Competition or cooperation? Bonding rituals can help

Rekha Krishnan

Beedie School of Business

Rajiv Kozhikode

Beedie School of Business

Rekha Krishnan is an associate professor of international business, innovation and entrepreneurship at SFU’s Beedie School of Business. Her research focuses on interaction rituals, social networks, status dynamics, entrepreneurship and emerging economies.

Rajiv Kozhikode is an associate professor of international business, management and organization studies, also at Beedie. His main research interest is understanding how markets, states, and civil society interact to shape a variety of organizational and entrepreneurial choices.

In their latest research, Krishnan spent several months observing a Silicon Valley accelerator seeking insight into workspaces that are collaborative yet also competitive. Their paper, An Interaction Ritual Theory of Social Resource Exchange: Evidence from a Silicon Valley Accelerator, provides lessons on how to build cooperative working environments.

Art, healing, discovery and the Marrow of Longing

Celeste Snowber

Faculty of Education

Celeste Nazeli Snowber is a dancer, poet, writer and award-winning education professor. Her scholarship is dedicated to bringing the body to ways of knowing and learning in relationship to researching, writing, creating and teaching.

She recently published The Marrow of Longing, a book of poetry that traces the inherited trauma of the Armenian genocide, memories of her ancestors, lessons learned in kitchen conversations, prayers in the night, and bodily yearnings. A descendant of genocide survivors, Snowber explores relationships between longing, belonging, and identity to uncover universal themes that guide readers to what has shaped their own lives.

Exploring the transnational choreography of human movement

Henry Daniel

Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology

Henry Daniel is an artist and scholar specializing in dance, performance studies and new technology. His research concentrates on strengthening notions of Practice-as-Research, Arts-based Research, and Research/Creation in Canada.

Professor Daniel’s current multi-year research project Contemporary Nomads, investigates the large-scale movement of bodies across international spaces as a kind of chaotic transnational choreography, one that speaks to the deep fragmentation existing between communities across national borders, between nationalized and personalized bodies, and between the social and political institutions that were originally designed to serve their communities.

“Art is important to us as a society: it is about the human condition, about who we are, and how we got here.” he says. “And especially in times like these, it is about where we are headed.”

Appearance matters: Perceptions of police using PPE in times of health crisis

Rylan Simpson

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

As essential frontline workers during the pandemic, police have adopted the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). What are the public’s perceptions of police wearing PPE during the health crisis? Criminology professor Rylan Simpson researches various areas of policing such as perceptions of police and social psychology. His recent study, The use of personal protective equipment (PPE) by police during a public health crisis: An experimental test of public perception, asks whether police are perceived favourably when using PPE.

Quest for HIV vaccine a scientific ‘holy grail’ of vaccine research

Ralph Pantophlet

Faculty of Health Sciences

Ralph Pantophlet is a professor of health sciences and current scientific director of SFU’s Containment Level 3 Lab. He specialises in antibody research on viruses such as HIV-1, influenza, human cytomegalovirus and SARS-CoV-2, with the goal of developing vaccine strategies that protect against these viral pathogens. Pantophlet’s recent study, A glycoside analog of mammalian oligomannose formulated with a TLR4-stimulating adjuvant elicits HIV-1 cross-reactive antibodies, adds to the body of knowledge in the quest for an HIV vaccine.

The (muscle) force is with us: Flexing two decades of research

James Wakeling

Faculty of Science

Biomedical physiology and kinesiology professor James Wakeling has been studying muscle movement in depth for more than 20 years. Understanding the way muscles function within the body has a variety of applications – from training and recovery to prosthetics and robotics. Wakeling’s latest publication Task-dependent recruitment across ankle extensor muscles and between mechanical demands is driven by the metabolic cost of muscle contraction, is the capstone of a project spanning a decade.

A novel idea to solve the “Hubble tension”

Levon Pogosian

Faculty of Science

Karsten Jedamzik (Université de Montpellier)

Cosmologists determine the current expansion speed of the universe in two ways. The first is based on the prediction of the standard cosmological model tuned to fit the exquisitely accurate cosmic microwave background data. The second is by directly observing the rate at which distant galaxies are moving away from us.

With both methods becoming more precise over the last few years, a significant disagreement emerged between the two. Resolving this discrepancy, known as the “Hubble tension,” has become the most pressing problem of cosmology. SFU physics professor Levon Pogosian and Karsten Jedamzik from the Université de Montpellier proposed that primordial magnetic fields, which have long been expected to exist in the universe, could help to reconcile the two measurements. Their paper, Relieving the Hubble Tension with Primordial Magnetic Fields, was recently published in Physical Review Letters.

Improving medical imaging for better outcomes

Ghassan Hamarneh

Faculty of Applied Sciences

Improving medical imaging and computer learning means more efficient and accurate interpretation of medical data. Computing science professor Ghassan Hamarneh specializes in medical image analysis and developing AI technologies for healthcare and biomedical applications. He and colleagues recently published Deep semantic segmentation of natural and medical images: a review,  which evaluates current imaging approaches and suggests directions for future research.

Central bank communication that works

Luba Petersen

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Economics professor Luba Petersen’s research focuses on expectations and decision making in macroeconomic environments. Her recent study with Bank of Canada economist Oleksiy Kryvtsov explored the effects of monetary policy and central bank communication to stabilize and guide markets. Their paper, Central Bank Communication That Works: Lessons from Lab Experiments, was published in the Journal of Monetary Economics.

Raising awareness and opportunities to reduce food waste

Tammara Soma

Faculty of Environment

In Canada, household food waste can be as high as 20%. This impacts the food supply chain, energy, resources and food security. In the first study of its kind, REM professor and co-founder of SFU’s Food Systems Lab Tammara Soma applied a consumer marketing framework to understand and develop more effective interventions to reduce food waste. Working with colleagues Belinda Li and Dr. Virginia Maclaren, their research, An evaluation of a consumer food waste awareness campaign using the motivation opportunity ability framework was recently published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling.