Spotlight on Graduate Research

Feminist author and social activist bell hooks once said that she entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for her and every other student to be an active participant, and not just a passive consumer of education.

That’s a sentiment that must certainly resonate with Jamie Sewell, who is studying the author’s works as part of her master’s thesis is philosophy.

While her findings are still very preliminary, a UWindsor biology student has found that newly reconstructed wetlands in the oil sands of Alberta support a greater variety of bird species than their natural, old-growth counterparts.

Masters student Sheeva Nakhaie has been tracking birds in the area of Fort McMurray over the last three summers, counting species in existing boreal forests, as well as in those wetlands that have been mined for bitumen by petroleum companies and then restored to their original conditions.

Oncologists may soon be able to quickly determine if certain tumours will resist chemotherapy thanks to work done by a UWindsor physics researcher and his graduate assistant.

Oil and gas companies often go to very expensive measures to replace pipelines that are in danger of cracking and bursting, but a PhD student in engineering is part of an award-winning team finding ways to better determine how long a cracked pipeline will last in the field.

“This will help the oil industry to make informed decisions on whether or when a cracked segment of pipeline needs to be replaced,” says Hossein Ghaednia, a student in professor Sreekanta Das’s Center for Engineering Research in Pipelines.