President's Dream Colloquium

Launched in 2012, the President’s Dream Colloquium brings together graduate students, faculty members, distinguished guests, and the wider public to learn with and from one another across disciplines, departments, faculties, and communities.

The Presidents' Dream Colloquium embraces SFU’s values and the four pillars of our framework for action:

  • Uphold Truth and Reconciliation
  • Engage in Global Challenges
  • Make a Difference in BC
  • Transform the SFU Experience

Each colloquium provides an opportunity for approved SFU students to gain graduate course credits towards their degree. The choice of each term’s colloquium, and associated responsibilities for its oversight and co-ordination, is determined through an application process. Applications must propose a graduate course and a six-speaker lecture series that is of interest to, and supported by, at least three university departments.

Current President Dream's Colloquium

One Health: Connections and Collaborations

Learn about the Public Lectures starting January 25

Learn more

2024 Spring - One Health: Connections and Collaborations

This colloquium explores the interconnectedness of humanhealth with the health of our local and global ecosystems and our planet. By mapping connections among people, animals, and environments, “One Health” reveals opportunities to prevent, prepare for, and respond to emerging and ongoing health threats. This concept isn’t new. It is rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing, and recognizes that health threats such as infectious diseases, environmental pollution, and climate change are shared across species, geographies, and generations.

Free Public Lectures / Public Engagement

President Joy Johnson brings leading thinkers to SFU and invites the community to an annual forum for intensive interdisciplinary exchange amongst faculty, students and the general public.

Seminars for Undergrads & Graduates

SFU students gain course credits towards their degree for attending and participating in colloquium seminars and completing supervised research papers relating to the colloquium’s subject or theme.

Upcoming Free Public Lectures

Public lectures are free and open to everyone including the general public. Please RSVP to the event as space is limited. A recording of each lecture will be made available after the event.

January 25, 2024

One Health and the changing global health landscape – The neglected heartbeat

Speaker: Salome Bukachi

Associate Professor, University of Nairobi’s Institute of Anthropology, Gender, and African Studies

Location: SFU Vancouver, HC 1900 (515 W Hastings St) and Online

Watch the Video Recording


February 15, 2024

Hands at Work: Indigenous Food Sovereignty in Western Canada

Speaker: Tabitha Robin

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Land and Food Systems, University of British Columbia (Métis and Cree)

Location: SFU Vancouver, HC 1800 (515 W Hastings St) and Online

 


February 29, 2024

What are the benefits of viral prospecting in nonuman animals?

Speaker: Marc Lipsitch

Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health

Location: SFU Vancouver, HC 1700 (515 W Hastings St) and Online

Video Recording Coming Soon!


March 28, 2024

Cities of Futures Past: Examining the Social-Ecological Legacies Affecting Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health

Speaker: Chris Schell

Urban ecologist, professor, Afrofuturist, Schell Lab

Location: SFU Vancouver, HC 1700 (515 W Hastings St) and Online

RSVP Now


April 4, 2024

What Reporting on Long COVID Taught Me

Speaker: Ed Yong

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author

Location: Online

RSVP Now


Past President's Dream Colloquia

Fall 2022

Indigenous Peoples and Local Community Perspectives on Sustainability and Resilience

Explore how some Indigenous peoples and local communities understand sustainability and resilience and how their traditional worldviews might provide models for more sustainable futures for their communities and others.

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Spring 2021

From Conversations to Action: Creating from Social Justice Research

Connect your passion for social justice through creative academic conversation. Take innovative interdisciplinary research from distinguished scholars and experiment with your peers to communicate it in engaging ways to a public audience.

Learn more

Fall 2019

Creative Ecologies

We must challenge ourselves to face the environmental bad news and imagine human and nonhuman life in strikingly new and different ways.

Learn more

Calls for Colloquium Proposals

We are currently accepting proposals for the Fall 2021 colloquium. SFU faculty members who would like to put together a colloquium proposal for a future series, please contact us to learn more.

Submit a Colloquium Proposal

Questions

If you have any questions about the Colloquium administration, please email Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.

Send us your questions