Sam Wilson – Biochemistry

by KAYLA TISHCOFF

If you think your kids are the cause of some grey hairs, you’re not alone. According to the research of biochemistry student, Sam Wilson, many fish also experience aging as a result of parenting.

Wilson has spent the past three years as a co-op student examining how oxidative stress from parental care results in an increase in aging.

Victoria Putinski – Biology

by KAYLA TISHCOFF

It only takes a few minutes with Victoria Putinski to realize her intense passion for the outdoors.

Sporting home-made “don’t litter” buttons on her backpack, environmental science student Putinski says she has always wanted to work with nature.

Her keen interest in the natural sciences led Putinski to a field assistant position, where she spent this past summer exploring the outdoors of a small village named Opinicon.

Maatalii Okalik-Syed – Political science and human rights

by TEEVI MACKAY

Though she is only 21 years old, Maatalii Okalik-Syed has already collected an impressive library of government publications from all over the world throughout her studies at Carleton.

Okalik-Syed is a fourth year Carleton University undergraduate student majoring in political science and human rights with a minor in Aboriginal studies.

Albert Isaacs – Biology

A lot of people have a love/hate relationship with junk food. It tastes great and fills you up. Halfway through your plate of bacon cheeseburger poutine you’re full, but somehow you keep eating to the finish.  Fifteen minutes later, you’re left with an empty plate and an oddly satisfying tummy ache.

Albert Isaacs’ research shows that the urge to overeat may be more compulsive than you think.

“We’re looking at food in this respect, as an addiction,” says the Carleton alumnus.

Daniel Nedecki – Architecture

Daniel Nedecki is exploring the singular ways life constructs itself.

“The way the hand curls in on itself is similar to the way a shell grows. The pores of skin are using the same algorithm that the whole galaxy spins at. The way the branches of a tree grow is the same way your lungs form,” he says.

The third-year Carleton student spent his summer applying these principles to his area of research – architecture design. On an NSERC grant, Nedecki helped professor Manuel Baez visualize architecture that incorporates elements of generative design.

Jeff Wilson – Computer Science

by KAYLA TISHCOFF

With an Ikea table, a Playstation camera, and some well-crafted software, computer science student Jeff Wilson spent this past summer trying to uncover new ways to improve web security.

Nicholas Humphreys – Physics

by SABRINA DOYLE

When Hollywood thinks of the word ‘beam,’ 007 death lasers and ‘beam me up Scotty’ are probably popular connotations.

But beyond the science fiction stories, there is a very real and modern use for radioactive beams – such as cancer treatment. While radiologists can set the beam to a certain power, Nicholas Humphreys—a biology undergrad with a mathematics minor—says there’s no way of really knowing the beam’s parameters (meaning the energy and spectrum).

Samantha Kornfeld – Biology and biochemistry

by SABRINA DOYLE

Say you have a basket of eggs. Unfortunately, there is a hole in the bottom of your basket and eggs keep dropping out. In order to maintain the number of eggs to keep your body sufficiently healthy and strong, you need to keep replacing those lost eggs. Now say someone fixed the hole.

In recent studies into how bats maintain muscle strength during hibernation, micro-RNA has been found to act as that hole-mender, so to speak.

Biology and biochemistry student, Samantha Kornfeld, has focused most of her undergrad research on micro-RNAs, with the help of an NSERC award.

Bryan Luu – Neuroscience

After eight months in a wheelchair, a previously healthy and fit individual will notice changes in their body. Their muscles will have started to deteriorate, becoming languid and weak after excessive idling.

However, some animals have clever biological functions that seem to make them oblivious of the harmful effects of long-term inactivity.

Fourth-year neuroscience student, Bryan Luu is trying to figure out how they do it.

Will Greenwood – Biochemistry

In clinical trial labs around the world, medical researchers are trying to develop aptamers.

Will Greenwood is trying to make their job a bit easier.

Shaun Turney – Biology

by KAYLA TISHCOFF

Whether tracking skunks, collecting bees, or diving through Ottawa-area ponds, biology student Shaun Turney rarely had a dull moment this summer.

As a field assistant for Prof. Lenore Fahrig’s Geomatics and Landscape Ecology Lab, Shaun split his time researching with three graduate students on two-week cycles throughout the summer.

“I’ve always liked animals and I’ve always liked being outside and I’ve always liked science. The ecology lab is a perfect amalgamation of the three,” says Turney, now a third-year student.

Xiao Li Wang – Biochemistry

Get your dancing shoes on—it’s time to learn about DNA aptamer binding!

This past summer, biochemistry student Xiao Li Wang took a break from his time as a research assistant to get his groove on, DNA aptamer style.

As part of the Dance Your PhD competition – a contest to encourage the expression of science in a creative way – Wang helped to dance out a PhD student’s thesis that focused on the SELEX process.

Megan Sanders – Microbiology

by KAYLA TISHCOFF

When you break a bone, you get a cast put on to heal the damage. But what happens when it’s your DNA breaking in two?

Megan Sanders, now a graduate of the biology program at Carleton, spent 16 months investigating this question at Professor Ashkan Golshani’s microbiology lab.

Through two NSERC grants and the completion of her honours thesis, Sanders investigated which genes are involved in the DNA repair of yeast—an organism with a similar genome as humans.

Annamaria Ruscito – Biochemistry

Ever since the introduction of antibiotics like penicillin, harmful bacteria have been getting increasingly resistant to them. Every time you take antibiotics to fight off infections like strep throat, you’re helping those strains learn how to fight back. The result is a growing body of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.

Annamaria Ruscito is trying to find an alternative to commonly used antibiotics today. Last summer, she helped Carleton researcher Dr. Anatoli Ianoul with his research by looking at the effects of antimicrobial peptides on lipid model membranes.

Jackie Shabsove – Religion

by KAYLA TISHCOFF

With more than 500 million active users, a Carleton religion student has deemed Facebook a key spot to “schmooze” online.

Jackie Shabsove spent the past academic year researching the connection between Facebook use and Jewish community and identity.

Connor Smith – Speaking the same language

by KAYLA TISHCOFF

With over quarter-of-a-million words in the Oxford dictionary, we sometimes take for granted the complex nature of the English language.

Cognitive science student, Connor Smith, has the spent the past three years attempting to take parts of our multifaceted language and simplify it into a code understood by computers.

Andrew Mikhail – Biology

by: NICK GOLDHALK

One of Andrew Mikhail’s willing test subjects taking the treadmill for a spin

To most people, the cricket’s mating call is all the same – it’s either keeping you awake on a camping trip or filling the silence after a bad joke. But Andrew Mikhail, a biology student at Carleton, is helping scientists understand the cricket’s responses when it hears  that beckoning chirp: what’s the difference between a cheesy pickup line and a seductive song?

Laura Mutu – Communications Engineering

by: NICK GOLDHAWK

Laura Mutu on her computer in the Minto Centre

Transistors used in modern laptop, smartphone and tablet processors are about the size of a virus or a particle of smoke, really small – and getting smaller. This allows today’s smartphones to be as fast as desktop computers from a few years ago. In the world of communication technology, speed is everything.

Laura Mutu is a communications engineering student at Carleton.

Owen Roberts – Mechanical Engineering

by: NICK GOLDHAWK

Owen Roberts with his robotic arm, compared to a standard arm used for industrial applications

Even lying on the workbench, you can imagine the four dynamic joints in Owen Roberts’ robotic arm twisting and turning on a car assembly line.

Each joint on the three foot long, 40-pound mechanism is held together by six rods. These, in particular, are what allow the hinges and gears throughout the arm to move in a unique way.

Roberts is a third year student of mechanical engineering at Carleton University. He built this arm over the summer — and he did it entirely on his own.

Roberts machined, welded, soldered and painted each piece before painstakingly fastening together each one of the 300 bolts to specific tension.

“That’s a lot of tightening,” he says.

Kojo Mintah – Psychology

by: NICK GOLDHAWK

Kojo Mintah poses with the Google logo on Valentines day

Your palms are sweaty, face pale, brain stuck as you try and spit out the first “hello” to that cute girl or guy you’ve been eyeing. Everyone’s been there, and everyone knows how hard it can be to pick the rights words and act the right way.

Kojo Mintah, a fourth-year psychology student at Carleton University, says that people with autism may have a much harder time talking to that special someone.

Jamie Leveille – Aerospace Engineering

by: NICK GOLDHALK

Jamie Leveille stands next to the motion simulation platform in the VSIM lab

Guiding a helicopter into a six-meter wide hangar on the Canadian Navy’s HMCS Halifax is an impressive feat – especially if it’s done in a storm.

Think back – how hard was it to learn parallel parking? Now, imagine trying to do it blindfolded, with a broken steering wheel, a moving parking spot and you only get one try.

These are the conditions the Canadian Navy must deal with when they need to deploy helicopters in inclement weather — dealing with heavy rain, gusting winds and rolling waves.

Jamie Leveille is a fourth year aerospace engineering student at Carleton. He’s organizing his master’s thesis around modeling and simulating this process – getting from the hangar to the helipad, and back again.

Blair Kennedy – Geography

by: NICK GOLDHAWK

Blair Kennedy is a new world explorer. He’s mapping the shores of the Mackenzie Delta in the Canadian Arctic – the frontier of gas exploration in North America.

“I’m working on a project with Environment Canada,” he says.  “It’s called the eSpace project. It’s basically environmental sensitivity mapping. There’s lots of emphasis in that area because of gas exploration”

Kennedy is doing this research to fulfill his masters of geography at Carleton. He says that this data will locate vulnerable areas, and can help guide action in the event of an oil spill.

Gary Glover-Social Work

Thirty years ago, Gary Glover did a community development diploma at Algonquin College. In the time since, he has organized anti-nuclear, anti-war, and anti-violence campaigns, gotten married, had kids, become a farmer, driven a school bus, and seen his kids through university.

“About eight years ago I got bored of all that,” he says. Looking for a change of pace, Glover spent some time running a camp for children with special needs, which brought him into contact with local social services agencies.

Amisha Agarwal-Biochemistry

by SARAH DAVIDSON

Amisha Agarwal in her 2nd year Animal: Forms and Function class.

Two years ago, after finishing the first year of her Health Sciences degree, Amisha Agarwal found herself in a scary situation — she had to take care of live crickets.

Agarwal had won a Dean’s internship at a behavioural science lab, where master’s and PhD students were conducting research projects on the crickets. “I worked with the researchers, and got to run trials, where we’d mate them and feed them,” says Agarwal, “I also got to take care of the crickets, which was kind of scary. I was afraid of them.”

Lindsay Coderre-Game Design

By SARAH DAVIDSON

Imagine if a computer, like a virtual security guard, could track movements in a museum and then report suspicious behaviour. That’s the premise behind a computer programming concept called Open Computer Vision. With Open CV, Lindsay Coderre can make your computer see.

The Interactive Multimedia and Design student spent all summer working with the programming concept, which allows a computer to detect movement or change in video footage.

Miriam Diamond-Particle Physics

By SARAH DAVIDSON

A part of the Large Hadron Collider built at Carleton University

Allie Davidson says she “never understood how learning about stupid algebra in high school” was ever going to get her anywhere.

When she didn’t get the grades the get into university, she considered taking a year off.  Instead she enrolled in Carleton’s enriched support program, and is now finishing up an honours degree in psychology, for which she’s researching equine-assisted development for kids with autism.

Pam Gross – Anthropology

by TEEVI MACKAY

Pam Gross has overcome many barriers that Inuit usually face while accessing post-secondary education. This is why she is naturally committed to working for ArcticNet research, Improving Access to Post Secondary Education in the Canadian Arctic.

For the project, Gross has interviewed other Inuit who have had to struggle in order to access post-secondary programs as part of her research duties.

Karen Aglukark – Humanities and political science

by TEEVI MACKAY

Since childhood, Karen Aglukark has had a passion for learning languages. This love for words has fueled her desire to help with Inuktitut research.

Her keen interest in language makes her the perfect fit as an assistant to a Carleton professor in an Inuktitut linguistic pre-research pilot project.

Leslie Cousins – Political science

By TEEVI MACKAY

Leslie Cousins worked at the Iqaluit Public Library as a high school student and developed her research skills and felt happiest as a self described “brain sponge that soaks up every tidbit of information.”

“It bothers me when I can’t find information” Cousins says.

Andre Morrill – Damselfly Parasites

By SARAH DAVIDSON

Under the microscope, the insect looks intimidating, with huge blue black eyes and an explosion of angular legs covered in prickly hairs that extend along its face and torso.

Biology student Andre Morrill starts by pinning down the wings and torso, then he uses a dozen tiny pins to painstakingly take apart the insect. Magnified, it looks like a prehistoric monster. In many ways it actually is prehistoric, the ancestors of this beast flapped their wings beside the first reptiles on earth, in the late Palaeozaic era.

Allie Davidson – Behavioural Psychology

By SARAH DAVIDSON

Photo by JD Wienecke

When she stepped out of the riding ring to do her research, Davidson says she gained a new perspective.

“I remember looking at some of the horses and kind of understanding the side of the horse in many situations, and then seeing the reactions of the kids, things that, had I been in the thick of it, I wouldn’t have noticed,” she says.

The results aren’t in yet, but Davidson says she hopes they back up her instincts.

“I am really hoping that there is some sort of an interaction between the kids with autism and the horses,” she says.