Panel Discussion: Postdoctoral Fellowships at the UWinnipeg

Tue. May. 16 12:30 PM - Tue. May. 16 01:30 PM
Contact: Dylan Jones
Location: 3C12

Ross Stokke, Professor, Mathematics, moderates this panel discussion featuring four of UWinnipeg’s Postdoctoral Fellows. Michael Beck, Katherine Dearborn, Michael Lang, and Kirsten Van Houten will share their experience as a postdoctoral fellow, and the research they conduct on campus. There will be time for questions after the discussion. 

There is no registration required to attend this in-person event.

To learn more about the panelists, please read their bios below, or this recent UWinnipeg News feature:

Meet UWinnipeg's Postdoctoral Fellows | University of Winnipeg News

Panelists:

Katherine Dearborn, Postdoctoral Fellow, UW Department of Environmental Studies & Sciences
Katherine is an ecologist with a broad interest in plant community responses to environmental change, and how those dynamics affect endangered wildlife. Most of her research has focused on high alpine, boreal, and tundra ecosystems in northern Canada, but she switched back to prairie systems when she began my postdoctoral fellowship here at UWinnipeg in 2020. Right now, Katherine is working on a prairie habitat connectivity project in partnership with the Nature Conservancy of Canada to help them plan the recovery of an endangered prairie butterfly species.

Kirsten Van Houten, Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Rights at UW Global College.

Since completing her Ph.D. in International Development Studies at the University of Ottawa, Kirsten has worked as academic and practitioner at the Human Rights and Peacebuilding Nexus. Across her academic work she has worked with local communities mobilizing for peace and human rights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Philippines, Palestine, India, Canada and elsewhere. She has also worked with Canadian political parties and Non-Governmental Organizations to advocate for improved policy on peacebuilding.

Her research interests include peacebuilding, civil society, human rights, state fragility, Canadian foreign policy and gender equality. She is currently editing books on Sustainable Development Goal 16: peaceful, just and inclusive societies; and Canadian foreign policy at the human rights and peacebuilding nexus, with several forthcoming articles on related topics.

Michael Lang, Postdoctoral Fellow, UW Physics, R&D Scientist at Sino Canada Health Institute

Michael received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Manitoba in 2020, with research focusing on precision magnetometry for the nEDM experiment at TRIUMF. Since July of 2020, he has been a Mitacs postdoctoral fellow at the University of Winnipeg in the department of Physics. Working with a partner company (Sino Canada Health Institute, or SCHI) he has helped develop a novel intraoperative magnetic resonance imaging system that is designed to improve workflow and patient outcomes in neurosurgical procedures. His work with SCHI has been a combination of scientific research, business, and regulatory affairs, with recent success coming in the form of a journal article in Magnetic Resonance Imaging as well as achieving FDA clearance for the intraoperative imaging system he helped develop. He is currently working on setting up a new Winnipeg-based company that will manufacture and distribute the technology to hospitals around the world.

Michael Beck, former Postdoctoral Fellow, current faculty in Physics and Applied Computer Science at UW

Michael Beck is a former postdoc in the Department of Physics and the Department of Applied Computer Science, where he is working in and combining the fields of machine learning, deep neural networks, high-performance computing, image recognition, phenotyping, and automated agriculture. Dr. Beck works extensively with TerraByte, UW’s Digital Agriculture Project. TerraByte conducts research revolving around machine learning applications in agriculture. This exciting, interdisciplinary project ranges from attaching cameras to tractors, constructing imaging robots, and using machine learning, all the way to creating a massive database of plant images. Three research areas are in our focus: how to automate the generation of labeled plant data; how to train computer models to recognize and classify plants; how to create a plant image database that is available and useful for everyone.

We look forward to seeing you in person at the event!

If you would like to attend virtually, please register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIkduqupzgqHdI2D52jMchIHy7ZqXSZJkoS