A doctoral citation summarizes the nature of the independent research, provides a high-level overview of the study, states the significance of the work and says who will benefit from the findings in clear, non-specialized language, so that members of a lay audience will understand it.
| Year | Citation | Program |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Dr. Tran defined a protocol for performing ultrasound-guided epidural needle insertion and developed methods to improve the image quality of lumbar ultrasound images and automatic segmentation of features in the ultrasound images. These techniques have been successfully tested in two clinical trials at BC Women's Hospital and Health Centre. | Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Monaghan studied the plant immune system using a combination of genetics and molecular biology. She showed that components of a highly conserved protein complex associated with the cell's RNA splicing machinery are necessary for successful defense against microbial pathogen infection in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. | Doctor of Philosophy in Botany (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Lenters conducted a case study of literacy instruction in an elementary classroom, using a new approach to social and cultural studies of literacy. Her research considers the ways material objects, such as books, forms and student publications, play a role in the literacy practices of students and their teachers. | Doctor of Philosophy in Language and Literacy Education (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Chen investigated signal design for wireless communication systems with multiple transmit and multiple receive antennas. He developed several novel low-complexity methods for enhancing the data rate and reliability of these systems by exploiting different forms of channel state information at the transmitter. | Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. MacKinnon McQuarrie used cortisol levels in saliva as a physiological index to measure children's reactivity to stress while completing tasks believed to underlie Math Disability. Higher levels of reactivity predicted poorer performance on working memory and math tasks, processes that are impaired in children with Math Disability. | Doctor of Philosophy in Special Education (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Dewar examined how the labels of infants' earliest objects are represented. She found that infants expect labels to refer to distinct object categories and she identified a learning mechanism through which infants' expectations of labeled objects may be acquired. This research illuminates the relationship between language and cognitive development. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Milward's research explored ways to resolve tensions between Aboriginal methods of justice and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This research may be of valuable guidance if and when Aboriginal communities are able to design their own justice systems, and will have to address how to accommodate both Aboriginal collective goals and individual rights. | Doctor of Philosophy in Law (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Ali designed novel authentication protocols that perform remarkably well compared to existing protocols while preserving high-security qualities. His work solves the problem of achieving fast and secure Internet connections for mobile users. | Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Kim explored how the social communication technology, folksonomy, is changing the way people organize Web resources. This empirical study proposes a conceptual framework to recast a folksonomy as a Web classification, and to better understand users' perception and use of folksonomy in organizing Web resources. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Lai investigated the roles of a novel protein family responsible for cell-to-cell communication in the central nervous system. His work led to the first description of how this protein family enhances neuronal maturation, as well as how it suppresses tumour growth in brain cancer. | Doctor of Philosophy in Cell and Developmental Biology (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. van den Berg studied theoretical and practical aspects of convex optimization for sparse signal recovery, which aims to obtain sparse approximate solutions to underdetermined systems of linear equations. His work has culminated in an optimization code that has found wide-spread use in the recently emerged field of compressed sensing. | Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Spetic studied the interrelationships between competitiveness and sustainability of two natural resources industries in British Columbia, New Zealand, Chile, and Brazil. With pressing demands for improved environmental and social business practices in natural resource sectors, his study contributes to theory development of competition by situating sustainability as a fundamental requirement. | Doctor of Philosophy in Forestry (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Schoemaker Holmes investigated urban online dating practices in order to study the role of such new media in producing gendered selves. This research illuminates gendered dating inequalities and broadens feminist theories of love by illustrating how gender remains an organizing and oppressive force in everyday life. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Kunz investigated the optical and electronic properties of functional conducting polymers, including the discovery of reversible amplification of fluorescence quenching using molecular switches. This research facilitates the development of organic based sensor materials. | Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Morin studied symmetric mathematical functions and their relationships. He discovered a family of staircase diagrams he could use to predict precisely when subtraction produces a positive sum of Schur functions. His findings will be used in the fields of representation theory and algebraic geometry. | Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Gadermann used interviews and large-scale surveys to identify which contextual factors are most important for children's well-being. The well-being measure that she validated is now widely used in British Columbia to inform practices in schools and communities that support children's well-being. | Doctor of Philosophy in Measurement, Evaluation and Research Methodology (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Albert examined the roles of surgical and morphological parameters on problematic implant migration after hip replacement. She showed that the extent of bone cement penetration into the graft has a larger effect on displacement than does the degree of graft compaction, and that excessive migration is attributed primarily to slippage between the graft and the host bone. | Doctor of Philosophy in Materials Engineering (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Carr worked on the isolation and structure elucidation of novel biologically active compounds from marine organisms. In addition, he synthesized analogs of these compounds with the goal of discovering compounds that can be used to treat various diseases. | Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Mahdi Eynian developed an experimental identification of models that predict forces that arise due to the tool's vibration during machining. Based on these models, he developed analytical vibration stability prediction methods for turning and milling operations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Saadaoui studied magnetism at the surface of cuprate superconductors using depth-controlled nuclear magnetic resonance (Beta-NMR) technique. These studies have detected the existence of small disordered magnetic fields a few nanometers above the surface of these superconductors, and have also shown the effect of disorder on the arrangement of magnetic flux lines inside the superconductor. | Doctor of Philosophy in Physics (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Mitchell developed a new and innovative experiment which promotes the casting defect known as hot tearing in aluminium alloys. Using this experiment and applying the optical technique of digital image correlation, he was able to evaluate the evolution of strain during localisation of hot tears in several commercial alloys. | Doctor of Philosophy in Materials Engineering (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Leung found interactions between two systems that regulate gene transfer in bacteria. She also identified growth conditions that affect the expression of these regulatory systems and gene transfer. These studies contribute to our understanding of how bacteria respond to changes in environmental conditions with appropriate modifications to gene expression. | Doctor of Philosophy in Microbiology and Immunology (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Beran developed techniques for discrimination of unexploded ordnance from metallic clutter using geophysical data. He showed how parameters of a physical model can be estimated from observed electromagnetic data, and how these parameters can be used to make discrimination decisions. These methods improved the efficacy and reduced the costs of environmental remediation of military munitions. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geophysics (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Griffith developed bioinformatic methods that utilize microarrays and massively parallel sequencing to discover novel isoforms and measure alternative expression of human genes. He subsequently applied these methods to identify candidate predictors of chemotherapy resistance in colon cancer. | Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Genetics (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Zhu developed an effective approach to obtain robust a-posteriori error estimates for discontinuous Galerkin methods for convection-diffusion problems. He applied this technique to derive a robust h-adaptive and hp-adaptive algorithm on isotropically and anisotropically refined meshes. | Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics (PhD) |