The Faculty of Science hosted its third Science Unplugged event on March 16, with a diverse and quirky lineup of talks that stimulated conversations and networking.
The event, held at The Underground, attracted some 80 attendees including faculty members, staff, graduate students and postdocs.
“By establishing a relaxed setting in which researchers from different disciplines present their work, events like Science Unplugged help counter the tendency many of us specialists have of talking only with one another,” said Professor James Elwick in the Department of Science & Technology Studies. “It’s a fun, and different, demonstration of Faculty interdisciplinarity.”
PhD student Yiyuan Wang , Faculty of Science Dean Ray Jayawardhana, Professor Hélène Mialet and Professor Muhammad Yousaf
The event kicked off with a welcome from Faculty of Science Dean Ray Jayawardhana, who introduced the speakers headlining the event.
Professor Hélène Mialet in the Department of Science & Technology Studies presented some of her research on how dogs become sensory machines. She discussed how dogs can be trained to detect hypoglycemia in patients with diabetes.
Chemistry Professor Muhammad Yousaf shared recently published research in which he and his team created a functional, scaffold-free 3D cardiac tissue using a novel cell-surface engineering technology developed in his lab. He showed videos of a soap bubble demonstration to explain how the technology works.
Finally, PhD student Yiyuan Wang (supervised by Professor Huaiping Zhu in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics) presented some of the math modelling research she is conducting in the Laboratory of Mathematical Parallel Systems to study the population dynamics of mosquitoes that carry diseases like West Nile virus. She focused on some of the work she has been doing in the Greater Toronto Area.
After the presentations, the attendees had the opportunity to mix and mingle over refreshments.