Drummers across North America and beyond are beating a path to Nadia Azar’s door.

A UWindsor kinesiology professor, Dr. Azar studies the physical demands of playing the drums. In addition to collecting data such as heart rate and energy expenditure during live performances, she studies musculoskeletal disorders in drummers.

Her latest research, funded through a recent grant from the Grammy Museum, will delve into the reasons why instructors do or don’t offer their students training about how to prevent playing-related injury.

“There’s definitely a demand for this type of research,” Azar said. “My goal is to do for drummers what sports science has done for athletes.”

Her project, awarded $20,000 U.S., will involve interviews with 30 drum instructors. The study, expected to take two years, is one of five scientific research projects funded by the Grammy Museum Grant Program this year.

Azar said she hopes her research will lead to the creation of training resources that can be incorporated into music lessons for drummers.

“Drum set educators play a vital role in promoting healthy behaviors in their students,” Azar said. Yet, she hypotheses based on her past research that few of them offer training in injury prevention.

While she will put out word of her research through the Percussive Arts Society, which has members around the globe, she doesn’t foresee having to beat the bushes for research subjects. Drummers find her.

More than 900 drummers from around the globe have participated in her past research projects.

Her interest in the biomechanics of drumming came to her one night in 2016 as she attended a concert by her favourite band, Dream Theatre.

As she watched drummer Mike Mangini bang away on his kit, she thought his movement and energy expenditure would make an interesting study.

She put that musing in a tweet. Mangini replied he’d be game, and a research project was born.

Azar soon found herself strapping monitors onto Mangini’s arms before his concerts to record his caloric expenditure. She did the same for The Tea Party’s Jeff Burrows, and others in rock, metal, pop, and country bands.

“Drummers saw their friends participate and they would message me, saying: ‘You’ve got to do me next’.”

She has established research relationships with drum equipment companies and publicizes her work through online platforms like Drumeo and Drum Talk TV.

Azar has been around drums for most of her life. Her husband and brother-in-law are drummers, as are two of her uncles. She learned the drums informally as a child and could play if pressed, but considers herself a rank amateur.

A UWindsor grad herself, Azar will use her project as a research opportunity for students in her Drummer Mechanics and Ergonomics Research lab, called the DRUMMER Lab for short.

“We hope to have an impact on the prevention of injuries in drummers,” she says.

The Grammy Museum Grant Program this year awarded $220,000 to 12 projects in North America. Five of the projects, including Azar’s, involve scientific research. Others involve music preservation and archiving.

Funded by the Recording Academy, the grant program, now in its 34th year, has awarded more than $7.7 million to music research and archival and preservation projects.

—Sarah Sacheli

Science and engineering students got a chance to express themselves creatively through film in the first SMArt Masterclass, organized by the faculties of science and engineering.

The visual media-focused class is the first in a series of non-credit courses offering students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines the opportunity to hone their communication skills.

Filmmakers Nick Hector and Kim Nelson, professors in the School of Creative Arts, taught science and engineering graduate and undergraduate students how to create a short film that would effectively communicate their science knowledge to a wider audience.

Arts courses are useful for every student, says Hector, they foster problem solving and critical thinking skills as well as build self-confidence through self-expression.

“Creativity is an integral part of a student’s intellectual development,” says Hector. “On the practical side, these skills will help future scientists communicate their findings to a broad audience in an engaging way.”

Hector says teaching STEM students was a fascinating experience. Film instructors must get film students, typically drawn to the field by their deep love of narrative, to step out of the story world and cast a critical eye on their work.

“Though analysis of an immersive artform can be difficult, STEM students seem to have no such problem, he says.

“They immediately recognized the mechanics of the art form. Their challenge was engaging with narrative, but they got there and the results were impressive.”

Sarika Sharma will start second-year studies in the School of the Environment this fall. She created a short film called Redefining Research: A Science Narrative. She says the class was a great reminder of the natural intersectionality that exists between disciplines and she would encourage fellow students to take this type of class.

“The instruction from professors Hector and Nelson really pushed me to think like a filmmaker who is trying to communicate scientific work, not like a scientist who wanted to make a film,” says Sharma.

“Treating film as the primary focus that science would then be woven into made the process feel less restrictive and encouraged greater creativity. It aided in creating a final product that would be more accessible for people without a scientific background and who are more visually inclined.”

The collaborative masterclass aims to increase communication skills for STEM students, allowing them to share scientific results, from research to what they are doing in the community.

Learning specialist Lisa Salfi from the Faculty of Engineering says it can be challenging to break down STEM knowledge into less complex terms.

“We’re helping STEM students to effectively communicate what they are learning to varied audiences using widely relatable and accessible forms of media,” she says. “This is a crucial skill in the working world and in introducing people to new or complex topics.”

Additional masterclasses will be offered in the upcoming fall and winter semester, with topics including visual arts, drama, creative writing, and music.

An article published in the Spring 2021 issue of Disability Studies Quarterly and an interview on the Disability History Association’s podcast explore the research interests of UWindsor professor Nicholas Hrynyk, which include queer history, disability studies, feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, and visual culture.

The article — entitled “’No Sorrow, No Pity’: Intersections of Disability, HIV/AIDS, and Gay Male Masculinity in the 1980s” — examines narratives of disease and disability in Canada’s gay and lesbian newspaper, The Body Politic (1971-87), in order to demonstrate how gay male masculinity developed within a gay ableist culture deeply affected by HIV/AIDS.

“In 1980, Gerald Hannon of The Body Politic comes out with this article called ‘No Sorrow, No Pity,’ which is now eponymously the name of my article,” says Dr. Hrynyk. “In it he speaks about the marginalization of people with disabilities in the gay and lesbian community, particularly in Toronto.”

In the 1980 article, Hannon laid out a wide set of conclusions about what had contributed to the marginalization of persons with a disability. But what Hrynyk appreciated was that he also interviewed those with a disability to ask them about their experiences.

At that time, two seemingly separate issues of disability and disease (HIV/AIDS) were woven together.

“As a result, two seemingly different discussions of disability and disease in The Body Politic intersected at the site of the gay male body,” Hrynyk says. “The perceptions of bodily ‘failure’ transferred from the disabled body onto the diseased body during the formative years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through imagery and text.”

Hrynyk is an adjunct assistant professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at both the University of Windsor and Carleton University, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto.

Five UWindsor grads heading to Tokyo for the Olympic Games are the subjects of a cover story in the latest edition of Lancers Illustrated.

The publication also pays tribute to three builders of athletics programs who died this year, and marks a centennial milestone. Read the electronic magazine at goLancers.ca.

Do you like to discuss new ideas? Solve problems? Make new connections? Then WE-Spark Think Tanks are for you.

The Aug. 6 event will begin with an update on local health research activities and new funding opportunities, followed by an overview of three projects that are looking for creative input and breakout sessions:

• Re-Imagining Health Justice in Windsor Essex
  Tess Sheldon, University of Windsor, Faculty of Law
• Clinical Diagnostics using Processing, Extraction, and Detection of Biomedical Signals
  Esam Abdel-Raheem, University of Windsor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Developing Health Related Mobility Innovations to Build a Connected and Sustainable City
  Tom Schnekenburger, University of Windsor, Data and Mobility Science
  Matthew Johnson, Invest Windsor-Essex

WE-Spark Health Institute hosts the bi-monthly sessions, open to everyone.

Click here to register for the August event, which will run 1 to 3:30 p.m.