Explore health, environmental studies and science based-research at a celebration highlighting Healthy Individuals, Healthy Communities and Global Health. The celebration is being co-hosted by three of York’s Faculties and Glendon College, in collaboration with the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation Friday, March 7.
Robert Hache
The event will highlight the research of five York scholars, on topics ranging from healthy aged-care in long-term care settings to how human security provided a chart for assessing the impacts of oil and gas development in the northwestern Canadian Arctic. It will also delve into what elite athletes can tell us about maximizing health and changes in long-term care witnessed in Ontario over the years and more.
“The Healthy Individuals, Healthy Communities and Global Health celebration highlights the range and diversity of health research at York and its connections to other disciplines including science and environmental studies research. It also gives a glimpse into the health research taking place on both the Keele and Glendon campuses,” said Robert Haché, vice-president research & innovation. “All York students, staff and faculty are invited to attend.”
The celebration will take place from 2 to 4pm in the Life Sciences Building Lobby. The event will feature mini-research byte presentations followed by Q&As from the audience.
Featured presenters will include: Professor Joe Baker of the School of Kinesiology & Health Science, Faculty of Health; Professor Dawn Bazely of the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, who is also the director of the Institute for Research & Innovation in Sustainability; Professor Martin Bunch, associate dean research of the Faculty of Environmental Studies; Professor Tamara Daly of the School of Health Policy & Management, Faculty of Health; and Professor Guy Bernard Proulx, CIHR Research Chair in Gender, Work and Health, of the Department of Psychology, Glendon College.
The event will be available for viewing online.
Martin Bunch: Ecohealth: Using complexity science to inform an adaptive ecosystem approach to environment and health in informal settlements in Chennai, India
Informal settlements (“slums” in Asian and United Nations parlance) are characterized by extremely poor living conditions. They are located on marginal and often dangerous sites; lack urban amenities; housing is dense and substandard; residents almost always lack tenure and are subject to eviction; and they are the location of poor, vulnerable and marginalized populations. Unfortunately, attempts to address problems of slums demonstrate that slum settlements are resilient and resistant to change. In May 2004 a Canadian and Indian project team began working with NGOs and two community partners to explore the efficacy of applying an adaptive ecosystem approach, which draws upon complexity theory and resilience thinking, to environment and health in those communities. Bunch will discuss how the perspective of complexity and self-organization helped to understand why these communities can be so perversely resilient, and identify key relationships and processes that should be either undermined or promoted to encourage this social-ecological system to evolve to more desirable configurations.
Tamara Daly
Tamara Daly: Healthy Public Policy for Living and Working in Long-term Care
Daly will discuss how an ethos of care must inform public debate about healthy aged care, drawing on her local and international research in long-term care settings. She will highlight some challenges in long-term care settings and raise questions about how to create healthy care communities that include a focus on the needs of residents, families and workers.
Dawn Bazely
Dawn Bazely: Navigating the waters of transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary collaboration
Bazely’s presentation will explore how human security provided a chart for assessing the impacts of oil and gas development in the northwestern Canadian Arctic. She will also discuss how human security has provided a map for supporting local peoples, both in Canada and elsewhere in the world, who are facing the consequences of climate change. Her presentation will briefly highlight the lessons learned and exported from the IPY GAPS project: International Polar Year, Gas, Arctic Peoples and Security (2006-11).
Joe Baker
Joe Baker: Optimal function and optimal health: What elite athletes can tell us about maximizing health
Elite athletes can inform our understanding of the limits of human potential, which may have particular relevance for older adults. Masters athletes typically show exceptional maintenance of cognitive and physical function compared to the normal aging population and challenge our notions of what older adults are capable of doing.
Guy Proulx
Guy Proulx: The Shifting Borders of Cognitive Aging
The field of cognitive aging is changing rapidly. Half of Canadians born in 2012 can expect to live to 100 years and the hope is that their “health expectancy” could be as long. The presentation will contrast changes in long term care witnessed in Ontario the last decades and the need for more applied research addressing the wide variability within the normal aging population.
Please RSVP.