Bernard Lightman Archives | Research & Innovation

Four 91��ɫ professors elected to the Royal Society of Canada

fmaquito — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:00:00 +0000

The achievements of four 91��ɫ professors have been recognized by the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), which has inducted them as Fellows.

Professor Pat Armstrong, a distinguished research professor of sociology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS); Professor Isabella Bakker in the Department of Political Science in LA&PS; Professor Rishma Dunlop in the Faculty of Education and in the Department of English in LA&PS; and Professor Bernard Lightman in the Department of Humanities, LA&PS, have all been inducted into the society as Fellows.

“On behalf of the 91��ɫ community, I would like to offer our sincere congratulations to four of our faculty members on being named as Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada,” said President & Vice-Chancellor Mamdouh Shoukri. “This prestigious recognition is well-deserved as Drs. Armstrong, Bakker, Dunlop and Lightman are leading scholars who have made outstanding contributions in research in their fields.”

The society has elected 78 new Fellows, including two Foreign Fellows, and one Honorary Fellow to its ranks for 2011. The newly elected Fellows will be officially inducted on Saturday, Nov. 26, during a ceremony at the Ottawa Convention Centre.

Election to the academies of the Royal Society of Canada is one of the highest honours awarded to Canadian scholars in the arts, humanities and sciences.

Pat Armstrong (right) is an internationally renowned sociologist with expertise in health care and women’s health, social policy, and gender and work. She has co-authored numerous books on health policy, including They Deserve Better: The Long-Term Care Experience in Canada and Scandinavia, Women’s Health: Intersections of Policy, Research and Practice, and Critical to Care: The Invisible Women in Health Services, among others. Armstrong is the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation/Canadian Institutes of Health Research Chair in Health Services and Nursing Research and an executive member of both the 91��ɫ Institute for Health Research and the Graduate Program in Health Policy and Equity. She is the principal investigator for a major collaborative research initiative project titled “Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices,” which is funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Isabella Bakker (left) teaches International Political Economy, Women and Politics and Public Finance. A leading global expert in her field, Bakker’s research examines the interplay between feminist perspectives and international public policy, with a focus on how macroeconomics and fiscal policy affect questions of gender and social justice. Bakker’s published work includes: Questioning Financial Governance from a Feminist Perspective, Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy, Beyond States and Markets: The Challenges of Social Reproduction and The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy. She has been a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at 91��ɫ since 1986, and has held visiting professorships at the European University Institute in Florence, the University of California Santa Barbara and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, among other institutions. Bakker is a Trudeau Fellow and was named Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2004. She is the principal investigator of a SSHRC-funded project “Budgeting for Women’s Human Rights in Canada”.

Rishma Dunlop (right) is an award-winning Canadian poet, playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. She is founding editor of the international online literary journal Studio. Dunlop’s poetry collections include: White Album (2008), Metropolis (2005), Reading Like a Girl (2004) and The Body of My Garden (2002). Next month, her fifth book, Lover Through Departure: New and Selected Poems will be published. Known for her innovative research that merges scholarly inquiry with artistic production, Dunlop has taught interdisciplinary seminars on research and artistic creation for over a decade. In 2009 to 2010, she was awarded the prestigious Canada-US Fulbright Research Chair at the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She won the Emily Dickinson Prize for Poetry in 2003, and her non-fiction and poetry have been short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards. She is currently principal investigator on the SSHRC research initiative on poetry of witness, human Rights and transitional justice. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, cross-appointed to 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Education and the Department of English, where she was coordinator of the Creative Writing program from 2007 to 2011.

Bernard Lightman (left) is an internationally renowned historian and currently the editor of Isis, the quarterly journal of the History of Science Society. He is also director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies at 91��ɫ. Lightman’s area of expertise is the cultural history of Victorian science. He is editor of the Pickering and Chatto Press monograph series, titled “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century”, in which 14 books have been published. His publications include: The Origins of Agnosticism, Victorian Popularizers of Science, Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain and Victorian Science in Context, among others. Currently, Lightman is working on a biography of the physicist John Tyndall, and he is the founder of an international correspondence project to collect and publish Tyndall’s letters. The project is being funded by the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

For more information on the 2011 Fellows, visit the website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Institute for Science & Technology Studies launches inaugural lecture series today

fmaquito — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Considered to be one of the world’s leading historians of science, University of California, San Diego history and science studies Professor Naomi Oreskes will be at 91��ɫ today to deliver a special lecture at 12:30pm in 320 Bethune College (The Delaney Gallery) on 91��ɫ’s Keele campus.

Left: Naomi Oreskes

Oreskes, who is an adjunct professor of geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and provost of Sixth College at UC San Diego, began her career as an exploration geologist working in the mining industry in the Australian outback. For the past 20 years, she has studied the process of consensus and dissent in science.

The central questions that inform her research are: How do scientists decide when a fact is established? How do they judge how much evidence is sufficient to deem something scientifically demonstrated? And what happens when scientists can’t agree?

Oreskes will be at 91��ɫ to talk about her new book, Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury Press, 2010).

In the book, Oreskes and her co-author Erik Conway, an historian of science affiliated with the California Institute of Technology, explore how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists, with extensive political connections, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

In seven chapters addressing tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming and DDT, Oreskes and Conway roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how the ideology of free market fundamentalism, aided by a compliant media, has skewed public understanding of the most pressing issues of our era.

Oreskes’ lecture marks the official launch of 91��ɫ’s new Institute for Science & Technology Studies. The institute, which launches today, was created to be a focal point for science and technology studies in Canada. Science & Technology Studies is a burgeoning field not only in Canada, but also the world, as scholars in humanities and social studies develop increasingly sophisticated intellectual and methodological tools for engaging with techno-scientific knowledge, practice and artifacts.

For more on the new institute, visit the Science & Technology Studies website.

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For 91��ɫ profs, it's science on-demand at Royal Canadian Institute gala dinner

fmaquito — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Have you ever wanted to have dinner with a scientist? Ask questions about Canada’s laser radar on NASA's 2007 Phoenix mission to Mars, the role of human genomes in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, the consequences of dwindling fossil fuels or perhaps how biochemical pathways affect obesity?

The Royal Canadian Institute (RCI) for the Advancement of Science, Canada's oldest scientific society at 161 years, is hosting a gala dinner featuring 25 scientists, and guests get to choose which one they’d like to sit with.

Five of the scientists are from 91��ɫ, which is a sponsor of the dinner. They are physics Professor Emeritus Allan Carswell, humanities and science & technology studies Professor Bernard Lightman, Osgoode Hall Law School Professor Giuseppina D’Agostino, anthropology and science & technology studies Professor Natasha Myers, and Canada Research Chair in Ecology & Conservation Biology, Professor Bridget Stutchbury. In addition, Mark Lievonen, president of Sanofi Pasteur Ltd., a 91��ɫ alumnus and member of 91��ɫ's Board of Governors, will also host a table.

Right: Giuseppina D’Agostino

Founder and director of Osgoode's Intellectual Property Law & Technology Program (IP Osgoode), D’Agostino, a recent recipient of the Law Commission of Ontario’s Visiting Scholarship Program, will talk about "Challenges to the Commercialization of Intellectual Property". The commercialization of intellectual property is often said to be indispensable for fostering a vibrant, creative and innovative economy, but many challenges remain before an invention can be brought from the lab into the marketplace. D’Agostino is currently investigating the intellectual property and privacy aspects of the electronic health record in Canada.

Left: Bernard Lightman

Lightman, editor of the history of science journal Isis, will discuss "Who, Exactly, Was Charles Darwin? The Making of a Cultural Icon". Lightman's early work, summed up in his , centred on the birth of a new form of unbelief in the wake of the debates over evolutionary theory. More recently, he has tackled the issue of how science was popularized in the second half of the 19th century in Britain. His current project is a biography of the eminent Victorian physicist John Tyndall.

Right: Allan Carswell

Former president of the Canadian Association of Physicists and vice-president of the Canadian Academy of Science, Carswell founded Optech Inc. in 1974 to develop commercial lidars (laser radar). He and a Canadian team provided a lidar on NASA's 2007 Phoenix mission to Mars as part of a meteorological station, MET, for studies of the Martian atmosphere. After the landing in May 2008, MET provided measurements of outstanding value, including the discovery of snowfall on Mars. An internationally recognized leader in the lidar field, Carswell will present "Canada Goes to Mars".

Left: Bridget Stutchbury

Stutchbury, Canada Research Chair in Ecology and Conservation Biology and a field biologist who has studied bird behaviour and conservation for 25 years, has followed Canadian migratory songbirds to their wintering grounds in Latin America to understand the threats they face far away. She is author of , a Governor General’s Literary Award non-fiction finalist, and the forthcoming T. She will discuss "Conservation Biology Studied Through Birds".

Right: Natasha Myers

Myers' research examines the lively visual cultures that thrive in contemporary life science laboratories and classrooms, with an interest in the artistry, craft and creativity of scientific work. She will discuss "Art Meets Science". Myers has been engaged in art-science collaborations for over a decade. Her most recent project was the 2009 Art Meets Science Series at 91��ɫ, a year-long series of events designed to foster a culture of collaboration among 91��ɫ’s artists and scientists.

Left: Mark Lievonen

Lievonen (BBA Spec. Hons. ’79, MBA ’87), a member of the Board of Directors of Oncolytics Biotech Inc. and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, will talk about the Canadian Vaccine Capability: Collaborating for Continued Success.

In addition, ex-91��ɫie Brock Fenton, a biology professor at the University of Western Ontario and former chair of 91��ɫ’s Department of Biology as well as former associate vice-president research, will ask "How do Universities Interact With Society?" He has written several books about bats intended for a general audience, including Just Bats (University of Toronto Press, 1983) and The Bat: Wings in the Night Sky ( Key Porter Press, 1998)).

Right: Brock Fenton

Scientists are chosen from various disciplines and many southern Ontario academic institutions. Each scientist hosts a table of eight. The gala partners are awarded several places, and their guests, as well as individual ticket purchasers, can choose the table of greatest interest to them. After a reception of an hour or so, dinner will start. Each scientist will provide a brief overview of their subject and/or current work and guests are then free to ask any questions or suggest topics they would like the host to discuss. For tables and topics, click here. Following the dinner, the president of the RCI will open a general question-and-answer period at which time any of the participants are free to direct a question to any of the scientists present.

The RCI for the Advancement of Science is a not-for-profit organization founded in Toronto in 1849 by a small group of civil engineers, architects and surveyors and led by Sir Sandford Fleming (1827-1915) who established the concept of time zones.

The gala will take place Thursday, April 22, from 6 to 9:30pm, in the MaRS Collaboration Centre, 101 College St., Toronto. Tickets are $250. The dinner will help to raise awareness and funds for the RCI's outreach activities, in particular the free public lectures it presents every year in Toronto and Mississauga on a diverse range of topics. The fundraising also goes toward providing scholarships for deserving high school students to attend university.

91��ɫ provides the Webcasting and archiving for all the lectures through the support of University Information Technology and the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. Click to view archived Webcasts of previous lectures. 91��ɫ also supplies many of the speakers. This winter two of the six Toronto were from 91��ɫ.

For more information, visit the Web site or contact 91��ɫ biology Professor Ron Pearlman, a member of the RCI council and the gala organizing committee, at ronp@yorku.ca.

Republished courtesy o f YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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