-support systems it develops and deploys to guide equitable and evidence-informed public health action. In ensuring the development of fair and equitable AI systems, the hub will combine not only advanced mathematical and computational modelling and AI and predictive analytics, but also health systems and policy research with social determinants of health and equity frameworks.

AIPHA will act as a research accelerator for large collaborative grants, train the next generation of AI-adept public health leaders and develop pilot AI-integrated protypes for infectious disease modelling, health system resource allocation and climate health risk forecasting.

It will also strengthen Canadian pandemic and emergency preparedness, enhance evidence-based policymaking, support climate-health adaptation strategies, improve health equity outcomes, and increase 91��ɫ’s national visibility in AI governance and public health innovation.

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At this point, Avian flu H5N1 is thought to have very limited ability to transmit between humans, but a recent case in British Columbia with an unknown source of transmission has piqued the curiosity and concern of scientists, including 91��ɫ Professor Seyed Moghadas.

Did this lone case come about through transmission from an animal or another person, and if it was via human transmission, what methods will control its spread in the human population? Director of 91��ɫ’s Agent-Based Modelling Laboratory in the Centre of Excellence in AI for Public Health Advancement, Moghadas and a group of researchers used modelling to understand the best spread control measures should human-to-human transmission become possible.

“The idea was, let's evaluate some of the interventions that we usually implement at the very earliest stage of a disease outbreak or emerging disease, which we know very little about,” he says.

For the research, ",” published today in Nature Health, various scenarios from isolation to vaccination before or after a spillover event were modelled. It is one of only a few studies that have explicitly modelled outbreak dynamics following spillover into humans or the effectiveness of public health interventions in early and highly uncertain phases of virus development.

As a professor of computational epidemiology and vaccine science in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Science, Moghadas and his colleagues were already collecting data on H5N1 cases in the United States when the Canadian case arose. Given the unknown nature of transmission, the team decided to pivot their work to look at what was happening in B.C.

“The case in B.C. was of particular interest for us because no definitive source of exposure was identified, including no direct contact with infected animals or known high-risk settings such as poultry farms,” says Moghadas. “Because of that, it came to our attention that maybe there is some sort of transmission going on between humans.”

As far as health and science experts know, H5N1 can only be transmitted among poultry and dairy cattle on farms, as well as through wild birds, and from these animals to humans, but sustained human-to-human transmission has not been established. The person from B.C., however, had no clearly identified exposure and even though human infection from animals is rare, avian influenza H5N1 is considered highly pathogenic and a potentially serious and evolving threat to global public health.

“This virus was first identified in 1997 in Southeast Asia. This kind of zoonotic virus essentially jumps from the bird or animal side to human side sometimes, mostly it circulates among wild birds,” says Moghadas. “There is no confirmation that human-to-human transmission happens as yet in North America.”

The virus has only been in North America since 2022, but surveillance monitoring for it began in 2003 and up until recently there have been close to 1,000 cases reported globally in humans and just under 500 deaths, although the number of cases could be higher because not all cases are likely reported or symptomatic. The virus has not only expanded its geographical range, but also the animal species it can infect.

“Evolution of influenza viruses of any type is always a challenge for humans. The flu virus is one of the very rapid mutating pathogens,” he says. The concern is it will mutate to be able to transmit between humans. How viable is it? How easily can it spillover from animals to humans, and how long could the potential chain of transmission from human-to-human become? These are still open questions.

“Quantifying that risk was important for us because that could also give us direction in terms of how bad the disease could be and what strategies will work to contain it,” says Moghadas. “We have very few measures in place or a strategy to deal with it at this point, given that the transmission between humans is not established.”

As it is an avian flu virus, it will likely require two doses of a similar vaccine to what was used during the H1N1 pandemic to reduce the risk and severity which often triggers a higher viral load.

The researchers used Abbottsford, B.C. as the location as it is a highly dense poultry farming area. The starting point is after a spillover has happened. “If a human became infected, how do we block this single individual to trigger a large outbreak? Or if the infection is going on between humans, can we block these chains and to what degree we can block them?” asks Moghadas. “What is the effectiveness of either self-isolation of symptomatic cases or vaccination of farmers or vaccination of farmers and their household members?”

Even with mitigation measures, someone in the farmer’s family could potentially be infected by the farmer and then transmit it to someone in the community.

The team evaluated two different types of vaccination strategies. One was reactive, which means that you trigger a vaccination program after a case has been identified somewhere. The second strategy was pre-emptive – individuals, such as farmers, are vaccinated before any case is identified.

What they found is that reactive vaccination has very limited additional benefits outside of self-isolation, but pre-emptive vaccination adds substantial additional benefits on top of self-isolation.

Should the virus be confirmed to be capable of human-to-human transmission, Moghadas says they want to limit the chain of transmission and minimize the risk of evolution of the virus to become more adapted to human conditions. For now, he says, when cases are identified, the person should self isolate immediately. For the authorized vaccine, it should be meted out quickly to target populations, but that could take several weeks to have population level effectiveness.

“Timely action is a critical part of controlling the spread. Self-isolation of symptomatic cases has a significant effect, but that comes with the caveat that we don't know if everybody who is infected will develop symptoms,” says Moghadas. “There could be potential asymptomatic cases we don't identify and by the time we do identify them, they've been already infecting others in the chain of transmission. This case in B.C. was particularly concerning because they could not find the source of infection.”

The concern is not only that the virus might be able to jump from animals to humans, but also the potential for it to mutate during early human transmission chains making it more adaptable to infecting humans. This underscores the risk of local outbreaks with global implications, he says.

“My research is all about evidence generation for governments, health-care providers and policymakers in public health organizations. We are generating evidence that can be used to at the very least limit the potential for this virus to become another pandemic,” says Moghadas.

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Tiny sliver of Crescent Moon and Venus will also conjunct on first day of spring

TORONTO, March. 17, 2026 – While it may not currently feel like it in parts of the country, this coming Friday marks the first day of spring, known astronomically as Spring Equinox, and this will also bring an increased chance of Aurora viewing in Canada.

“This March 20 the magnetic fields of the Sun and the Earth work in conjunction with geometry to give us a good chance at Aurora, so fingers crossed for some solar activity,” says 91��ɫ Faculty of Science Associate Professor , director of the Allan I. Carswell Observatory at 91��ɫ.

The Equinox is often described as 'equal day' and 'equal night' but in fact it is just near to when the day and night are most equal for your location, she explains. At higher latitudes the inequality between the lengths of our days and nights grows. The Equinox could be described as the time when Earth is most evenly facing the Sun. 

That in itself is a bit of a trick, says Hyde, as Earth's axis is tilted about 23.5 degrees away from the plane of the solar system. So, if you imagine the Sun, the Earth and the planets all in a line, Earth would be orbiting the Sun tilted just a bit away or towards it depending on where it is in the orbit. This leads to the seasons and at the Equinox the Earth's magnetic poles are tilted nearly at a right angle to the flow of solar wind from our Sun two times a day. This 'equinoctial effect' presents a bigger target for charged particles to hit. 

“As the seasons change to Summer or Winter, the poles point either more toward or away from the Sun, reducing this effect,” says Hyde. 

This same alignment near the Equinox also means that the magnetic fields of the Earth and Sun can line up in a way that could allow them to connect. 

“This is when the 'north-south' of Earth's magnetic field is opposite the Sun's, and opposites attract in magnets,” says Hyde. “This is called the Russel-McPherron effect and together the two effects can lead to more frequent and brighter auroras when the Sun is active.”

The Sun is currently in the most intense phase of its 11-year cycle, moving from minimum to maximum activity or vice-versa. In general, near the maximum we always see more solar activity, but there is also an increase near the Equinox to look forward to. 

As an extra astronomy bonus, with the New Moon on March 19, we also have a conjunction between a very faint sliver of a Crescent Moon and the planet Venus this Friday. In Ontario this will occur near sunset in the West, low on the horizon, so observers with a clear view in that direction will get an extra treat.

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91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for meaningful life and career paths. 91��ɫ's Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campus in Costa Rica offers students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contact: Emina Gamulin, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca

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91��ɫ U led study found clear vaccine-initiated immune response biomarkers between HIV positive and HIV negative groups, but outliers underscore varied, intricate nature of the immune system

How people with compromised immune systems respond to vaccines is an important area of immunological research. A led by 91��ɫ found that not only could machine-learning models accurately pinpoint differences in healthy controls and those living with HIV, but also found outliers in both groups that provide fascinating glimpses into the complex nature of the immune system and what personalized medicine could look like in the future, accounting for variables such as age, comorbidities and genetics.

“This study constitutes an important step forward in the potential for personal vaccination intervention strategies,” says lead author Chapin Korosec, who worked on this paper as a postdoctoral fellow at 91��ɫ under the supervision of Faculty of Science Professor , whose research focuses on infectious disease modelling. “By learning the structure of immune variability at scale, we move toward a data-driven foundation for personalized vaccination and therapeutic design.”

Korosec, now an adjunct professor with the University of Guelph, used a dataset of people with and without HIV who had received up to five doses of COVID-19 vaccine over the course of 100 weeks. All the individuals living with HIV were from the Greater Toronto Area whose illness was being controlled with antiretroviral therapy. The researchers used a type of machine-learning method called random forest to analyze 64 immune biomarkers elicited through a response to the COVID-19 vaccine, and then created a group of ‘virtual patients’ to further model immune responses.

“While we were working with a rich dataset well suited for statistical testing, longitudinal mathematical models still face identifiability limits when the data cannot uniquely resolve immune dynamics. We therefore turned to machine learning to identify the core differences between groups, and then leveraged that learned structure to generate virtual patients that capture how immune patterns differ between groups.”

They were able to show that saliva-based antibodies, particularly a type of antibody in the saliva called IgA, coupled with white blood cells, which have long been known to be associated with HIV status, create the signature difference between the two groups. Korosec says this is significant because there is a lot of research showing altered mucosal immunity for those living with HIV and how it is influenced in the short and long term.

Heffernan notes that they identified subgroups within the HIV positive group, which highlights the importance of personalized vaccination strategies and the challenges of modelling immune responses due to individual variability.

“The immune response is very, very complicated.” explains Heffernan. “Sometimes something can act as an inhibitor of an arm of the immune response, but in other times it might be an activator. There is also a lot of individual variability among people with similar immune system status. Using machine learning, mechanistic modelling, and ‘virtual patients’ we can try to uncover important differences in the subgroups and between individuals – even of immune system components that are not measured in the data. Kind of like trying to find the needle in a haystack, but with a clearer path to finding it.”

The HIV positive group, despite having the benefits of antiretroviral therapy, had clear differences in their vaccine-elicited responses compared to the control group and the machine-learning model was able to classify those differences with nearly 100 per cent accuracy, but there were two individuals who they could not differentiate from the control group.

“No matter how we shuffled the data or which biomarkers we used, the machine-learning algorithm could not distinguish a small subset of HIV-positive individuals from those who were HIV-negative,” says Korosec. “In those individuals, the vaccine-induced immune responses were indistinguishable from the HIV-negative group. That suggests that, at least in terms of vaccination response, their immune function was effectively restored.”

Conversely, there was one individual in the healthy control group whose markers looked indistinguishable from someone living with HIV, which may suggest underlying immune issues that may not yet have been clinically identified.

Supported by the National Research Council of Canada (NRC)-Fields Mathematical Sciences Collaboration Centre, the National Sciences and Engineering and Research Council of Canada and Artificial Intelligence for Public Health (AI4PH), the study was published today as a pre-print in the Journal Patterns and will appear in print as the cover article on March 13. Korosec worked with collaborators, including Heffernan,  Senior Research Officer Mohammad Sajjad Ghaemi from the NRC Digital Technologies Research Centre, Associate Professor Jessica Conway from Pennsylvania State University and researchers from the University of Toronto and St. Michael’s Hospital.

“This study moves us closer to understanding immune diversity in people living with HIV; how their responses compare to age-matched controls, how well antibodies are maintained over time, and why some individuals show strikingly different patterns,” says Korosec.

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91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for meaningful life and career paths. 91��ɫ's Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campus in Costa Rica offers students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contact: Emina Gamulin, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca

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91��ɫ researchers say the decrease in the smallest PFAS during COVID points to its sources and the potential to change the environmental levels of it in the future

TORONTO, Jan. 29, 2026 – A new study out of 91��ɫ has found that the amount of atmospheric trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), the tiniest forever chemical, significantly declined in Toronto during COVID in 2020, which researchers say is good news for the world’s ability to mitigate it in the future.

“When we turned off the tap, so to speak, and we all went home and stopped normal activities, we saw a really quick response, a dramatic reduction of TFA. But the real surprise is that the results point to TFA being formed from short-lived chemical precursors emitted into the atmosphere,” says 91��ɫ atmospheric chemist Professor Cora Young, senior author of the paper published today. “I was so surprised when we saw that it had decreased during the pandemic, but I had to double and triple check the data because I didn’t believe it at first.”

The reason it is such good news, says Young is “that when there is an immediate response after emissions reduction, it tells us that we should be able to figure out how to minimize the emissions and control the formation of TFA in the future. We could have a lot more control over this than we previously thought and that’s very exciting. If we don't know where it's coming from, it's very difficult for us to regulate.”

Unfortunately, as people returned to work and daily life, these levels have crept back up and they peak in the summer when there is more light, which is needed for its creation. A short-chain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS), TFA forms in the atmosphere when various chemical emissions come together.

“TFA is something that we haven't known a lot about before, but we're learning more now that we can measure it,” says 91��ɫ PhD Candidate Daniel Persaud, the paper’s lead author. “With levels of TFA dropping during the pandemic, it now gives us a lot more information about its thousands of sources, such as industrial and vehicle air conditioner emissions.”

The researchers collected and analyzed monthly measurements of both wet (rain and snow) and dry deposition – gases and particles that land on surfaces and form a layer of dust, for example, on windows and car windshields – from the Air Quality Research Station on roof of 91��ɫ’s Petrie Science and Engineering Building between 2018 to 2024.

What is still unknown, is the effect of long-term exposure on people and wildlife. Young says TFAs are already orders of magnitude higher in the environment than some of the other PFAS, such as perfluorooctanoic acid, known as PFOA. PFOA was the subject of successful lawsuits with hundreds of millions in payouts, including from DuPont, which is also the focus of the 2019 documentary Dark Waters.

“The short-chain PFAS precursors were supposed to be more benign, and many are, but not all and so that created more unknowns about their effect. There is preliminary evidence that is behaving in ways we didn't expect. We’re finding it at high concentrations in food, for example,” says Young of 91��ɫ Faculty of Science.

“We didn’t think that PFASs like TFA could bioaccumulate, but they’ve been found to accumulate in plants, and can be found in the food people and wildlife eat. It has even been found in human blood. Our exposure could still be quite high, even if it's not bioaccumulating. If TFA levels in the environment are driven by short-lived emissions, then that’s something we can actually address now.”

A little history

The main precursor chemicals that form short-chain PFASs are the second generation of chemicals designed to replace the ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), phased out globally starting with the 1987 Montreal Protocol. These first-generation replacement chemicals remain for years to decades in the atmosphere and can slowly react to form short-chain, persistent PFAS, like TFA, thought to be better than CFCs at the time, but these forever chemicals are now found everywhere from the Arctic to the Antarctic and there is no way to turn back the clock on them.

“The change from long-lived to short-lived precursors was made for climate reasons because the long-lived ones are also really potent greenhouse gases,” says Persaud of the Faculty of Science. “We previously though the biggest source of TFA was first-generation CFC replacements, but our results show the important role of short-lived, next-generation replacements.”

An example of that change is that in North America all car air conditioners from 2019 onwards now use a short-lived TFA precursor rather than the long-lived PFAS precursors. However, if these performance chemicals for air conditioners are finding their way into the atmosphere, it’s expensive for car manufacturers and consumers for alike.

The paper, , was published in journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

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The combined results add to physicists’ understanding and they validate the impressive collaborative effort
between two competing — yet complementary — experiments.

TORONTO, Oct. 22, 2025 – The (T2K) experiment in Japan and the (NOvA) experiment in the United States, previously considered rival experiments, conducted a joint analysis and published their first results today in the journal .

Both are long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments using accelerators, and by leveraging their different baselines and neutrino energies, they achieved precision measurements of neutrino oscillations.

Neutrinos are subatomic particles that are neutral and weigh almost nothing, and almost never interact with the matter around them, making them notoriously hard to study. However, they may hold the secret to why the universe is now filled with matter and light. Everything known about particle physics tells scientists that when the universe began there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which when they collide, annihilate to form light.

“If matter and antimatter behave identically, then the universe now should hold nothing but light.  Something must have tipped the balance to favour matter over antimatter, and all the other particles we have studied till now cannot tip this balance. It is possible that neutrinos may be what tipped that balance, so the field is trying as hard as it can to see if neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently from each other,” says 91��ɫ Professor Deborah Harris.

Harris, a particle physicist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Science, is an active member of the large research collaboration T2K.  She also collaborates on a next generation neutrino oscillation experiment aiming to measure oscillations with even more precision, called the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), and is a senior scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States. 

The combined efforts of T2K and NOvA succeeded in reducing the uncertainty in the differences between neutrino masses to below two per cent. Although the ordering of the three neutrino masses is still unknown, their results show that depending on this ordering, the magnitude of CP symmetry violation – a difference in behaviour between particles and antiparticles – would be strongly constrained.

This achievement marks an important step toward uncovering CP symmetry violation in neutrinos and the origin of the matter–antimatter asymmetry in the universe. The joint analysis combined 10 years of T2K data collected since 2010 and six years of NOvA data collected since 2014, and it also demonstrates the strength of collaboration between two international experiments that are competitive yet complementary.

“This combination does not yet see a definitive difference between neutrinos and antineutrinos but by combining the two experiment’s data we know much more about neutrinos than either experiment can tell us by itself,” says Harris.

91��ɫ researchers have been an important part of T2K since its inception and contributed the critical Optical Transition Radiation Detector in the beamline. These researchers include Professor Sampa Bhadra and postdoctoral Fellows Dr. Noë Roy and Dr. Arturo Fiorentini, and former PhD students Dr. Rowan Zaki and Dr. Mitchell Yu.    

Context

When the universe began, physicists expect there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But if that were so, the matter and antimatter should have perfectly canceled each other out, resulting in total annihilation.

And yet, here we are. Somehow, matter won out over antimatter — but we still don’t know how or why.

Physicists suspect the answer may lie in the mysterious behaviour of abundant yet elusive particles called neutrinos. Specifically, learning more about a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation — in which neutrinos change types, or flavours, as they travel — could bring us closer to an answer.

The international collaborations representing two neutrino experiments, T2K in Japan and NOvA in the United States, recently combined forces to produce their first joint results, published today in the journal Nature. This initial joint analysis provides some of the most precise neutrino-oscillation measurements in the field.

“These results are an outcome of a cooperation and mutual understanding of two unique collaborations, both involving many experts in neutrino physics, detection technologies and analysis techniques, working in very different environments, using different methods and tools,” says T2K collaborator Tomáš Nosek.

Different experiments, common goals

Despite their ubiquity, neutrinos are very difficult to detect and study. Even though they were first seen in the 1950s, the ghostly particles remain deeply enigmatic. Filling in gaps in our knowledge about neutrinos and their properties may reveal fundamental truths about the universe.

T2K and NOvA are both long-baseline experiments: they each shoot an intense beam of neutrinos that passes through both a near detector close to the neutrino source and a far detector hundreds of miles away. Both experiments compare data recorded in each detector to learn about neutrinos’ behaviour and properties.

NOvA, the NuMI Off-axis ν_e Appearance experiment, sends a beam of neutrinos 810 kilometers from its source at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, Ill., to a 14,000-ton liquid-scintillator detector in Ash River, Minnesota.

The T2K experiment’s neutrino beam travels 295 kilometers from Tokai to Kamioka — hence the name T2K. Tokai is home to the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) and Kamioka hosts the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector, an enormous tank of ultrapure water located a kilometer underground.

Since the experiments have similar science goals but different baselines and different neutrino energies, physicists can learn more by combining their data.

“By making a joint analysis you can get a more precise measurement than each experiment can produce alone,” says NOvA collaborator Liudmila Kolupaeva. “As a rule, experiments in high-energy physics have different designs even if they have the same science goal. Joint analyses allow us to use complementary features of these designs.”

As long-baseline experiments, NOvA and T2K are ideal for studying neutrino oscillations, a phenomenon that can provide insight into open questions like charge-parity violation and the neutrino mass ordering. Two experiments with different baselines and energies have a better chance of disentangling the two effects than one experiment alone.

Interrogating neutrino oscillations

The mystery of neutrino mass ordering is the question of which neutrino is the lightest. But it isn’t as simple as placing particles on a scale. Neutrinos have miniscule masses that are made up of combinations of mass states. There are three neutrino mass states, but, confusingly, they don’t map to the three neutrino flavours. In fact, each flavour is made of a mix of the three mass states, and each mass state has a different probability of acting like each flavour of neutrino.

There are two possible mass orderings, called normal or inverted. Under the normal ordering, two of the mass states are relatively light and one is heavy, while the inverted ordering has two heavier mass states and one light.

In the normal ordering, there is an enhanced probability that muon neutrinos will oscillate to electron neutrinos but a lower probability that muon antineutrinos will oscillate to electron antineutrinos. In the inverted ordering, the opposite happens. However, an asymmetry in the neutrinos’ and antineutrinos’ oscillations could also be explained if neutrinos violate CP symmetry — in other words, if neutrinos don’t behave the same as their antimatter counterparts.

The combined results of NOvA and T2K do not favour either mass ordering. If the neutrino mass ordering is found to be normal, NOvA’s and T2K’s results are less clear on CP symmetry, requiring additional data to clarify. However, if future results show the neutrino mass ordering is inverted, the results published today provide evidence that neutrinos violate CP symmetry, potentially explaining why the universe is dominated by matter instead of antimatter.

“Neutrino physics is a strange field. It is very challenging to isolate effects,” says Kendall Mahn, co-spokesperson for T2K. “Combining analyses allows us to isolate one of these effects, and that’s progress.”

The combined analysis does provide one of the most precise values of the difference in mass between neutrino mass states, a quantity called Δm²₃₂. With an uncertainty below two per cent, the new value will enable physicists to make precision comparisons with other neutrino experiments to test whether the neutrino oscillation theory is complete.

What’s next

These first joint results do not definitively solve any mysteries of neutrinos, but they do add to physicists’ knowledge about the particles. Plus, they validate the impressive collaborative effort between two competing — yet complementary — experiments.

The NOvA collaboration consists of more than 250 scientists and engineers from 49 institutions in eight countries. The T2K collaboration has more than 560 members from 75 institutions in 15 countries. The two collaborations began active work on this joint analysis in 2019. It combines six years of data from NOvA, which began collecting data in 2014, and a decade of data from T2K, which started up in 2010.  Both experiments continue to take data, and efforts are already underway to update the joint analysis with the new data.

“The joint analysis work has benefited both collaborations,” says Patricia Vahle, co-spokesperson for NOvA. “We have a much better mutual understanding of the strengths and challenges of the different experimental setups and analysis techniques.”

NOvA and T2K are the only currently operating long-baseline neutrino experiments. Their initial combined results lay a foundation for forthcoming neutrino experiments that will answer the questions around neutrinos unambiguously.

The Fermilab led Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment is under construction in Illinois and South Dakota in the U.S. With its longer baseline of 1,300 kilometers, DUNE will be more sensitive to neutrino mass ordering and could give physicists a conclusive answer shortly after it turns on in the early years of the next decade.

In Japan, Hyper-Kamiokande, the successor to Super-Kamiokande, is currently under construction in an underground mine in Kamioka, Hida City, Gifu Prefecture, with experiments scheduled to begin in 2028. Hyper-Kamiokande will conduct highly sensitive searches for CP symmetry violation through high-statistics measurements made possible by a detector about eight times larger and an intense neutrino beam.

Many physicists hope these next-generation neutrino experiments can come together — as NOvA and T2K have already done — to make progress on their shared scientific goals to learn more about neutrinos and their unusual properties.

“As shown in this very analysis, there are no truly ‘rivaling’ experiments because they all share a common goal of scientific study of a phenomenon,” says Nosek. “Collaborating is naturally important for the transfer of knowledge, know-how and experience, and for sharing resources, ideas and tools. The T2K-NOvA collaboration is not merely a sum of T2K and NOvA collaborations. It is much, much more.”

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Researchers use newly deployed CHIME Outrigger telescopes and deep-space imaging to challenge long-held assumptions about what causes the mysterious cosmic signals

A team of international astronomers, including a researcher from 91��ɫ, have pinpointed one of the brightest fast radio bursts (FRBs) ever detected to a location in a nearby galaxy. The finding and the location surprised the team and offered new insight into FRBs, which are one of astrophysics’ biggest mysteries.

FRBs are powerful, millisecond-long flashes of radio waves from space. Researchers suspect that they are the result of extreme cosmic events but have, so far, been unable to determine the exact origin of any of them. FRBs are notoriously difficult to study because they vanish in the time it takes to blink. For the past years, CHIME has been casting a broad net to catch the rarest astrophysical events. Now it can also pinpoint their origin.

“This was the brightest fast radio burst that the CHIME Telescope has ever seen,” says Assistant Professor Paul Scholz, a coordinator on the CHIME/FRB project and author of one of the papers outlining the discovery. “Previously, most of the fast radio bursts were detected halfway across the universe, where they’re extremely distant. This one was in a galaxy that's very close to us.”

A particularly bright FRB was detected in March from the direction of the Big Dipper by the Canadian CHIME/FRB radio-telescope. Referred to as FRB 20250316A, affectionately dubbed “RBFLOAT” for Radio Brightest FLash Of All Time, the FRB marks a significant change for researchers because it allowed for the identification of a point of origin using only CHIME/FRB, the most prolific FRB discovery machine.

“This result marks a turning point: instead of just detecting these mysterious flashes, we can now see exactly where they’re coming from. It opens the door to discovering whether they’re caused by dying stars, exotic magnetic objects, or something we haven’t thought of yet,” said Amanda Cook, a McGill-based Postdoctoral Researcher, who led the study that announced the discovery.

‘Like spotting a quarter from 100km away’

To investigate RBFLOAT’s origin, the researchers relied on CHIME’s newly completed “outrigger” telescopes, which span North America from British Columbia to California. This array of vantage points gave them unprecedented spatial resolution, allowing them to trace the burst to a region just 45 light years across – smaller than the average star cluster – in the outskirts of a galaxy about 130 million light-years away.

“The precision of this localization, tens of milliarcseconds, is like spotting a quarter from 100 kilometres away,” said Cook. “That level of detail is what let us identify the host galaxy, NGC 4141, and match the burst with a faint infrared signal captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.”

That, in turn, revealed a mysterious source of near-infrared light in the exact spot where RBFLOAT occurred. This surprised the researchers who are left wondering if the spot is something like a red giant star or a fading light echo from the burst itself.

“The high resolution of JWST allows us to resolve individual stars around an FRB for the first time. This opens the door to identifying the kinds of stellar environments that could give rise to such powerful bursts, especially when rare FRBs are captured with this level of detail.” said Peter Blanchard, a Harvard Research Associate and lead author of the other paper.

Despite being the brightest yet seen by CHIME, researchers have not detected repeat bursts from the source, even in the hundreds of hours its position was observed by the CHIME survey instrument over more than six years. That goes against the prevailing idea that all FRBs eventually repeat.

“It seems different energetically than the repeaters we’ve studied. We’re now re-examining some of the more explosive models that had fallen out of favour,” said  Mawson Sammons, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill. Sammons works with Victoria Kaspi, astrophysicist and professor at McGill, who co-leads the CHIME/FRB research team of roughly 100 scientists.

New possibilities

The new observations are described through two studies, the first of which Scholz was an author on. The first is focused on the and localization of the burst, and the other on of the location from which the radio burst originated. Together, they provide detail and new possibilities for studying FRBs, not just as cosmic curiosities but as tools to probe the universe.

“This marks the beginning of a new era where we can routinely localize even single, non-repeating bursts to pinpoint precision. That’s a game-changer for understanding what’s behind them,” said Sammons.

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91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future. 

Media Contact: Emina Gamulin, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca

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Novel models of planetary interiors give scientists a framework to interpret current observations of distant exoplanets from space- and ground-based telescopes

TORONTO, July 29, 2025 – A new paper led by a 91��ɫ professor and in Nature Astronomy introduces a simple theoretical framework to describe the evolution of the coupled interior–atmosphere system of hot rocky exoplanets known as “lava planets.”

“Lava planets are in such extreme orbital configurations that our knowledge of rocky planets in the solar system does not directly apply, leaving scientists uncertain about what to expect when observing lava planets,” says first author Charles-Édouard Boukaré, Assistant Professor in 91��ɫ’s Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Faculty of Science.

“Our simulations propose a conceptual framework for interpreting their evolution and provide scenarios to probe their internal dynamics and chemical changes over time. These processes, though greatly amplified in lava planets, are fundamentally the same as those that shape rocky planets in our own solar system.”

Exotic worlds may unveil processes driving planetary evolution

Lava planets are Earth- to super-Earth–sized worlds orbiting extremely close to their host stars, completing an orbit in less than a single Earth day. Much like Earth’s Moon, they are expected to be tidally locked, always showing the same face to their star. Their dayside surfaces reach such extreme temperatures that silicate rocks melt – and even vaporize – creating conditions unlike anything in our solar system. These exotic worlds, easily observable due to their ultra short orbital period, provide unique insights into the fundamental processes that shape planetary evolution.

Probing planetary interiors through atmosphere and surface properties

The study combines expertise in geophysical fluid mechanics, exoplanetary atmospheres, and mineralogy to explore how the compositions of lava planets evolve through a process akin to distillation. When rocks melt or vaporize, elements such as magnesium, iron, silicon, oxygen, sodium, and potassium partition differently between vapor, liquid, and solid phases. The unique orbital configuration of lava planets maintains vapor–liquid and solid–liquid equilibria over billions of years, driving long-term chemical evolution.

The paper, “The role of interior dynamics and differentiation on the surface and atmosphere of lava planets,” was co-authored by Daphné Lemasquerier (University of St Andrews), Nicolas B. Cowan (McGill University), Lisa Dang (University of Waterloo),  Henri Samuel, James Badro, Aurélien Falco and Sébastien Charnoz (Université Paris Cité).

Using unprecedented numerical simulations, the team predicts two end-member evolutionary states:

            • Fully molten interior (likely young planets): The atmosphere mirrors the bulk planetary composition, and heat transport within the molten interior keeps the nightside surface hot and dynamic.

            • Mostly solid interior (likely older planets): Only a shallow lava ocean remains on the dayside, and the atmosphere becomes depleted in elements such as sodium, potassium, and iron.

Testing hypotheses with the James Webb Space Telescope

Boukaré explains that this research on lava exoplanets began as a highly exploratory effort with few initial expectations. It builds on a novel modeling approach he developed to study molten rocky planets in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris, Université Paris Cité, published in Nature earlier this year.

What began as an exploratory study has since opened a promising new line of research. The predictions outlined in this work helped secure 100 hours of observation time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — the most advanced infrared observatory ever built, featuring a 6.5‑metre segmented mirror and ultra‑sensitive instruments capable of probing the earliest galaxies and the atmospheres of distant exoplanets with unprecedented precision. These upcoming JWST observations, led by co-author Prof. Dang, will directly test the theoretical framework proposed in this study.

“We really hope we can observe and distinguish old lava planets from young lava planets. If we can do this, it would mark an important step toward moving beyond the traditional snapshot view of exoplanets,” says Boukaré.

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91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future. 

Media Contact: Emina Gamulin, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca

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To empower learners world-wide to respond to the global water sustainability crisis, UNITAR Global Water Academy and 91��ɫ are launching three new courses today – World Environment Day.

The three free, online courses, , , and , will play a pivotal role in delivering accessible knowledge on freshwater to the global community. The start date for the UNITAR Global Water Academy @ 91��ɫ courses is flexible.

To date, the Global Water Academy has reached 10,000 leaners across 153 countries. The courses build on the Global Water Academy’s focus on social justice, diversity, and the public good.

Professor , director of the UNITAR Global Water Academy @ 91��ɫU, and 91��ɫ Research Chair in Global Change Biology in 91��ɫ's Faculty of Science, says: “The goals of the Global Water Academy and our latest courses highlight our commitment to democratizing education to our global community to work towards achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal 6: ensuring access to clean water and sanitation for all.”

These courses are intended to raise awareness and foster action around UN Sustainable Development Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation. Learners will receive digital badges and UNTIAR certificated upon completion.

The impacts of climate change on lakes worldwide is highlighted first, in particular how and why lakes around the world are losing ice cover, and how this is relevant to the 2025 World Water Day theme of glacier preservation.

There is also a seminar course taught by international leaders on big data and big data analytics and provide learner with tools on how to acquire and analyze large global water and climate data sets. 

Hillary Birch, PhD student in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and UNITAR Global Water Academy research assistant, designed the course, , in collaboration with Indigenous researchers across Canada.

“The course itself is full of fantastic clips from Indigenous scholars, elders, and knowledge holders from which people can learn directly,” she says. “The idea is to provide learners with an introduction to different ways of relating to water, particularly from Indigenous perspectives, which treat water very differently from how Western models have of related to water over the past centuries.

It's an effort to provide at least the first way of thinking about water differently and use the long-established knowledge of Indigenous Peoples to begin to shift a little bit of our thinking around how we relate to water and helps address the long challenge of reconciliation in Canada.”

The courses are designed to be engaging and interactive with images, embedded videos of community knowledge holders, multiple choice quizzes, and prompts for reflection. Learners will have the opportunity to engage directly with voices from Indigenous and local communities.

These courses are meticulously designed to encourage reflection and meaningful engagement with the materials. Sachin Satahoo who recently graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering at 91��ɫ and served as the course engineer, hopes they will deepen knowledge in environmental work, encourage learners to respect Indigenous sovereignty and think about water in a reciprocal lens rather than an extractive resource.

“I'm excited for the learners to interact with the courses and go through the text, the visuals, the videos. The course format encourages a reflection and personal connection with the material, helping learners to go through it on a deeper level,” says Satahoo. “I'm proud that the course doesn't just provide information, but rather it invites learners in a new way of thinking, respects Indigenous worldviews, and presents the material in forms which are both accessible and grounded; and being able to support that work through thoughtful design and user experience.”

These courses are available on Moodle and can be viewed here. Visit the course links below to register. Contact ugwacord@yorku.ca for questions or to be added to the Listserv.

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