Research at Waterloo
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Culture contributes to unsafe sex
Sandra Bullock – Applied Health Sciences
Sandra Bullock conducts her research through the dual lenses of behavioural science and public health, giving her a unique perspective on why young people take risks with their health.
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Financial crisis opens door to reforms
Eric Helleiner – Arts
For a political science professor conducting cross-disciplinary research in economics and history, the global financial crisis provides a perfect Petri dish. Eric Helleiner is interested in responses to the monetary meltdown. “The question now,” he says, “is how will governments work to ensure this never happens again?”
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Complexity theory guides social innovation
Frances Westley – Arts
“Farmers don’t grow crops; they create conditions for crops to grow,” says Frances Westley, the J.W. McConnell Chair in Social Innovation. Her understanding of how human and natural systems function are the seeds she plants to nurture change in both environmental and social arenas.
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Probing the history of fat
Wendy Mitchinson – Arts
Known for her historical studies of the medical treatment of women, Wendy Mitchinson is currently weighing in on fat, tracing the medical and cultural views of obesity in Canada — from 1920 through 1980.
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Supplanting silicon with organic electronics
Hany Aziz – Engineering
While silicon has long been the mainstay of the electronics industry, the tide may be turning in favour of organic electronics, using molecules made of carbon and hydrogen to replace silicon.
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Nano-medicine targets diseased cells
Pu Chen – Engineering
How to cure the disease without killing the patient: That’s a major hurdle facing medicine today — one that Pu Chen is helping to resolve. As Canada Research Chair in Nano-biomaterials, the chemical engineering professor conducts research straddling the fields of nanotechnology and biomedicine.
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Researcher gives voice to Regent Park residents
Laura Johnson – Environment
Even planners admit the Regent Park housing project in downtown Toronto was less than successful. “It was Canada’s first and largest public housing project, and considered a major failure,” says School of Planning professor Laura Johnson, whose interest is in participatory planning.
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A pen mightier than a keyboard
Ed Lank – Mathematics
Ed Lank believes the potential of pen computing on tablet computers, electronic whiteboards, and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) has yet to be realized — and he’d like to make it happen.
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Qubit behaviour a quandary
Joseph Emerson – Mathematics
Joseph Emerson is trying to bring a little order to the chaotic quantum world — one qubit at a time. The applied math professor (a member of UW’s Institute for Quantum Computing and an affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics) became intrigued with quantum theory as a PhD student at Simon Fraser University.
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Research for better crops, safer water
David Rudolph – Science
Protecting watersheds is David Rudolph’s preoccupation. A professor in earth and environmental sciences, he specializes in regional groundwater flow and the movement of excess nutrients, road salt, micro-organisms, and other contaminants in groundwater systems. He has a particular interest in the effects of agricultural land use practices on water quality.
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Seeking sustainability in Alberta’s oil sands
George Dixon – Science
George Dixon, UW’s vice-president, university research, is a biology professor with an international reputation as an eco-toxicologist. For the past 15 years he’s been studying the environmental impact of the Alberta oil sands industry — a challenge as massive as the oil sands themselves, which contain the second-largest oil reserves in world, after Saudi Arabia’s.
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Universe ‘does not expand uniformly’
Mike Hudson – Science
Mike Hudson thinks big. No, bigger. His research on cosmic flows in the universe is expected to bring a new understanding of the origin of structure in the universe.
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