Blind Date with Knowledge

Waste in the West: Advancing our Waste Management Practices

Professor, Canada Research Chair in Bioresources Engineering and Director of Beaty Water Research Center

Dr. Pascale Champagne is the Canada Research Chair in Bioresource Engineering and a Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Queen’s. She is also the Director of the Beaty Water Research Centre, which brings together faculty across disciplines to collaborate on research into water-related issues. Dr. Champagne’s research focuses on the development of alternate water and waste management strategies and environmentally sustainable approaches. She has collaborated widely to develop new integrated bioresource management practices, to introduce alternate aqueous and solid waste management approaches, and to create unique opportunities for the bioenergy and bioproducts sectors. She is a member of several prestigious societies, including the RSC College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists and the American Academy of Water Resources Engineers, and she received the Queen’s Prize for Excellence in Research in 2017. In this episode, Dr. Champagne discusses integrated bioresource engineering as a method to redirect waste to generate energy, effectively recycle, and reduce treatment costs. She explains that multidisciplinary methods, as well as the integration of student involvement, are progressing our understanding of bioresource engineering to allow policymakers to make informed choices.

https://civil.queensu.ca/Research/Environmental/Pascale-Champagne/index.html

Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy

Dark Matter and What Goes Bump in the Night

Dr. Joseph Bramante is an Assistant Professor at in the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Perimeter Institute and a member of the new, Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astro-Particle Physics Research Institute at Queen’s. His research focuses on constructing theories that describe fundamental physics and finding new ways for humans to test those theories. He held postdoctoral fellowships at the Perimeter Institute and the University of Notre Dame, and received his doctorate from the University of Hawaii for work on “Dark Particles and Primordial Perturbations.” In this episode, he discusses the new McDonald Institute’s network of researchers and students whose central aim is to make new discoveries and advance the frontier of knowledge related to astro particle physics. Dr. Bramante also explains how his research on fundamental theories of dark matter has progressed through experimentation at SNOLAB.

https://www.queensu.ca/physics/joe-bramante

David Lyon, Professor, Queen’s Research Chair in Surveillance Studies

David Murakami Wood, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Surveillance Studies

Midori Ogasawara, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology

From the Babysitter to Alexa: Surveillance is All Around

Dr. David Lyon is Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre and Professor of Sociology and Law at Queen’s University. Dr. Lyon is credited with spearheading the field of “surveillance studies,” and he has produced a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. His most recent book, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life, looks at the imaginaries and practices of everyday surveillance. Dr. Lyon is also the Principal Investigator of the “Big Data Surveillance” project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This study examines the relationship between big data and surveillance in security, marketing and governance.

Dr. David Murakami Wood is the Canada Research Chair in Surveillance Studies at Queen’s. He is a widely published specialist in the sociology and geography of surveillance and security in cities from a global comparative perspective, with a particular focus on Japan, Brazil, Canada and the UK. His current research focuses on security and surveillance in smart cities. Dr. Murakami Wood is also the Editor-in-Chief of the international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal, Surveillance & Society, and a co-investigator of the “Big Data Surveillance” project.

Midori Ogasawara is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. Midori’s current doctoral project focuses on the colonial origins and consequences of “identification” technologies, such as ID cards and biometrics, in northeastern China under the Japanese occupation of the 1920s. Midori worked as a staff writer for Asahi Shimbun — Japan’s national newspaper, for 10 years. She was awarded the Fulbright Journalist Scholarship and John S. Knight Professional Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University in 2004-2005. In May 2016, she was the first Japanese journalist to interview the NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden, and she published a number of articles.

In this special panel episode, the scholars discuss the changing nature of surveillance studies. Dr. Lyon explains his concept of “social sorting” as dividing a population into groups so that they can be seen and treated differently. Ogasawara explores the colonial roots of the Japanese biometric ID system, arguing that it was grounded in perceptions of Chinese labour and internal resistance. While Dr. Murakami Wood explains that cities have always been mechanisms for surveillance with current iterations such as smart cities allowing private companies to integrate themselves into government and gain mass data. Together, they discuss the future of the regulation and accountability of mass data collection in an ever-increasing multinational process.

https://www.queensu.ca/sociology/people/faculty/david-lyon

https://www.queensu.ca/sociology/people/faculty/david-murakami-wood

https://www.queensu.ca/sociology/people/graduate-students/midori-ogasawara

Gabor Fichtinger, Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Computer-Integrated Surgery, School of Computing

Caitlin Yeo, Chief Resident in General Surgery, School of Medicine

Flying Blindly vs. GPS Navigation in Surgical Procedures

Dr. Gabor Fichtinger is the Canada Research Chair in Computer-Assisted Surgery and a Professor in the School of Computing at Queen’s. His research focuses on computer-assisted surgery and interventions, specifically on integrating and translating medical imaging, image computing, scientific visualization, surgical planning and navigation, robotics, and biosensors into clinical use. He also specializes in minimally invasive percutaneous interventions performed under image guidance, with primary applications in the detection and treatment of cancer. He has an active lab filled with many undergraduate and graduate student researchers, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Dr. Caitlin Yeo is the incoming Chief Resident in Surgery, and a past Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Lab for Percutaneous Surgery under the supervision of Dr. Fichtinger. She has been a Resident in General Surgery at Queen’s since 2013, and she completed her Master’s of Medical Education at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Dr. Yeo collaborates closely with the PerkLab and other members of the School of Computing and Department of Surgery to bring innovative surgical techniques to patients.

In this episode, they discuss the innovative NaviKnife, a miniature GPS system for surgeries in the operating room, as an improvement to the current guidewire in use. It provides a 3D virtual image that is more precise in the process of removing cancerous tissues than the current 2D method.

http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~gabor/

http://perk.cs.queensu.ca/users/yeo

Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies, Department of Philosophy

Is Treating the Death Penalty as a Medical Procedure Due Diligence to Avoid Pain?

Dr. Lisa Guenther is the Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies, jointly appointed in the Department of Philosophy and the Cultural Studies Program. Dr. Guenther’s research focuses on the intersection of phenomenology, political philosophy, and critical prison studies, with further specializations in feminism and philosophy of race. She is a public philosopher, publishing her work both in academic journals and in major media outlets including The New York Times and CBC’s “Ideas.” She is the author of the renowned 2013 book Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives and is currently working on a book about incarceration, reproductive politics, and settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and the United States. In this episode, Dr. Guenther discusses the medical effectiveness of the death penalty in the United States, the only Western country to practice capital punishment in the twenty-first century.

https://www.queensu.ca/philosophy/guenther-lisa

Associate Professor, Faculty of Law and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research

“The Business of Justice Delivering the Justice of Business:” Arbitration within International Commerce

Dr. Joshua Karton is an Associate Professor and the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research in the Faculty of Law at Queen’s. His research is interdisciplinary, focusing on international arbitration, comparative and international contract law, uniform law, globalization and law, international legal theory, and sociological analysis of law. His writing explores what happens when private actors from different backgrounds – legal, cultural, and linguistic – meet in the international legal arena. In between receiving his JD from Columbia Law School and his PhD in International Law from Cambridge, he practiced in litigation and arbitration in the New York office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. Dr. Karton has also held visiting positions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the National Taiwan University, and Wuhan University (China). In this episode, he discusses how interdisciplinary approaches to researching law as a social institution are the best methods to understand how it reflects the organization of society. In particular, Dr. Karton researches how private arbitration, as a procedural choice, impacts the substance of actual disputes compared to a public court venue. He also explores how language affects the international arbitration system within legal law understandings.

https://law.queensu.ca/directory/joshua-karton

Molly Wallace, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature

David Carruthers, PhD Candidate, Department of English Language and Literature

The Bitterness of Indulging: Dark Ecology and the State of Environmental Mega-Risks

Dr. Molly Wallace is an Associate Professor and the Graduate Chair in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s. Her research interests lie in contemporary literature, eco-criticism and eco-cultural studies. Dr. Wallace has published extensively on these topics, including her most recent book Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty.

David Carruthers is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s where he studies the environmental humanities, particularly ‘dark ecology’ and eco-phenomenology. His doctoral research looks at eco-phenomenological, plant-human intersections as represented in post-Cold War literature and their relationship to understandings of ecological crisis. Carruthers co-edited a book with Wallace entitled, Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis.

In this episode, Carruthers discuss dark ecology and eco-phenomenology as concepts that situate ecology and the environment at the centre of thinking about the complex relationship between human and plant actors. While Dr. Wallace explains that her research examines how we understand living in a state of mega-risks, such as climate change and nuclear threat, related to the environment.

https://www.queensu.ca/english/m-wallace

https://www.queensu.ca/english/doctoral-students

Professor, Department of Oncology and Director, Clinical Translational Research, NCIC Clinical Trials Group

Evolving Clinical Trials through Collaboration

Dr. Janet Dancey is the Director of the Canadian Cancer Trials Group, also known as the CCTG, and a Professor in the Department of Oncology at Queen’s. She is also the Director of the High Impact Clinical Trials Program at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. The CCTG has over 80 member institutions, comprising over 2100 Canadian investigators who have facilitated over 500 trials in more than 40 countries. They are also the only non-American partner of the US National Clinical Trials Network. Prior to joining the CCTG, Dr. Dancey was Senior Clinical Investigator in the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program at the US National Cancer Institute and then Associate Chief of the Investigational Drug Branch. Her expertise lies in anti-cancer drug development, linking drug and biomarker development, and associated clinical trials methodology. In this episode, she discusses the importance of clinical trials and breaks down their evolved and enhanced process for drug development and delivery. Dr. Dancey also explains that the collaborative study of medical interventions in the treatment of cancer have expanded to also investigate how lifestyle, radiation, surgical, and smoke cessation interventions can affect the entire spectrum of cancer treatment.

http://oncology.queensu.ca/divisions/divisions/medical_oncology/janet_dancey

Assistant Professor and Distinguished Faculty Fellow of Management Information Systems

Emails: The Story of a Love/Hate Working Relationship

Dr. Shamel Addas joined Smith School of Business in 2016 as Assistant Professor of Information Systems (IS). Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor of IS at IESEG School of Management in France. Shamel’s research centers on the intended and unintended impact of IS on organizational work. His current research interests include: communication technology interruptions, the dark side of IS, and health information technologies. His research has been published in leading journals such as MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, and others. In this episode, Dr. Addas discusses his research on email interruptions during the workday as part of a bombarding “love/hate” relationship with email. He is researching the impact of these interruptions on work performance and identifying mechanisms responsible for those effects. Dr. Addas also explores how emails can trigger mindless and mindful work processes.

https://smith.queensu.ca/faculty_and_research/faculty_list/addas-shamel.php

April 25, 2018

Dr. Stephen Archer (Head, Department of Medicine), Dr. Paula James (Professor, Department of Medicine) and Dr. Mark Ormiston (Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences)

Synopsis: Cardiopulmonary diseases are the leading cause of death in Canada. Queen’s CardioPulmonary Unit (QCPU) – an 8,000 square foot translational research facility located in Queen’s Biosciences Complex – officially opened on October 6, 2017. Funded by a $7.7M joint award from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science, QCPU research focuses on the development, preclinical testing and commercialization of new therapies for heart, lung, blood and vascular (HLBV) diseases.

In this episode, Drs. Archer, James and Ormiston discuss the vast array of HLBV diseases impacting Canadians and QCPU’s use of a translational ‘molecules up to populations’ approach with the aim to improve health outcomes for patients of HLBV disease. QCPU features state-of-the-art infrastructure and services (CyTOF mass spectroscopy, 2-photon confocal microscopy, micro PET/SPECT/CT, genome sequencing, etc.). Very few facilities bring this type of high calibre equipment together in a central location. QCPU also features clinical trials space and is a satellite clinic with Kingston Health Sciences Centre (Spring 2018). The proximity between QCPU’s clinic and lab spaces means that, instead of having to carry samples across town, all research can be done efficiently in one space – allowing a patient to take “a translational journey.” The QCPU team encourages collaboration between multidisciplinary research groups and is invested in training the next generation of scientists. Please visit the QCPU website for more information.