Concordia's Thursday Report

Two in a row: Congratulations to Manuel Morales, who has been awarded a $10,000 PhD scholarship from the Casualty Actuarial Society and Society of Actuaries. Only four of five of these renewable scholarships are awarded every year across North America. Professor José Garrido, who is director of the actuarial mathematics program, reminds us that last year another of his students, Esteban Flores, won the same award.

A group of 56 paintings by Canadian artist Sheila Maloney called The Famine and Beyond: Irish Resettlement in the New World, has been given to the Canadian Irish Studies Foundation through the generosity of Brian Leavitt. The works, ranging in size from eight by six inches to four by three feet and done in a colourful, naif style, were shown June 19-28 in Samuel Bronfman House. The curator was Professor Kat O’Brien (Design Art).

Suresh Kumar Goyal (Decision Sciences/ MIS) co-authored the article “On manufacturing batch size and ordering policy with shelf lives” with Professor S. Viswanathan, of Nanyang Business School of Singapore. The article was accepted for publication by the International Journal of Production Research.

Harold Chorney (Political Science) presented three papers last year, one in New York at the Eastern Economics Association meetings in February, another in London in July to the annual meetings of the Association of Heterodox Economics, and a third to the Association Québécoise de Droit Comparé.

Jaleel Ahmad (Economics) was invited by Nobel laureate Robert Solow to present a paper at the 13th World Congress of the International Economic Association (IEA), of which he is president. The conference is being held in Lisbon, Portugal, September 9-13.

Karin Doerr (Simone de Beauvoir, CMLL) organized the session “Transgenerational Memory of Genocide in Literature and Literary Criticism” for the 32nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, held at Kean University in Union, NJ in March. She also presented “Re-Reading Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader as a Mirror of Germany’s Holocaust Memory.” Sima Aprahamian (Sociology/Anthropology) gave a presentation on “Recent Literary Responses to the 1915 genocide of the Armenians.”

Congratulations to two students in the John Molson School of Business, Taoufik Oualhdj (MBA) and Marc Huras (BComm). They won third prize in the CIBC World Market Ivey Business Plan Competition last spring. Their entry was a research and development start-up called K&H Innovations Inc. It was quite an achievement, as they had little capital invested and unproven technology, unlike many of their competitors. Over 60 teams from across North America and as far away as India competed.

Four members of the TESL Centre (Education) were delighted to hand out prizes at a celebration in June held by the Société Québecoise pour la réussité de l’académique. They were Beth Gatbonton, Barbara Barclay, Chen Feng Huang and retired professor Gwen Newsham. They attended at the invitation of TESL graduate Bruce Peterson. He runs the English classes of Superkids, sponsored by the Chinese community to teach mathematical skills and English as a second language to their children, most of whom are in the French school system.

David Pariser (Art Education) gave a lecture in July at the International Literacy and Education Research Network Conference on Learning in Beijing. It was on “Navigating Cultures in Graphic Development: Testing the Cultural Socialization Hypothesis.” He also gave two lectures at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.

Bart Simon (Sociology/Anthropology) presented a paper called “Science Studies and Computer Games: Notes on Materiality and Fantasy in Mediated Environments” at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science at MIT in October of last year, and “Satellite Dreams: Materializing the Indonesian nation” at a workshop on socio-technical change in developing countries at the University of Twente, Netherlands, in June.

Professor Emeritus Hugh McQueen was honoured this summer by CONCIM 2002, a symposium on metallurgy, for his contributions to science and technology as a researcher, teacher and communicator. The symposium was held August 11-15 in Montreal, and included a talk by Professor McQueen about the historic St. Lawrence River bridges.