VIEW to the U: An eye on UTM academic community

An ode to audio and the UTM academic community Creator and current host of VIEW to the U (VTTU) Carla DeMarco is embarking on a secondment with the Office of the Vice-Provost, Students at U of T St. George. VTTU might return in some iteration, as yet TBD. But for now, Carla is hanging up her headphones, and handing back the audio equipment. Please stay tuned and stay subscribed for further updates...

Creating more equitable environments in academia On this episode of VIEW to the U, guests are Profs Scott Jess and Lindsay Schoenbohm – Lindsay is a faculty member in UTM's Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences, where she has served as its Chair since 2019, and Scott, a former postdoc in Lindsay’s lab, is currently a faculty member in the School of the Environment at Washington State Univer...

Kids, kindness, and community On this episode of VIEW to the U, Tina Malti, a faculty member in the Department of Psychology, and the Director of the Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy – or CCDMP for short - talks about her work at CCDMP, which was established in 2019, and for which she is the Founding Director. But Tina is a world-renowned expert, whose contributions to child...

This is, once again, a VIEW to the U first: it’s a Part II continuation of another episode with guests Mary-Rebekah Reyes and her brother Romario, just in time for Halloween to talk about their short horror film Short Drop. It is audio from the chat with them in September 2023, however it contains some spoilers on their film Short Drop. So, if you don’t want the plot of the film ruined for you, pl...

Community support, love, and art On this episode of VIEW to the U, Mary-Rebekah Reyes and Romario Reyes, a sister and brother team and a truly dynamic duo, talk about Short Drop, a short film they made together – Romario was the writer and director, and Mary-Rebekah produced it. Short Drop has recently made the rounds at film festivals over the past few months – notably the Film and Folklore Festi...

The value of community engagement in academia On this episode of VIEW to the U, Andreas Bendlin, a faculty member in the Department of Historical Studies, and UTM’s current Vice-Dean, Academic Experience, touches on his work in Classics & Roman History, with expertise in ancient religion and ancient civilizations, in many areas, but particularly in the Graeco-Roman world. But he provides insight w...

On this episode of VIEW to the U, Professor Andreas Hilfinger talks a bit about his work in Chemical & Physical Sciences, but we also get to hear about the work of Professor Meghan Sutherland from Visual Studies. It's a bit of a film review with two brilliant UTM researchers, and we are talking about Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie – both undoubtedly THE films of the summ...

In honour of Canadian Multiculturalism Day, which comes around each year on June 27, on VIEW to the U, we are talking about identity that directly correlates to the language that we use. On this episode, featured guest, Professor Ai Taniguchi talks about her work as a linguist in UTM’s Department of Language Studies, as well as her art, which animates and illustrates much of her scholarly pursuits...

On this episode of VIEW to the U, Nick Rule, UTM’s new Vice-Principal, Academic and Dean, and a professor from the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science, talks about his research related to social cognition, and how first impressions can persist in colouring our perceptions of people. He is a leading expert on the concept of “gaydar,” among other related areas, such as racial b...

Stewards of Sustainability The Curb the Rain team, who placed first in the Rain It In Competition in 2021, includes Lauren O’Malley, Nandaraye Choi, Borys Brodziuk, and Tina Elliott. The Curb the Rain team were accepted into the Leap Startup League program presented by ICUBE UTM and Sheridan EDGE. They were also finalists in the Early Stage Finalists category among 4 other start-ups, and they succ...

On this episode of VIEW to the U, Professor Doug VanderLaan from UofT Mississauga's Department of Psychology talks about his work in the Biopsychosocial Investigations of Gender Laboratory – or the BIG lab for short - and this interview highlights Doug's work in gender diversity and gender expression. In the BIG lab, Doug has several lines of research running, including a Neuroimaging Study of Tra...

On this episode of VIEW to the U, Ajay Rao, an associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies, and UTM’s current Vice-Dean, Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs, talks about his work, including the Global Past project, which recently received funding with a University of Toronto Connaught Global Challenge Award, and is an undertaking that unites several UofT researchers as well a...

Taking the plunge into podcasting and floundering at university This episode of VIEW to the U features two UofT Mississauga undergraduate students from different disciplines who found common ground in their relation to academic failures – but also successes along the way. Harleen Kundan and Loridee De Villa were able to turn their experiences and discussions into a 12-part podcast series, called F...

Have you ever wondered about what all the role of a Dean entails? Well, we have got a guest for that: on this episode of VIEW to the U, UofT Mississauga’s current Vice-Principal, Academic and Dean Amrita Daniere fills us in on the joys and the challenges associated with serving in this role at UTM, as well as some of her priorities for the UTM campus. Amrita Daniere also talks about her research r...

The guest on this episode of VIEW to the U, Professor Ruba Kana'an, a historian of Islamic art in the Department of Visual Studies at UofT Mississauga, talks about art and architecture, how it enriches our lives, what we can learn from it, and the stories it tells about people and places. Ruba also talks about her history with the work she has done with museums, particularly her association with t...

A sweeping scholarly smorgasbord On this episode of VIEW to the U, the guest is Zoë Wool, an assistant professor from UTM’s Department of Anthropology. Very few researchers cover as much ground in a research program as Zoë does, and over the course of this interview, Zoë talks about this range of work, which spans medical and sociocultural anthropology, and examines the harms of war and toxic burn...

This episode of VIEW to the U features Professor Alana Ogata from UTM’s Department of Chemical & Physical Sciences. Over the course of this interview, Alana talks about her bioanalytical chemistry research that measures proteins, which are at the root of all biological functions and processes and has relevance for disease diagnostics and treatment. Alana is also particularly interested in investig...

On this episode of VIEW to the U, Drs. Katie Harris-Howard, Elizabeth Parke, Dmitry Pichugin, and Vera Velasco from the Office of the Vice-Principal, Research at UofT Mississauga, talk about their roles as Senior Research Associates or SRA. So, what is an SRA? At their core, they are educators and academics in their own right, with established programs of research and expertise in their respective...

On this episode of VIEW to the U, Professor Kristen Bos from UTM’s Department of Historical Studies talks about her research on Indigenous feminisms, with among other things, considers the past, present, and future of seed beads. These little beads that have been used by Indigenous communities for thousands of years, vary in size but usually measure no more than 5 mm – or for a sense of scale, a b...

To kick off this new season of VIEW to the U, we are picking up where we left off – with representation from UTM’s Department of Psychology – but this time around the featured guests are two new faculty members, Professors Anna Kosovicheva and Benjamin Wolfe, co-directors of the Applied Perception and Psychophysics Lab, or APPLY Lab, that was recently established at UTM. Anna and Ben are helping m...

On this episode of VIEW to the U we highlight Professor Keisuke Fukuda, also known as K, who talks about his research related to visual working memory and how memory guides behaviour. But along with that, K also talks about other studies his lab is taking on such as why is it so hard to forget things we would rather not remember and how memory distortion can come into play when we are processing i...

This edition of VIEW to the U features Professor Nicole Charles in Women and Gender Studies from UTM's Department of Historical Studies. On this episode she talks about her research related to hesitancy around the human papillomavirus vaccine in Barbados, and why the word “suspicion” resonates so much for her in her work, which intersects across several fields including transnational Black feminis...

On this edition of VIEW to the U, Professor Anna Korteweg from the Department of Sociology at U of T Mississauga talks about the motivations behind her research in immigration integration, policy and practices. She also outlines the work she has done with her long-time collaborator from Humboldt University in Germany, Professor Gökçe Yurdakul. Very much in keeping with this “Adventures in Research...

On this short day’s journey into night – coming just in time for the winter solstice, Professor David Samson is featured on this edition of VIEW to the U, on which he talks about his evolutionary biology research in UTM’s Department of Anthropology. For this season of the podcast, which is a focus on "adventures in research," David shares his stories that vividly illustrate studies are not always...

On this latest episode of VIEW to the U, Professor Peter Kotanen from the Department of Biology at UofT Mississauga discusses his research and current projects, which have “ecological interactions between plants and their natural enemies,” such as herbivores, insects, and pathogens, at their core. But our chat is also infused with a couple of Peter’s tales from the field, in some of the wilderness...