Alana Gerecke (English) Receives Trudeau Scholarship (2011)
Alana has been awarded a prestigious Trudeau Scholarship in support of her doctoral research on site-specific dance and urban public space. Alana joins 13 other scholars from across the country in receiving an annual stipend of $40,000 for up to three years, plus an additional $20,000/year in research-related travel expenses.
Among Canada’s most coveted awards, the Trudeau scholarship is granted to social sciences and humanities students examining hot issues affecting Canadians in the areas of environment, international affairs, responsible citizenship, and human rights and dignity.
Many Trudeau Scholars become leading national and international figures.
Born and raised in Toronto, Gerecke is a professional contemporary dancer who has published and presented work internationally.
Her doctoral research examines whether or not site-based dance in public places can help stimulate urban regeneration in North America. Gerecke’s exploration of how site-based dance can challenge and change the way we move in and through public spaces dovetails with the Trudeau Foundation’s interest in funding research that fosters responsible citizenship.
“I draw from current debates about the role of art and culture in urban sustainability to challenge a widely held assumption that performance in public places equally democratizes performance and public places,” says Gerecke.
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Jordan Gutierrez Wins Entrepreneur of the Year Award
Jordan Gutierrez, the 21-year-old who in 2008 founded what is now the world’s largest online Spanish-language medical bookstore to serve rural doctors in his native Mexico, has won Simon Fraser University’s Student Entrepreneur of the Year (SEY) award.
The fourth-year economics undergrad, whose site www.librerialeo.com.mx generated $300,000 in sales last year and will exceed $1 million in 2010, received the award Nov. 17 during SFU’s Celebrating Entrepreneurship event at the Segal Graduate School of Business.
“I saw the market for this,” says Gutierrez, whose father is a dentist in Mexico and whose mother ran a publishing company. “Our family has been involved in books for 100 years. We ship everywhere in Mexico.”
His website went live targeting a previously untapped market niche: country doctors whose principal alternative was an existing medical book website that was so expensive it was cheaper to come to Mexico City to buy books.
Librerialeo.com.mx offers competitively priced texts and medical supplies using “all the technologies available,” he says, “and while we’re not the first company selling medical books, we strive to keep everything up to date.”
Gutierrez attributes good customer service and providing 33 different newsletters targeting different medical specialties as keys to his success. The site also has 10,000 Facebook fans.
Gutierrez’ award includes a $1,500 prize package and entry to SFU’s VentureLabs student incubator, which offers business development assistance from experts and mentors.
By Stuart Colcleugh, Public Affairs & Media Relations
Michelle Lawrence Awarded Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Scholarship
A lawyer who returned to academia to study how substance-induced psychotic disorders impact criminal responsibility is SFU’s latest Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation scholar.
Michelle Lawrence, a criminology PhD student, is one of 15 recipients of the prestigious scholarship, Canada’s most coveted social sciences and humanities doctoral prize, valued at $180,000. Trudeau scholarships subsidize tuition fees and living and travel expenses while scholars research subjects such as labour, mental health, conflict resolution and the environment.
Lawrence will focus her research on the legal and clinical treatment of people found to have committed crimes while in a state of substance-induced psychosis. She will also assess alleged Charter violations in cases of voluntary or self-induced intoxication.
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Camilla Speller, Archaeology, Receives Governor General's Gold Medal
An archaeologist whose research is shedding light on how early indigenous animals were domesticated has received SFU’s highest graduate student honour, the Governor General’s gold medal.
Camilla Speller’s innovative work on the domestication of turkeys, carried out with archaeology professor Dongya Yang, was published earlier this year in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Working with colleagues at Washington State University, they found that the ubiquitous dinner-table fowl was domesticated twice. Both the Mesoamericans of southcentral Mexico and ancestors of the Pueblo Indians in the southwestern U.S. were raising domestic turkeys by 200 B.C.
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Sean Wilkinson, History, Wins Robert C. Brown Award
Sean Wilkinson is this year’s winner of the FASS undergraduate Robert C. Brown award for “a combination of outstanding academic achievement and outstanding performance or leadership in another endeavour at the university." In other words, Sean has had a very busy year. Not only did he excel in the classroom, he was involved with the recycling and composting program on campus, was a member of the Poetry Club and organized a photo auction to raise money for a family living in a refugee camp in Malawi.
Sean, who grew up in Squamish, has now begun his MA in History with his thesis focussing on the development of a community of native Skwxwú7mesh Christians. Sean has also been awarded a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship Masters grant of $17,500 for his research.
Dennis Storoshenko, Linguistics PhD Student, Awarded 2 Year SSHRC Post Doc
Dennis Ryan Storoshenko started in Linguistics as an undergrad at SFU, worked through a PhD Program, and will continue with a Post-Doctoral position at Yale University. There, he will continue using a combination of fieldwork, corpus analysis, and psycholinguistic research methods to inform his work on various languages including English, Japanese, Korean, and Shona (spoken in Zimbabwe). His work involves the modelling of these languages in a common, computationally-informed, framework: Synchronous Tree-Adjoining Grammar. This diversity of languages opens up possibilities for future translation applications, and seeks to demonstrate the fitness of this model for a broad spectrum of human languages.
Dean's Medal Recipients 1999-2010
2010
Graduate Students
Angela Cooper, Linguistics
Michelle Lawrence, Criminology
Heather Latimer, English
Undergraduate Students
Judit Bognar, Psychology
Racan Souiedan, History
2009
Jeff Derksen, English
Steve Easton, Economics
Helen Leung, Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies
2008
Greg Dow, Economics
Jack Little, History
Barbara Mitchell, Sociology and Anthropology / Gerontology
2007
Ray Corrado, Criminology
Peter Dickinson, English
Trude Heift, Linguistics
2006
Mark Leier, History
Paul Warwick, Political Science
2005
Anil Hira, Political Science / Latin American Studies
Stacy Pigg, Anthropology
Betty Schellenberg, English
Jacqueline Viswanathan-Delord, French
2004
Marianne Ignace, Sociology and Anthropology / First Nations Program
Meredith Kimball, Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies / Psychology
Murray Munro, Linguistics
Gordon Myers, Economics
2003
Stephen McBride, Political Science
Marlene Moretti, Psychology
Michael Roberts, Geography
2002
Karlene Faith, Criminology
Carole Gerson, English
Neil Watson, Psychology
2001
Tina Loo, History
Owen Underhill, School for the Contemporary Arts
Andrew Wister, Gerontology
2000
Douglas Allen, Economics
Marjorie Cohen, Political Science
Charles Crawford, Psychology
1999
Dara Culhane, Sociology and Anthropology
Martin Kitchen, History
Simon Verdun-Jones, Criminology
2009 Students Awards Archive
Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal
Dorothy Easton (Public Policy)
Dorothy Easton is graduating from the SFU Masters in Public Policy Program in 2009 with an award of the Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. This award reflects her high cumulative grade point average (just a hair shy of a perfect 4.0) plus her outstanding policy research as part of the MPP degree. She investigated "Divorce and the Division of Canada Pension Plan Credits" with original source materials and concrete recommendations for policy reform to make the system fairer and more accessible for both divorcees and their ex-spouses.
Vanier Canada Scholarships (May 2009)
The following students in FASS have been awarded a Vanier Canada Sholarship:
Nadine Deslauriers-Varin (Criminology) and Kim Reeves (Psychology)
We also had three recipients in NSERC.
The results are now posted on the Vanier website and SFU had a 75% success rate placing our success rate tied at number 4 in Canada. In contrast UBC's success rate was 68% and UVic 14%.
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