Names in the News

Names in the news: Concordia faculty, staff and alumni/ae pop up in the media more often than you might think!

The Globe and Mail science page on June 14 featured interesting work on sunscreens by Ann English (Chemistry/Biochemistry) and collaborators, especially Tito Scaiano, of the University of Ottawa. Using titanium dioxide in a way that keeps the active ingredients from actually touching the skin, they are working to reduce the risk of skin cancer and avoid the sometimes negative side-effects of conventional sunscreens.

The Globe’s financial pages featured a profile of Montreal financier and philanthropist Stephen Jarislowsky on June 30. The Jarislowsky Chair in Canadian Art Studies at Concordia is one of 11 research chairs in subjects as various as management, democratic structures and the environment that he has endowed at Canadian universities over the past decade. In the article, he describes how he ensures that his endowments will not be clouded by campus politics.

Hundreds of papers were presented at the annual conferences of humanities scholars and social scientists, held this spring in Halifax, but only a few get noticed by the media. One was “School Uniforms, Eros and Mixed Messages,” the result of graduate work by Gillian Shadley. Interviews she did at a Montreal girls’ school indicated that many female students feel sexually objectified by their skimpy tartan skirts. Other papers focused on the prom dress, the influence of Britney Spears and “little girls in sexy clothes.”

Michael Montanaro (Contemporary Dance) was glimpsed in a documentary on Oprah on June 24. The internationally popular daytime TV show went behind the scenes at the Cirque du Soleil to show how hard performers work. Montanaro, who took leave from teaching duties at Concordia to choreograph last year’s highly successful show Varekai, was shown in rehearsal.

Matthias Foellmer, a PhD student in biology, received a good deal of attention from the media as the result of a paper published in Nature called “Spontaneous male death during copulation in an orb-weaving spider.” It was written with his supervisor, Daphne Fairbairn, who is now teaching at the University of California at Riverside. An excellent article appeared in the influential newspaper Der Spiegel, and the Royal Society featured it on its biology letters page.

Painter and art teacher Guido Molinari was profiled in the Gazette on June 12. Despite ill health, he is still painting, and had a show at Galérie René Blouin, on Ste. Catherine St. W. dedicated to the French poet Mallarmé, who, like him, was a pioneer in expressing the abstract.

Mick Carney (Management) has been interviewed frequently during the ongoing crisis in Canada's airline industry, by ROBTV, CBC and La Presse (June 18), among others. In May, his colleague Isabelle Dostaler (Management) was interviewed on Radio-Canada about the dilemma faced by Air Canada's pilots, who had been asked to approve cuts that would stave off bankruptcy.

In a May article in Les Affaires about the effect on Quebec of U.S. trade sanctions against Canada, Ramdas Chandra (Marketing) suggested that Canadian business people report the consequences of protectionism to their American clients, who in turn should get their elected officials to listen to reason.

Rev. Raymond Lafontaine, one of Concordia’s chaplains, was widely quoted in regional newspapers about a survey he conducted for the Roman Catholic Church in Canada on religious vocations. His team’s pastoral plan moves away from recruitment to the priesthood and other religious orders, and emphasizes “discernment,” helping young people find their place in the Church.