2012 Dean’s Undergraduate Convocation Medal Winners

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences is pleased to announce that Kimberly Gilbertson and Justin Wiltshire are the winners of the Dean’s Undergraduate Convocation Medals. The awards recognize academic achievement and are given to two graduating students at spring convocation.

Kimberly Gilbertson, English (Honours)

“Kim is so strong as a critical thinker and researcher that she is already working at the level of an advanced graduate student; indeed, she is the best undergraduate I have taught.”– Margaret Linley, Department of English

Having just completed her Honours undergraduate degree with an outstanding CGPA of 4.2, Kim is currently one of SFU’s top candidates for an SSHRC MA Scholarship and, not surprisingly, has received highly competitive offers for graduate studies.  Kim will begin her MA at SFU this fall.

Justin Wiltshire, Economics (Honours)

“I have thirty years of teaching experience… I rank Justin among the top one or two students I’ve ever taught, and on certain dimensions one of the most talented persons I’ve ever known.” – Douglas Allen, Department of Economics

In a department known for its hard marking, Justin finished his B.A. with an incredible CGPA of 4.12. He accomplished this while taking a full course load, being married, and working part time.

Justin is also highly committed to and engaged with his community. In the past, he has volunteered with the Vancouver Island Addiction Recovery Society and is currently a youth leader with the Calvary Baptist Church.



Robert C. Brown Award Winner

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Adjudication Committee has unanimously chosen Mr. Ramsay Malange for the Robert C. Brown Award.  Ramsay graduated with an Honours B.A. in Psychology at the June convocation.  His CGPA is 4.17.

What makes Ramsay an exceptional candidate for the Robert C. Brown Award is how he fulfills the non-academic requirements of the award:  “representing the university to the community at large” and performing in leadership roles.

While maintaining his stratospheric CGPA and engaging in original research for his Honours project, Ramsay has mentored international students through the Global Partnering System; facilitated discussion during the Envision Project; prepared the volunteer training for SFU Out On Campus; and volunteered for SFU Student Development and Programming.  Ramsay worked as a community advisor for the on-campus residences and implemented new programs aimed at improving residence life.  He has represented SFU to the community through the SFU Inspiration Club and the Semester in Dialogue.  He has served as an Orientation Leader and been a member of the water polo club.  He has been involved with SDPIRG and the SFU Results Club.



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.

Read more.

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 Convocation Medal Winners 2010

2010

Graduate Students

Angela Cooper, Linguistics
Michelle Lawrence, Criminology
Heather Latimer, English

Undergraduate Students

Judit Bognar, Psychology
Racan Souiedan, History

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%.