StFX receives over $1.2 million in research funding

March 13, 2024

(l-r) Research funding recipients and StFX leadership pose with Sean Fraser, Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities and MP for Central Nova

ANTIGONISH, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA - St. Francis Xavier University celebrates an announcement made today by the federal government of $1.2 million in federal funding for StFX researchers to continue and enhance their important work. This funding will also allow students to participate and play an important role in research at StFX in years to come. StFX faculty were successful in receiving two Canada Research Chair and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awards. The Hon. Sean Fraser, Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities and MP for Central Nova was on hand for the event.

Overview:

• Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) - Dr. Katie Aubrecht, Department of Sociology - $500,000 over 5 years for Healthy Equity and Social Justice.
• Tier 2 Canada Research Chair - Dr. Marcia English, Department of Human Nutrition - $600,000 over 5 years for Protein and Flavour Chemistry.
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) - Insight Development Grants (IDG) competition - Dr. Kyran Cupido, Department of Mathematics and Statistics - $49,486 for Local Investigations of Life Expectancy in Atlantic Canada.
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada - Insight Development Grants competition - Dr. Catherine Girard, Department of Art - $56,263 for Generating a New Praxis and Theory of Intercultural Dialogue Around the Visual and Material Archive of the Komqwejwi'kasikl Language

"The success of Dr. Katie Aubrecht, Dr. English, Dr. Girard and Dr. Cupido speak to the unique and diverse research capabilities of StFX faculty", says Dr. Richard Isnor, StFX Associate Vice-President Research, Graduate and Professional Studies. "It is exhilarating to see our faculty members receive CRC awards and Dr. Girard and Dr. Cupido receive their first SSHRC grants, which in the case of the IDGs are really meant to help set them up for future research success."

Dr. Katie Aubrecht

Dr. Katie Aubrecht, Department of Sociology was awarded $500,000 over 5 years for Health Equity and Social Justice. The Canada Research Chair in Health Equity and Social Justice will develop knowledge and capacity to support Canadian and international policy on rural mental health using a participatory action research and training program with three objectives: 1) Identify promising directions in human rights-based approaches to rural mental health care; 2) Evaluate health equity impacts of human rights-based approaches to mental health; 3) Mobilize knowledge of mental health for social justice.

"With the renewal, my CRC program will generate knowledge about mental health disability in rural settings, from sociological and intersectional disability studies perspectives," says Dr. Katie Aubrecht. We are in the midst of a global paradigm shift in mental health care, policy and research. Sociological, place-based and lived experience led perspectives are essential to making sense of these changes and navigating new directions."

Research activities include knowledge syntheses, legislative and policy scans and comparative analyses, social innovation labs, health equity impact assessments, and participatory policy evaluation. Work is guided by an intersectional disability studies perspective informed by socio-legal studies and a comparative rural lens. In addressing these objectives, the Canada Research Chair in Health Equity and Social Justice will advance knowledge about laws, policies and programs that respect and promote the dignity, human rights and health equity of people and groups most directly impacted by mental health policy decisions and explore opportunities to integrate rural mental health policy with social development agendas.

The overall goal is to improve the quality of mental health care and self-perceived mental health and wellness of people living in rural communities experiencing social and economic marginalization. Knowledge from this interdisciplinary research program will be co-developed and shared with disability communities, researchers, and government through a newly established Centre for Disability, Culture and Justice at St. Francis Xavier University. The Centre will offer a platform for coordinating disability researchers across rural spaces and facilitating first voice-led government and civil society partnered disability education, research, evaluation, and policy actions.

Dr. Marcia English

Dr. Marcia English, Department of Human Nutrition, received a Canada Research Chair valued at $600,000 over 5 years in Protein and Flavour Chemistry. The long-term objective of the CRC program is to understand and improve the shelf-life stability, sensory quality (flavour and texture), and nutritional properties of plant-based foods.

"Utilizing ingredients that are rich in nutrients and low in fertilizer requirements has been suggested as a course of action to meet the demand for more sustainable healthy foods," says Dr. Marcia English. "A wide variety of high-protein beans, seeds, and novel protein sources could serve this purpose, however, there are increasing concerns regarding the nutritional profile and consumer acceptability of emerging plant-based products. This research will provide the fundamental understanding required to begin to address some of these challenges and is a promising way to improve the nutritional quality of food-based foods in Canada. Complementary research will also explore innovative and sustainable packaging solutions for these foods."

The program will focus on characterizing the nutritional quality, functional properties, and flavour profiles of new and emerging plant proteins; understanding the mechanisms underlying flavour development in plant-based foods and evaluating components that modulate flavour interactions in plant-based foods during processing and storage; and upcycling waste from food processing by blending them with protein-rich materials to form biodegradable packaging materials.

Dr. Kyran Cupido

Dr. Kyran Cupido of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics has received $49,486 in funding for 'Local Investigations of Life Expectancy in Atlantic Canada,' a research project that will focus on new insights about the spatial distribution of life expectancy in Atlantic Canada.

Dr. Cupido says as an early career researcher, he is incredibly grateful for this funding "as it will provide an exceptional opportunity to establish my research program within the Canadian demographic research community. Importantly, it will provide some of our students at StFX a tremendous opportunity to engage in data-driven research, which applies the skills they have learned in the classroom towards real-world human population modelling problems."

Life expectancy is a widely used metric for understanding the overall health of a population and assessing the potential inequalities that exist between geographical areas. The ability to accurately estimate life expectancy allows for an intuitive indication of a society's health, which unlike many other demographic indicators, assesses the quantity of life rather than the quality of life. Such an understanding of human survivorship is essential for Canadian demographic, actuarial, and economic practices, especially with regards to the administration of social welfare programs such as the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) and the Old Age Security (OAS) program, which require accurate estimates of life expectancy and mortality rates across the country. As such, improving our understanding of Canadian longevity requires ongoing efforts.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Statistics Canada (2019) reported that life expectancy at birth had been steadily growing in Canada for both males and females across time. While encouraging news at a national level, this growth in Canadian life expectancy has not been experienced across the provinces equally. Consequently, our current understanding of mortality and life expectancy in Atlantic Canada, which has been lagging provincially, could stand to be improved through more localized investigations operating at much more refined spatial scales, especially when considering the diverse social and demographic landscape in the region.

This project aims to study underlying patterns which may be present in the distribution of life expectancy for the Atlantic Canadian population. This will be achieved through the estimation of life expectancy at the census division level across the provinces, and in-depth investigations of the spatial dependencies in these estimates. Once such a framework for describing the variability in life expectancy and human mortality across the region is complete, statistical modelling techniques will be employed to further study the relationship between life expectancy projections at birth with factors relating to the socioeconomic and population composition. The findings of this research will allow for a clearer understanding of the population health in Atlantic Canada and the impact that socioeconomic inequalities have on mortality rates across space.

In addition, this research will provide opportunity for undergraduate students to participate in demographic research, which they would not be exposed to in their classroom curriculum. The results of this project will allow for a natural extension of this research towards the investigation of the spatial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across Atlantic Canada.

Dr. Catherine Girard

Dr. Catherine Girard of the Department of Art is the recipient of $56,263 in funding. Her research, 'Generating a New Praxis and Theory of Intercultural Dialogue Around the Visual and Material Archive of the Komqwejwi'kasikl Language' will apply the two-eyed seeing method to art historical research and will fill a gap in the visual and material culture of the komqwejwi'kasikl script, the writing system of the L'nuk language.

This project will engage with the colonial archive in a spirit of reconciliation by activating the visual and material culture of the komqwejwi'kasikl script, the writing system of the L'nuk language, through a collaborative project between a non-Indigenous principal investigator (PI), Dr. Catherine Girard (settler/French Canadian), and an Indigenous artist, poet, and scholar, Michelle Sylliboy (L'nu). They will use two-eyed seeing to examine the content of colonial archives in Vienna and Paris that contain printing plates, images, objects, and documents connected to the publication of two illustrated prayer books, the first in Paris in 1691, and the second in Vienna in 1866, written mostly in the komqwejwi'kasikl script. While the historical, cultural, and linguistic significance of these prayer books has been studied and is well known in the L'nu community, no systematic examination of the visual and material records kept in European archives of their production by European priests drawing on Indigenous knowledge has been conducted. This project will fill this gap by enhancing the knowledge of the prayer books' materiality and related archival fonds. It will also implement ethical practices that will make an epistemological contribution to the discipline of art history by foregrounding Indigenous voices and concerns throughout the research process, charting a way forward for art historians whose primary sources include the colonial archive.

The project will apply the two-eyed seeing method to art historical research. The researchers will use the dialogical approach to examine the content of the archives together while sharing their respective cultural perspectives, listening respectfully and learning from one another. Dr. Girard will be responsible for the conduct of the project, but the dialogical approach will allow for an Indigenous voice to shape the research and dissemination activities. Instead of creating more sites of academic entrapment, the project explores new directions for ethical practices in art history. This approach aligns with a spirit of reconciliation and prevents the appropriation of an Indigenous narrative. An undergraduate student will use audiovisual documentary techniques to document the two-eyed seeing process of the visual and material analyses done in the Vienna and Paris archives, with the support of an art consultant who will provide training sessions and coaching on technical proficiency, management of large amounts of footage and files, time management, and troubleshooting on-site issues. An L'nu masters student will have primary responsibility for incorporating L'nu language and culture into the research, transcriptions and analyses, while receiving mentorship from the Indigenous expert to become a language scholar.

The knowledge mobilization plan will convert the dialogical approach of the research stage into a cultural event, a documentary showing the two-eyed seeing process, two publications, two conference presentations, and a knowledge sharing event. The community event on campus will create a bridge between the research communities on the archives of the komqwejwi'kasikl writing system in Mi'kmaki and in Vienna. Dr. Girard will write a scholarly article and present at two professional conferences in which she will critically examine the disciplinary practices that maintain the ownership, by Western institutions, of this visual and material colonial archive that contains Indigenous knowledge. The project will culminate in a knowledge sharing event with the Indigenous expert's community.

The SSHRC grants are a two year period.

NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship recipients MacKenzie Le Vernois and Alexandra Reinhart pose with the Hon. Sean Fraser

Also awarded were two NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarships valued at $17,500 each to Alexandra Reinhart for research regarding 'Chemical sensing and navigational behaviour of Hermissenda crassicornis in the field.' StFX student MacKenzie Le Vernois also received the NSREC award for research in 'Accessible and Cost-Effective Methods to Distinguish Methane Sources.'

Earlier today, the Honourable Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Transport, made an announcement at l' Université de Montréal to celebrate the recipients of several funding programs on behalf of the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, and the Honourable Mark Holland, Minister of Health.