Bravo Reichs: UdeM researchers stand out
The University of Montreal highlighted the great achievements of its researchers on April 20, at the Bravo Reichs Party.
The University of Montreal celebrated the work of its research teams at the Bravo Recherche Gala on April 20, which was held for nearly the fourth time. The pandemic won’t slow down the 133 researchers whose exceptional work has been highlighted. They have been awarded Canadian Research Chairs (14 awards, 7 renewals), Industrial Chairs (2), Grand Grants (8), Philanthropic Chairs (12 awards, 12 renewals), Quebec Awards (25), Canadian Awards (38) and International Awards ( 15th).
Some of the accomplishments particularly caught the attention of UdeMNouvelles, who spoke with four researchers.
Antoine Boivin from the Department of Family Medicine and Emergency Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine
Antoine Bouivin
Credit: Boniso Dumas
Antoine Boivin has been reappointed as Head of Research Canada in partnership with patients and the public.
What are the major projects in the first five years of your chair?
I’m always a little embarrassed to talk about it for me Achievements: These are team accomplishments and none of this would have been possible without the participation of patients.
We first co-founded the Center of Excellence with Vincent Domez to partner with patients and the public. The center, jointly led by patients, quickly became one of Canada’s leading organizations for patient engagement and hosted 1Verse International Summit on Partnerships with Patients and the Public in Montreal in 2019.
The main task of the chair is to develop the science of partnership. Partnership is a relationship, an art and a science. The scientific and evaluation component is essential to ensure that best practices are followed and that patients have a real place in the process. The chair’s first achievement was the creation of a Caring Community research work project with Ghislaine Rouly, a patient partner who has been a supportive spouse for 50 years. We knew we would do better together: Often, people would come to my consultation with symptoms that had nothing to do with a medical problem and that required a response other than treatment. Peer support professionals have significant life experience and are committed as allies to listening, supporting, and fostering communication with people in the health system and community.
What will the president’s work be in the next five years?
We want to create partnerships with marginalized people and communities, who are excluded from engagement processes, for example the homeless. Our work shows that despite a very difficult life path, these individuals have the experience and strengths gained through these experiences.
The second aspect of renewal is the transition from individual commitment to collective commitment. What is often done in the health care system now is to invite one or two people to sit on a panel. Instead, we must build communities of experience and influence that will work together to act on the key social and environmental determinants of health.
Gérard Beaudé, from the School of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture at the School of Planning
Gerard Beaudette
Credit: Amelie Philibert
Gérard Beaudé won the Ernest Cormier Prize awarded by the Government of Quebec.
The Ernest Cormier Award recognizes your outstanding contribution to the field of land use planning. What distinguished your career?
I have a background in architecture and urban planning. I started my career in the Technical Association for Regional Development. At that time, I had no idea of an academic career, but the question of the common good always motivates me and gives the university a privileged position if one has the desire to be in the public arena, to participate in reflections on the discipline. Societal issues and public debates. I consider that the treatment accorded to us as academics justifies a certain form of giving back, and thus the obligation as citizens or as experts by being in the media in particular, is one of the main features of my career.
What issues would you like to work on in the coming years?
There is a lot! From the very beginning I have often been associated with heritage, but I have also touched upon commuting and leisure tourism … I have been interested in urban planning issues in the capital for a long time, hence the recent authorship of two books, the first on the suburbs and over-urbanization of the Montreal metropolitan area, and another on the main issues of public transport In the Montreal metropolitan community, especially in the suburbs. The landscape issue caught my attention as well, and I’ve collaborated on several projects with the UdeM Landscape and Environment Chair. However, these topics remain of great interest.
I consider myself a generalist, but jokingly say that my work is colored by the fact that in addition to two courses in architecture and urban planning, I had “bad connections” while working with geographers. The geographers I was in contact with influenced me a lot and even encouraged me to move from architecture to town planning. I think these three views of the area are a big part of who I am as a developer.
Rosanne Blanchett, of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at UdeM . School of Public Health
Roseanne Blanchett
Credit: University of Montreal
Roseanne Blanchett is the recipient of the Alice Wilson Fellowship from the Royal Society of Canada.
What does this Canadian scholarship mean?
I was awarded the Alice Wilson Fellowship for my work during my second postdoctoral fellowship at the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary. Le projet pour lequel j’ai été récompensée examine comment et pourquoi l’accès aux aliments et à l’alimentation chez les personnes issues de groupes raciaux ou ethniques minoritaires a changé pendant la pandémie de COVID-19 au person cunes ont comment changing. We also want to ask them which measures are most important to improve the food strategies and health of their groups in Canada.
This project is ongoing. We are about to start hiring for qualitative interviews. Quantitative data from a study conducted during the pandemic will also be analyzed for changes in trends.
What do you want to focus on in the future?
What has always intrigued me is understanding why people have certain eating habits and how to change them so that they eat healthier, live healthier, and live longer. One way to do this is to ensure that they are not food insecure. This concern is implicit in my career. I am interested in indigenous, immigrant and ethnic minorities because they face barriers when it comes to healthy eating in Canada. I want to understand the mechanisms that perpetuate social inequalities in nutrition and health. I hope my research will help improve strategies, programs and policies to reduce these inequalities.
I just applied for a grant for another project that will focus on food insecurity among temporary migrant workers in our Quebec food system—agricultural environments, food processing plants, and slaughterhouses. These workers are the ones who let us eat, but do they have access to the food they help produce? we do not know; We welcome an increasing number of these workers in Canada, but we do not know their living conditions.
Laurence Perreault-Levaseur from the Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences
Lawrence Perrault Levasseur
Credit: Mila
Laurence Perreault-Levaseur is the recipient of a grant from the Simons Foundation.
What earned you this important scholarship?
The scholarship we received comes from a large program that is open to all majors in mathematics and physical sciences. It is a very ambitious eight-year research program in which many institutions will have to collaborate.
Personally, I have experience developing machine learning methods applied to astrophysics, an area that is still little exploited. After she received her Ph.D. from Cambridge University, England, she started taking an interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning methods as part of her postdoc at Stanford University. AI methods aren’t often applied to astrophysical data, and I’ve seen the potential there.
What will you achieve with this scholarship?
In the next decade, many observatories will come into operation. The purpose of these new telescopes is to produce data to answer fundamental questions, particularly those about the nature of dark energy, dark matter. Getting answers to these questions is essential because these components make up about 95% of the energy that the universe is made of and we have no idea what they are.
These telescopes will generate a huge amount of data. Only one of these new observatories will produce as much data as the Internet today. They will have to be analyzed, but the researchers realized that traditional analysis methods do not make it possible to extract maximum information from this data. So we need a fundamental shift in the methods of analysis used in astrophysics and this is where recent advances in artificial intelligence and deep learning are very interesting. My work demonstrated the tremendous potential of these developments to extract as much information as possible from the data produced. The research program with the Simons Foundation is part of this spirit. We want to extract as much information from this data as possible to build a 3D map of our universe, since that was about 400,000 years after its birth. It’s a big challenge!
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