This week we have a short video for you all to watch and discuss. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk, entitled "The Danger of a Single Story," and her warning against homogenized views of any group of people, seems especially appropriate in light of recent news. Go to http://projects.upei.ca/arts-equity-and-inclusion/ and click on the 'join the discussion' image. Share with colleagues and tell us what you think!

AS part of the Molecular and Macromolecular Sciences Seminar Program, Dr. Michael Freund from Dalhousie University will be presenting on Conjugated Polymer Composites for Biologically Inspired Sensing and Energy Storage/Conversion Systems. 

Conjugated polymers are an exciting class of materials that hold great promise in emerging electronic, sensing and energy applications. The excitement surrounding the field has resulted from the tremendous possibilities presented by merging the vast knowledge base of synthetic organic chemistry and polymer science with critically important areas of electronic materials and solid-state physics. This rapidly growing field presents opportunities for revolutionizing material science and electronics in ways we are just beginning to imagine. This presentation will discuss the development of conjugated polymers for use in artificial photosynthesis and artificial olfaction, inspired by biological systems. In particular, recent developments in the design of membranes consisting of electronically and ionically conducting polymers will be discussed including their figures of merit and engineering challenges for use in coupling the absorption of light with the generation of solar fuels. In the area of artificial olfaction, the development of chemically diverse conjugated polymer sensing elements compatible with CMOS integrated circuits will be described. 

His presentation is today at 12:30 in KCI room 104 and will be followed by a pizza luncheon in the Chemistry Student Lounge, KCI 200. 

All are welcome to attend. 

It's that time again! Soup for the Soul: Year 4, Event 6
UPEI Graduate, Soup for the Soul Founder and Cow's Ice Cream employee Kyle Holland returns with his new team from Cow's to host our final Soup event of this academic year. Tomato and Chicken Noodle soups with ummm, hmmmm dessert from Cow's. Come and get it!

This event is today from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm in the Chaplaincy Centre. 

The School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences welcomes the campus community to a public research presentation by Dr. Faiza Khan Khattak, candidate for tenure track position in Data Analytics, on Wednesday, March 20th at 3:00 pm in Robertson Library, Room 208.

Presentation Title: Empowering Clinicians with Machine Learning

Abstract: My work is focused on applying machine learning techniques to clinical data to improve the healthcare system. I will present two of my ongoing projects. The first project is about using real-time information to predict ICU-transfer of patients. The preliminary study shows that using real-time information (in the form of short text messages between nurses and doctors regarding the patients’ condition) can improve the ICU-transfer prediction accuracy. The second project, AutoScribe is a system for automatically extracting pertinent medical information from dialogues between clinicians and patients. The system parses the dialogue and extracts entities such as medications and symptoms, using context to predict which entities are relevant. It also classifies the primary diagnosis for each conversation. 

All are welcome to attend.

The Department of Companion Animals at the Atlantic Veterinary College, UPEI, will be interviewing candidates to fill a newly-created, tenure-track faculty position in Zoo, Exotic & Wildlife Animal Medicine. Each candidate has been asked to present two (2) thirty-minute seminars; one a topic of their choosing that should be geared toward 3rd year DVM students and aimed at delivering “core” information for veterinary students (i.e., information that a new graduate will need to possess to be successful on Day 1); and the other on their vision for building/expanding an exotic animal practice at the AVC.

Our second candidate will be on-campus Thursday and Friday of this week.

March 21st & 22nd, 2019
Dr. Sara Gardhouse (OVC ’12) has completed an Exotics, Wildlife & Zoological Medicine internship at WCVM (2013); a Small Animal Rotating Internship at Kansas State (2014) and a Zoological Companion Animals Residency at the University of California-Davis. She is board-certified by the American College of Zoological Medicine and is currently working as a Staff Veterinarian with the Avian & Exotic Medicine Service at the Health Sciences Centre, Ontario Veterinary College.

Rabbit Nutrition: The Scoop on Poop, Carrots, Fibre & so Much More
Vision for Building/Expanding an Exotic Animal Practice at AVC
Thursday, March 21st @ 12:30pm, ‘287N’, AVC Learning Commons

Any interested faculty / staff are invited to attend. A copy of the candidate’s CV and letter of application are available by contacting Laurel Fisher (fisher@upei.ca) in the Department of Companion Animals.

We are in the third of four weeks of our FSDE graduate students presenting their thesis research in three minutes, for the purpose of preparing and practicing clear, concise, and inspired talks. This week we have four 3-minute presentations:

"BioPierce: preventing piercing infection using 3D printers”
Emad Naseri

"Development of a portable, smartphone-operated salivary cortisol biosensor”
Rodolfo Nino-Esparza

“Fighting superbugs in chickens for a healthier dinner table”
Nauman Nazeer

“Waste to value: isolating nanocrystalline cellulose from local invasive tunicate”
Matthew Dunlop

Wednesday, March 20, 12:00 noon to 1:00 PM in SDE 212, all are welcomed!

In recognition of the outstanding performance and dedication of our faculty and staff, a number of annual awards have been created to acknowledge their efforts and achievements. 

Up to 10 Presidential Awards of Merit for UPEI Faculty, Librarians, Clinical Veterinary Professionals and Clinical Nursing Instructors and four categories of Presidential Awards of Merit for UPEI Staff will be awarded in 2019. These awards will be presented during a Celebration of Colleagues to be held on Tuesday, April 30, 2019 from 10:30am-12:00pm in McMillan Hall, W.A. Murphy Student Centre. 

Susan Connolly, Associate Vice-President, Human Resources & Legal, will lead the process and chair the committee to select award recipients. 

Nominations for both faculty and staff awards close on Friday, March 29, 2019. 

For further details on the awards and the nomination process, please visit: http://www.upei.ca/president/presidential-recognition-awards-merit 

Next meeting: Friday, March 22, 12:30-1:15, AVC 286N, to discuss: 
Graham C, von Keyserlingk M, Franks B. 2018. Zebrafish welfare: Natural history, social motivation and behaviour. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 200:13-22.
Available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159117303192?via%3Dihub 
The Animal Welfare Journal Club meets approximately once a month to discuss scientific articles related to animal welfare. Everyone is welcome to attend and to propose articles for future discussion. 
The club is co hosted by AVC’s Sir James Dunn Animal Welfare Centre and Animal Welfare Club. Email acrook@upei.ca or jdamico@upei.ca to be on the e-mail list for future information.

Selected first-year students are invited via their UPEI email to participate in the CUSC-CCREU 2019 Survey of First Year Students, along with students from more than 60 other Canadian institutions. Core areas covered by the survey include
• use of and satisfaction with various facilities and services
• experiences with faculty
• students’ academic profile
• financing education
• assessment of the overall university experience

First-year students are asked to check their UPEI email to see if they have received an invitation to participate in the survey. If so, they are asked to complete it as soon as possible. The survey will close in mid-April. Responses are confidential, and participation is voluntary. To learn more about the survey, visit http://cusc-ccreu.ca.

The Fall 2019 and Winter 2020 schedule is now available in the myUPEI Course Catalogue http://www.upei.ca/discovermore/course-catalogue. Incoming First Year students are now able to register for classes. 

Registration dates for all other students are as follows:
Fourth Year, Graduate Students, BEd students: May 16th, 2019
Third Year: May 21st, 2019
Second Year: May 24th, 2019
All other Students: May 27th, 2019

Any questions regarding registration may be directed to registrar@upei.ca.

It's time for another event in the series of discussions about indigenization and decolonization being presented by the Faculty Development Office and the Indigenous Education Advisory Circle's faculty development committee. On Wednesday, March 20, from 3:00-4:00 in HSB 106, Gary Evans will present on and lead a discussion about “Indigenization at Other Universities.” Come out and join the conversation!

The E-Learning Office is hosting some workshops on using Moodle for quizzes. 
On Tuesday, March 19th is a session on importing your your questions into Moodle and setting up graded online quizzes
On Wednesday, March 20th is a session on using Moodle to create paper quizzes that can be scanned and graded. 

For more information about these sessions, or to register please view this form.

For more E-Learning Office workshops check out upei.ca/teachingsupport/workshop-calendar

Speaker: Will Robbins, Biomedical Sciences
Title: Investigating Novel Transmission Routes of the Canid Metastrongylids Angiostrongylus vasorum and Crenosoma vulpis.

This event is Tuesday, March 19 at 3:30 pm in AVC Lecture Theatre B.

If your device isn't working, try turning it off and back on again. 
Sometimes it really does work!
You're welcome, ITSS.

The School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences welcomes the campus community to a public research presentation by Dr. Faiza Khan Khattak, candidate for tenure track position in Data Analytics, on Wednesday, March 20th, 3:00 pm at Cass Science Hall, Room 101. 

Presentation Title: Automatic extraction of information from patient-clinician dialogues

Abstract: AutoScribe is a system for automatically extracting pertinent medical information from dialogues between clinicians and patients. The system parses the dialogue and extracts entities such as medications and symptoms, using context to predict which entities are relevant. It also classifies the primary diagnosis for each conversation. A novelty of this work is that, unlike most of the existing systems which primarily use lexicon-based term matching, AutoScribe uses linguistic context and time information to extract entities and also determines which entities are relevant. 

All are welcome to attend.

The E-Learning Multimedia Development Grant is being offered for the second time as an opportunity for faculty and staff members to create a multimedia course resource with the help of the E-Learning Instructional Multimedia Specialist over the Summer 2019 semester. Find out more about the grant here.

If you have questions related to your multimedia project ideas, please contact Kristy McKinney at kmckinney@upei.ca

Closing date for applications is April 5, 2019 and completed application forms can be sent to dmoses@upei.ca with the subject line “E-Learning Multimedia Development Grant Application 2019.”

This week we have a short video for you all to watch and discuss. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk, entitled "The Danger of a Single Story," and her warning against homogenized views of any group of people, seems especially appropriate in light of recent news. Go to http://projects.upei.ca/arts-equity-and-inclusion/ and click on the 'join the discussion' image. Share with colleagues and tell us what you think!

AS part of the Molecular and Macromolecular Sciences Seminar Program, Dr. Michael Freund from Dalhousie University will be presenting on Conjugated Polymer Composites for Biologically Inspired Sensing and Energy Storage/Conversion Systems. 

Conjugated polymers are an exciting class of materials that hold great promise in emerging electronic, sensing and energy applications. The excitement surrounding the field has resulted from the tremendous possibilities presented by merging the vast knowledge base of synthetic organic chemistry and polymer science with critically important areas of electronic materials and solid-state physics. This rapidly growing field presents opportunities for revolutionizing material science and electronics in ways we are just beginning to imagine. This presentation will discuss the development of conjugated polymers for use in artificial photosynthesis and artificial olfaction, inspired by biological systems. In particular, recent developments in the design of membranes consisting of electronically and ionically conducting polymers will be discussed including their figures of merit and engineering challenges for use in coupling the absorption of light with the generation of solar fuels. In the area of artificial olfaction, the development of chemically diverse conjugated polymer sensing elements compatible with CMOS integrated circuits will be described. 

This event is Wednesday, March 20 at 12:30 in KCI 104. His presentation will be followed by a pizza luncheon in the Chemistry Student Lounge, KCI 200. 

The School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences welcomes the campus community to a public research presentation by Dr. Faiza Khan Khattak, candidate for tenure track position in Data Analytics, on Wednesday, March 20th at 3:00 pm in Robertson Library, Room 208.

Presentation Title: Empowering Clinicians with Machine Learning

Abstract: My work is focused on applying machine learning techniques to clinical data to improve the healthcare system. I will present two of my ongoing projects. The first project is about using real-time information to predict ICU-transfer of patients. The preliminary study shows that using real-time information (in the form of short text messages between nurses and doctors regarding the patients’ condition) can improve the ICU-transfer prediction accuracy. The second project, AutoScribe is a system for automatically extracting pertinent medical information from dialogues between clinicians and patients. The system parses the dialogue and extracts entities such as medications and symptoms, using context to predict which entities are relevant. It also classifies the primary diagnosis for each conversation. 

All are welcome to attend.