A promising discovery in a rare neurodegenerative disease
Imagine being middle aged and starting to feel that you are off balance a lot and that you are having a hard time coordinating your movements. Those are among the symptoms of Spinocerebellar ataxia type 6, known as SCA6, a rare neurodegenerative disease which typically appears in adulthood and worsens over time. Over time, other problems such as slurred speech and difficulty seeing or seeing double, may also appear.
Night Lights and Scientific Delights: Nuit blanche at McGill
by Phuong Hoang, Faculty of Science Communications AssistantTrue to its name, Montréal’s Nuit blanche is an annual celebration of the vibrant culture of the city, with thematic itineraries and extended business hours that ensure festival-goers a night of endless excitement.
Real Data and Real Solutions in MATH 527
On a cloudy afternoon this past December, a group of McGill students gathered in a downtown Montréal boardroom to give a data science presentation to Citera, a sustainability analytics company. This presentation wasn’t for an internship or any other extracurricular activity – it was part of one of McGill’s newest and most innovative courses: MATH 527, Statistical Data Science Practicum.
Soup & Science: McGill’s stew-pendous serving of research
Recently, McGill undergraduate students had the opportunity to savor an enriching blend of knowledge and soup at the 37th edition of Soup & Science. This week-long event, occurring once a semester, highlights research taking place on campus. This semester’s showcase included topics across disciplines, ranging from quantum meta-photonics to optogenetic stimulation in roundworms, and students were able to learn and engage with these topics in an intimate setting.
Eclipse events abound at McGill
McGill will be hosting three solar eclipse events on April 8, one downtown, one at Macdonald campus, and another at the Gault Nature Reserve.
Species diversity promotes ecosystem stability
What maintains stability within an ecosystem and prevents a single best competitor from displacing other species from a community? Does ecosystem stability depend upon the presence of a wide variety of species, as early ecologists believed, or does diversity do the exact opposite, and lead to instability, as modern theory predicts?
A push for more women in computer science
When Jade Raymond, BSc’98, studied at McGill’s School of Computer Science, she was one of few women in the program and “I think the only woman I knew in my year who went and got a job as a programmer in computer science after graduating.”
Raymond became a trailblazer in the video game industry, helping create the huge hit Assassin’s Creed, and building studios from the ground up for Ubisoft and Electronic Arts.
$107.5 million for eight innovative research projects led by McGill
On March 13th at the Université de Montréal, the Honourable Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Transport, on behalf of the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, and the Honourable Mark Holland, Minister of Health, announced the results of the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s (CFI) Innovation Fund (IF) 2023 competition.
Seventeen McGill researchers announced as Canada Research Chairs
Seventeen outstanding McGill researchers were appointed on March 13th as new and renewed Canada Research Chairs (CRC), one of Canada’s most prestigious academic honours. The Honourable Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Transport and Quebec Lieutenant, made the announcement on behalf of the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, and the Honourable Mark Holland, Minister of Health, at the Université de Montréal.
Support science for everyone on March 13!
One element that makes McGill24 so special is the energy that our students bring to the event. They use this day to raise funds for student-run projects and initiatives, and this year the Faculty of Science has the largest ever number of crowdfunding projects.
Ed Doolittle and Panel on March 14th
Asha Basu and Antoine Labelle – Winners of the 2023 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition
Asha Basu and Antoine Labelle were ranked in the top 100 receiving the accolade of Honorable Mention in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, a preeminent mathematics competition for undergraduate students in the United States and Canada.
Postdoc Dr. Rand Eid wins a REDI Early Career Transition Award
Congratulations to Dr. Rand Eid, a postdoc in Dr. Rosemary Bagot's lab, on winning the CIHR Research Excellence, Diversity, and Independence (REDI) Early Career Transition Award! The REDI award is a new career transition award that funds researchers through the end of their postdoc and on into starting their own labs.
Courtney Y. Paquette receives 2024 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
It is a great pleasure to announce that our colleague Courtney Paquette has been named a 2024 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computer Science.
Machine learning relies heavily on probabilistic optimization algorithms.
While machine learning papers are written at a staggering rate, there is much less foundational mathematical work that addresses the success of machine learning.
Energy poverty in Canada
As many as one in five Canadian households can be considered to be in energy poverty, according to researchers from McGill University. Energy poverty occurs when households cannot afford or access the levels of energy necessary to meet their daily needs, live decent lives, and maintain healthy indoor temperatures all year round. More Canadians potentially suffer from energy poverty than from food insecurity.