UNews - Dr. Louise Barrett

U of L researchers receive Canada Research Chair funding

caroline.zentner — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 20:31:39 +0000

Three ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers have received $2.4 million in new and renewed funding through the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program.

Dr. Matthew Bogard, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology, has been named a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Environments. Drs. Andrew Iwaniuk, Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Comparative Neuroanatomy, and Louise Barrett, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Cognition, Evolution and Behaviour, have received renewed funding.

Bogard joins the U of L on July 1 from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Washington where he’s been doing post-doctoral work. He grew up in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, obtaining a bachelor’s at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Saskatchewan, a master’s at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Regina and a PhD at the Université du Québec à Montréal. As a biogeochemist, he studies how elements like carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycle through aquatic ecosystems.

Dr. Matthew Bogard

“I want to use the Oldman River basin as a model system to understand how watershed disturbances impact the functioning of the biogeochemistry of aquatic networks,” says Bogard. “I also want to understand how humans are changing the food web and what impact that has on the biogeochemistry. If we’re adding too many nutrients, for example, or changing how the water flows through the landscape, that will impact the functioning of the ecosystem.”

The Oldman River watershed is an ideal place to work, Bogard says, because of its proximity to the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ. The area provides an environment that encompasses the Rocky Mountains and the Prairies, thus providing opportunities to work across different landscapes and human disturbances. These include climate effects on headwaters, agriculture, irrigation and urbanization and Bogard will be looking at how these factors interact at the watershed scale.

“I sense there’s a lot of interest in the sustainability of the Oldman River watershed from diverse perspectives,” says Bogard. “It has a more complicated management portfolio.”

With the renewal of her Tier 1 CRC, Barrett will extend her research on humans and non-human primates to look at how these two groups cope with climate change.

“I am very interested in the notion of the Anthropocene, this new geological epoch that recognizes that humans are a major geological force,” says Barrett. “We have changed the climate and patterns of land use and even the structure of the Earth’s crust. I am interested in understanding more about whether and how humans and other animals can adjust to these vast changes.”

Dr. Louise Barrett

Part of the research looks at a population of vervet monkeys in South Africa. Barrett has studied the group since 2008 and, in 2013, she and her students started a cohort study following the lives of every infant born in their study groups. In the years ahead, the researchers will be able to learn more about the factors that make a monkey well adjusted, well adapted and able to cope with the social and ecological world around them.

The aspect of the research dealing with humans is centred in Samoa and Nunavut. The Samoan islands are vulnerable to rising sea levels and the majority of people and infrastructure reside in coastal areas. Nunavut is experiencing receding sea ice and warming temperatures. Food security is a big issue in Nunavut, where people rely on hunting to ensure they have a regular supply of food.

“We’ve been looking at whether women’s reproductive decisions — when they choose to have children and how many children they decide to have — reflect their experience of risk in the environment,” says Barrett. “Overall, we’re looking at primate life history and human life history and trying to see how we cope with big changes in our environments.”

Iwaniuk’s research focuses on how and why the anatomy of animals’ brains differ from species to species. His renewed funding will allow him to continue to build and analyze his brain collection — the largest collection of bird brains in the world — through international collaborations and state-of-the-art imaging technology.

Some of his research will involve reconstructing the brains of extinct and endangered species to provide a more accurate view of these species’ abilities to find food and sense the world around them. Using computerized tomography (CT) scans, similar to what human patients receive in hospitals, Iwaniuk and his collaborators obtain high-resolution images of the skulls and heads of these species from which they reconstruct and measure sensory regions of the brain.

The first of these projects will focus on the night parrot, a highly secretive, nocturnal, green parrot found only in the arid interior of Australia. Almost nothing is known about the behaviour of the night parrot, but working with Australian scientists to reconstruct its brain from CT scans, Iwaniuk will provide insights into its senses of sight and smell, which are important for managing this endangered species and its habitat.

Working with researchers in Sweden, Iwaniuk and his undergraduate students will also explore what makes the chicken brain different from its wild relative, the junglefowl.

“In doing so, we might finally be able to answer whether chickens are truly bird-brained after all,” says Iwaniuk.

Grant enables U of L researchers to investigate how people engage with art

caroline.zentner — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 20:58:10 +0000

Intuitively, Dr. Josephine Mills, curator of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge Art Gallery, knows people get something out of art. Exactly how people engage with art remains a mystery even though art galleries, large and small, have a big interest in being able to answer the question.

“Public engagement in the arts is a huge topic right now, particularly for the Canada Council for the Arts and other funding bodies and boards of free-standing art galleries. Within universities, it’s often phrased as academic engagement,” says Mills. “There’s this pressure to do lots of public engagement but there’s really no sense of how you would know when it’s successful.”

The question of how public engagement in the arts can be measured is perfect fodder for the Level 2: Lichen Lab interdisciplinary research group at the U of L. The team consists of Mills; Dr. Louise Barrett, Canada Research Chair in Cognition, Evolution and Behaviour; Christine Clark (MFA ’14), assistant professor in the Department of New Media; Donald Lawrence, a professor in the Faculty of Arts at Thompson Rivers ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ; Dr. Tiffany Muller Myrdahl, senior lecturer in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ; and doctoral students Miranda Lucas, Leila Armstrong and Maria Madacky. It hopes to shed some light on public engagement thanks to $48,000 in funding from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection (SSHRC) Grant.

U of L Lichen Lab members include, from left to right, Leila Armstrong, Maria Madacky, Dr. Louise Barrett, Christine Clark and Dr. Josephine Mills.

Previous research studies have focused on museums in large cities and most measures of audience engagement are based on assessing the performing arts where attendance numbers are easy to capture. People who visit an art gallery exhibit can provide anecdotes about their experience but there’s often a difference between what people say and what they do.

“Can you measure their behaviour and get some sense of what people are experiencing and getting out of an exhibition without having to ask them?” says Barrett.

To answer that question, Barrett and Lucas, recipient of a SSHRC graduate scholarship, thought techniques used to study the behaviour of vervet monkeys could be adapted to studying the behaviour of people at an art exhibit. In her study, Lucas set up small video cameras in four art galleries and recorded people’s behaviours, supplemented with her own notations. Lucas measured details like how close people went to an artwork, how long they stood in front of it, how much they moved around and whether they spoke to someone. The data has not yet been analyzed but Lucas will be looking for common factors in people’s behaviours.

To build on Lucas’s work, Mills and Barrett have devised a project called You are Here. The project will bring together artists with an interest in activism and audience engagement, ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ, art gallery professionals and students for a three-day workshop dedicated to developing the understanding of public engagement in art galleries on both practical and philosophical levels. Philosophically, Dr. Alva Noë’s (��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of California Berkeley) theory that art is a ‘strange tool’—a means to reorganize, reflect on and understand human behaviour—will be used to connect the behavioural studies of gallery engagement with the artists’ practices and the forms of art they produce.

“Can we look at art as something that’s a way of extending our mind into the world and use it as a tool for understanding ourselves and others?” says Barrett. “If we can understand more about how people engage actively with art, artists can use that knowledge to elicit particular responses and alter viewers’ perceptions. As the artists we work with are also activists, they are keen to incorporate such ideas into their practice.”

In conjunction with the workshop, and a related series of exhibitions at the U of L Art Gallery in the fall of 2017, Clark will be involved in the knowledge mobilization component of the project, facilitating the creation of podcasts and a video miniseries which will be hosted on a dedicated website.

“I’ll be helping with concept development and production of the podcasts, editing alongside the others, and overseeing a student to create the website that will host the podcasts and videos and other information to extend the material that people will have access to,” says Clark.

The project will contribute to research and teaching in museum studies, visual art and the field of cognition, as well as inform art gallery professionals.

U of L scientists to be featured on The Nature of Things

caroline.zentner — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 21:16:21 +0000

The research work of three ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge scientists will be highlighted in Thursday’s episode of The Nature of Things.

The popular program hosted by David Suzuki airs on CBC Television and presents science stories in an engaging and informative way. Think Like an Animal features research on hummingbirds and primates conducted by Drs. Andrew Hurly, Louise Barrett and Sergio Pellis.

Dr. Louise Barrett poses for a photo with one of her research subjects, a vervet monkey.

This past summer, director Leora Eisen and a camera crew from 90th Parallel Productions spent several days on campus, at the U of L’s Westcastle field station and at a monkey reserve in South Africa, to explore the innovative ways U of L professors are delving into the animal mind.

“For many years, scientists have judged the intelligence of animals by comparing them to us,” says Eisen. “But, as Prof. Barrett told me, perhaps it’s time to take off our human-centred spectacles and look at how animals think in a new light — to understand how smart they are as themselves.”

“We have this wealth of people studying animal behaviour at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ and that’s really impressive,” says Barrett. “For our work to be shown on The Nature of Things is significant.”

Hurly has studied the behaviour of hummingbirds to learn about their cognition and Barrett and Pellis have studied the behaviour of primates, including vervet monkeys.

Hurly’s research on hummingbird cognition illustrates how the tiny birds rely on spatial information to find food. He and colleague Sue Healy, from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of St. Andrews in Scotland, placed eight artificial flowers filled with a sugar solution inside a wild hummingbird’s territory in the Rockies. After visiting four flowers, the researchers timed how long it took for the bird to return. Almost like clockwork, they found it returned in 10 to 15 minutes.

“We wanted to know if it could remember the flowers it had emptied and go only to the flowers it hadn’t yet visited,” says Hurly. “The answer is yes, they, upon return, were quite good at avoiding flowers that they’d already emptied.”

The film crew used a special camera to capture hummingbird movements in high definition slow motion.

“The footage is breathtaking,” says Eisen.

Barrett and Dr. Peter Henzi, a U of L psychology professor who also studies primate behaviour, conduct research with three different vervet monkey troops in South Africa. A film crew accompanied the research team to the site and filmed vervets living their everyday lives in the wild — grooming, playing and reacting to vocal calls.

“Louise Barrett is one of those rare ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ who can explain science in a way that viewers can understand,” says Eisen. “She provides real insight into the complex problem-solving skills of these highly social animals.”

Pellis has analyzed vervet monkey play and, in Think Like an Animal, he shares his insights into the processes that build a thinking brain. Young vervets will create unpredictable situations during play and those uncertainties challenge the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain involved in problem solving and complex planning.

“Animals that have much more complex social decision making are also the ones that tend to use play for such training,” says Pellis.

When: Thursday, Nov. 24, 8 p.m. on CBC

Three U of L professors elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada

caroline.zentner — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 16:03:02 +0000

A renowned neuroscientist, an accomplished anthropologist and a leading biologist from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). Their election acknowledges the remarkable accomplishments of Drs. Louise Barrett, Bruce McNaughton and Joe Rasmussen in advancing knowledge and scholarship.

Barrett, a U of L psychology professor, has been elected by her peers in the Anglophone division of the Academy of Social Sciences. Her innovative approaches to evolutionary anthropology and psychology have contributed to an exciting and fruitful interdisciplinary research program. Her training in ecology and anthropology led her to accept a Canada Research Chair in Evolution, Cognition, and Behaviour as well as the publication of influential books and articles on the social nature of cognition. Her research is firmly grounded in world-class empirical field study of social interaction in primate populations.

Dr. Louise Barrett poses with one of her research subjects.

“It is an enormous honour to be elected, and a great thrill to be recognized in this way by my adopted country, but I would never have been able to achieve it without the support and hard work of my collaborator, Peter Henzi, our students and our other research collaborators, so much of the credit must also go to them,” says Barrett. “It also meant a great deal to me to be nominated by Linda Fedigan, as she is without doubt Canada’s leading biological anthropologist, and someone whose work I have long admired.”

“I nominated Dr. Louise Barrett for membership in the FRSC because she is a recognized leader in the field of social cognition. She focuses mainly on social dynamics in wild, non-human primates, specifically baboons and vervets, as models of how animals conceptualize and interact adaptively in their social worlds,” says Dr. Linda Fedigan, FRSC, C.M., ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Calgary professor emerita.

Rasmussen, a biology professor, joins the Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences division of the Academy of Science. He has contributed significantly to the development of tracer approaches to modelling energy flow in food webs, based on fractionation and kinetics of naturally occurring isotopes. These approaches have yielded fresh insights and technical inroads into important ecological problems such as the biomagnification of persistent contaminants and the impacts of heavy metals and mining practices. Rasmussen’s research has important applications to conservation problems, including invasive species, habitat modelling and fragmentation.

Dr. Joe Rasmussen's research has implications for important ecological problems.

“It feels very special to be honoured in this way by colleagues for all these years of doing something that is so much fun. I’m a lucky guy,” says Rasmussen.

“Joe is most deserving of being elected to the Royal Society of Canada. I nominated him because he is a scientist with a broad interdisciplinary scope and strong quantitative skills. He knows the potential that exists in applying theory, tools and modelling approaches from physical sciences to ecology and he’s brave enough to venture into uncharted waters,” says U of L President Mike Mahon.

McNaughton, a neuroscience professor, has been elected to the Life Sciences division of the Academy of Science. His ground-breaking discoveries in systems neuroscience have been the basis for thousands of studies and publications focused on how the world thinks about synaptic plasticity, spatial cognition and long-term memory. His research has dramatically impacted neuroscience theory and his experimental and conceptual work contributed significantly to the work upon which the shared 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded.

Dr. Bruce McNaughton is a world leader in systems neuroscience.

“Generals get medals for battles won through the courage and sacrifices of their troops. Senior scientists get elected to prestigious societies for much the same reason,” says McNaughton. “It is a pleasure and honour to have been nominated and elected, but the main credit goes to the many talented trainees and research staff who have made any achievement I have made possible.”

“Bruce is truly a world leader in systems neuroscience and he’s made major advances in several areas and pioneered new technologies and new conceptual approaches. He continues to have a huge impact on neuroscience theory, research and methods. I was pleased to nominate him and his election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society recognizes his many accomplishments,” says Mahon.

Distinguished scholars and artists are elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada every year based on their exceptional contributions to Canadian intellectual life. The Society was established through an Act of Parliament in 1883 as Canada’s National Academy for senior scholars, artists and scientists.

UNews - Dr. Louise Barrett

U of L researchers receive Canada Research Chair funding

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