UNews - Daniel O'Donnell

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers awarded federal research grants worth more than $3 million

caroline.zentner — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 21:50:59 +0000

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers are among the successful applicants for federal grants announced by The Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions, and the Honourable Marjorie Michel, Minister of Health.

The more than $1.3 billion in funding supports over 9,700 researchers and research projects in Canada through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

“From brain plasticity and the mechanism of low-dose radiation to supporting newcomers through mentoring, these grants illustrate the diversity of research being done at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge,” says Dr. Dena McMartin, vice-president of research. “This funding not only helps established researchers continue their work but also helps our early career researchers build their research programs. Ultimately, our students benefit with increased opportunities to engage in research throughout their post-secondary careers.”

In total, ULethbridge received funding from NSERC for nine Discovery Grants and two Discovery Development Grants. The Discovery Grants will bring in nearly $475,000 a year for the next five years. The research projects include the following:

Dr. Gerlinde Metz (Neuroscience) will receive $96,000 per year for a study looking at the social determinants of experience-dependent brain plasticity.
Dr. Stacey Wetmore (Chemistry & Biochemistry) will receive $89,000 per year for a project involving computer modelling of modified RNA.
Dr. Olga Kovalchuk (Biological Sciences) was awarded $55,000 annually to study the fundamental mechanisms of low-dose radiation.
Dr. Borries Demeler (Chemistry & Biochemistry) is set to receive $47,000 yearly for solution studies of interacting biopolymer systems.
Dr. Hadi Kharaghani (Mathematics & Computer Science) will receive $32,000 a year for his project on special orthogonal matrices.

The remainder of the NSERC recipients are four early career researchers, each of whom received a Discovery Launch Supplement of $12,500 in addition to their Discovery Grant.

Dr. Corina Birghila (Mathematics & Computer Science) was awarded a yearly amount of $31,000 for a project titled Optimal Decision under Uncertainty.
Dr. Jessica Willi (Chemistry & Biochemistry) will receive $44,000 annually for a project on ribosome functions through synthetic biology.
Dr. Vineet Rathod (Chemistry & Biochemistry) will receive $38,000 annually to examine the structure-function relationship of natural and engineered amyloid proteins.
Dr. Dylan Girodat (Chemistry & Biochemistry) will receive $42,000 per year for a project on the structural dynamics of ribosomes during translation.

In addition, Discovery Development Grants, worth $22,000 each, were awarded to Drs. Christopher Hopkinson (Geography & Environment) and Marc Bomhof (Kinesiology and Physical Education).

Hopkinson will use remote sensing to model vegetation and snowpack response to wildland fire in headwater basins.
Bomhof intends to look at the interplay between exercise and dietary factors on appetite regulation.

ULethbridge social science and humanities researchers were awarded $645,000 in SSHRC Insight Grants.

Dr. Daniel O'Donnell (English) will work on a project involving Research Data Management and Research Data Infrastructure by humanities researchers.
Dr. Scott Rathwell (Kinesiology) wants to enhance sport participation, promote physical activity and improve health outcomes for aging adults by establishing a framework for effective sport programming in middle-aged and older adults.

Several ULethbridge researchers are the recipients of Insight Development Grants totalling more than $291,000.

Dr. Toupey Luft (Education) has designed a project to address the gap in understanding how arts-based mentorship may enhance a sense of belonging for newcomer young adults.
Dr. Kenneth Holyoke’s (Geography & Environment) project investigates the nature and scope of climate impacts on the Wolastoqiyik and Wabanaki archaeological record in New Brunswick.
Dr. Justin Raycraft’s (Anthropology) objective in this project is to increase understanding of the social dimensions of human-carnivore coexistence in the Tarangire ecosystem of northern Tanzania.
Dr. Jeffrey MacCormack (Education) will develop a professional development intervention consisting of a community of practice for teachers and principals where they learn evidence-based practices to support students with profound and multiple disabilities.
Dr. Miranda Leibel (Liberal Education) will examine how the creation and maintenance of postal services are an important component of Canadian state- and nation-building.

Centre for the Study of Scholarly Communication to work with international collaboration on peer review

trevor.kenney — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 16:28:07 +0000

Dr. Daniel Paul O’Donnell of the Centre for the Study of Scholarly Communication and Department of English at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge is collaborating with an international team on a project that investigates academic peer review.

The project, led by Principal Investigator Dr. Martin Eve at Birkbeck College, ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of London, has been awarded a grant of $99,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This project will analyze the role of peer review in the research cycle to develop better ways of using expert opinion to assess and improve the literature.

The research team – comprised of Eve, Dr. Cameron Neylon (Curtin ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ, Australia), O'Donnell (U of L), Dr. Jennifer Lin (director of Product Management at Crossref), Dr. Damian Pattinson (vice-president of Publishing Innovation at Research Square), Samuel Moore (King’s College London) and Dr. Veronique Kiermer (executive editor, Public Library of Science (PLOS)), who initially convened at the Mellon-funded Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute – will investigate the peer review database at PLOS ONE, the largest scientific journal in the world.

The reports, which will be strictly anonymized and treated as confidential, will be examined using a range of close-reading, distant-reading, and stylometric approaches. The team hopes to understand the shape of peer-review at scale, leading to a better understanding of the oft-hidden process.

“Every academic in the world is familiar with peer review,” says Eve. “We all participate in this system. However, surprisingly little is known about what peer review looks like at scale. Using a set of cross-disciplinary methodologies, we will study the writing patterns of reviewers and look for trends that can give us insight into how reviewers respond to requests for evaluation.”

“Working with the Birkbeck group allowed us to find ways to leverage our large dataset of reviews while maintaining confidentiality,” says Kiermer. “This is a great opportunity for PLOS to partner with experts to gain insights and promote evidence-based approaches to peer review.”

“This is an exciting project for the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s new Centre for the Study of Scholarly Communication,” adds O’Donnell. “It demonstrates the international and interdisciplinary scope of Scholarly Communication research and provides valuable opportunities for the students who work in it.”

Building a real-time digital reliquary

trevor.kenney — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:00:58 +0000

Written in Old English by an anonymous poet, The Dream of the Rood is recognized as one of the oldest poems in the English language and among the most beautiful religious works. What many don't know is that much of the poem is carved in runes (ancient symbols) on a 17-ft high stone cross in a Scottish church.

The 8th century Ruthwell Cross is historically linked to two other crosses: the 11th century Brussels Cross, made of oak and thought in the Middle Ages to contain a relic of the "True Cross" from Christ's crucifixion, and the 8th century Bewcastle Cross in England, which is carved of stone. All three bear elements that are thematically related to The Dream of the Rood poem.

In the past, Anglo-Saxon historians were required to travel to Belgium and Great Britain to study these artifacts in all three dimensions. Despite the gains of modern digital photography, the crosses are difficult to capture photographically because of their condition and inconvenient locations. Additionally, even a very high-resolution image cannot capture subtle details, like the techniques used to carve the cross.

"It's not 100 per cent clear whether or not the poem was carved when the Ruthwell Cross was carved," explains U of L English professor Dr. Daniel O'Donnell. Being able to examine the crosses in all three dimensions is the only way for researchers to assess this and many other questions.

To improve access to the objects, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge team is co-ordinating an international effort to create a high-tech alternative. O'Donnell, a medieval literature specialist, is collaborating with U of L professors James Graham (New Media) and Dr. Wendy Osborn (Mathematics and Computing Sciences), computer programmer and U of L graduate Joel Rigby, and researchers from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Leeds and the Università degli studi di Torino, to create an online environment that will allow researchers to view and interact with the crosses virtually, in real-time and in three dimensions.

"After examining the multitude of available new media technologies used by humanities researchers and wanting to create an innovative online system that would significantly improve the standard of interactivity, visual accuracy and authenticity-of-experience, we settled on developing a proprietary digital information retrieval system that would work in combination with a collection of next-generation video game technologies," Graham explains. "We felt that the third dimension was the next logical direction for hypermedia-based research to go, as it allows users to see and intuitively interact with virtual representations of objects they wish to know more about."

To render the crosses in 3-D, high-tech laser scanners will be used to capture every detail of the historic artifacts. The digital scan files will then be converted from the 3-D x,y,z data into a highly efficient texture files – called normal maps – that will then be applied to the surface of the 3-D cross models.

The Visionary Cross research group is also completing an innovative system that will allow researchers to interface directly with external online databases while navigating within the 3-D game environment. Students and researchers examining the relics within the virtual game environment will be able to directly access specific online database information – and even add to that database – simply by clicking on the relevant location on the 3-D virtual object.

Not surprisingly, the project will need heavy-duty technological infrastructure. That's why Osborn, who is the director of the Southern Alberta Digital Library and an expert in data management, is examining the best ways to store the data involved to make its retrieval efficient.

"We're still working on proof-of-concept, so we don't have huge amounts of data yet, but when we go online and people start to add their own data, it could be terabytes of data that come into this," she explains.

To put this in perspective: 1 terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes (GB), and your personal computer probably has about between 1-5 GB of memory. In addition to the massive volume of information, the project will also involve many different kinds of data, which also presents a tremendous challenge, Osborn says.

The Visionary Cross Project is being funded by a two-year, $23,000 grant that Graham, O'Donnell and Osborn received from the U of L Community of Research Excellence Development Opportunities (CREDO) program. The researchers have also applied to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for funding for the next stages of the project.

While the Visionary Cross Project may seem like a radical diversion from most humanities research, O'Donnell explains that humanities researchers have relied on computers since the middle of the 20th century for things like statistical analysis and library cataloguing. But humanities researchers haven't just been the benefactors of technology – they've also created it.

"For example, an awful lot of what allows XML to work essentially comes out of work done in humanities computing," O'Donnell says.

UNews - Daniel O'Donnell

��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers awarded federal research grants worth more than $3 million

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Centre for the Study of Scholarly Communication to work with international collaboration on peer review

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��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers awarded federal research grants worth more than $3 million