Matthew Steckle

Pam and DanBiochemistry PhD student Pam Ovadje and third-year undergrad Daniel Tarade recently presented their research at the Natural Health Products Research Society annual conference in British Columbia and came home with top honours in the oral and poster presentation competitions.

Cancer cell 'suicide' aim of award-winning students

Assisted suicide is topic guaranteed to court all kinds of controversy.

However one place where you’ll get general consensus on the matter is among the students working in the biochemistry lab of Siyaram Pandey, where rather than people, they help cancer cells commit suicide.

“One of the hallmarks of cancer cells is that they forget how to die,” says third-year undergrad Daniel Tarade. “We’re forcing their hand, and causing them to commit suicide.”

Lecture to examine French colonial presence in the Detroit River region

Eighteenth-century Detroit is often depicted as a fur-trading post in the historiography of the colonial Great Lakes, says historian Guillaume Teasdale, while in fact, hundreds of French families from the St. Lawrence valley settled in the Detroit River region during that time.

“As a result, Detroit developed into a thriving French colony that was connected to the western Great Lakes through the fur trade,” says Dr. Teasdale, a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Research on French Canadian Culture at the University of Ottawa.