Many of The University of Winnipeg staff, students and guests spent Monday, September 11, 2006 viewing the results of undergraduate student research over the past year in a unique Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). Prairies sponsored competition that is destined to become an annual event. Called The Undergraduate Science Poster Session, the competition featured 23 posters representing the work of 25 undergraduate students.

A cross section of the type of research being done by undergraduates at The University of Winnipeg, the posters showcased projects in five different departments.

The University of Winnipeg prides itself in the fact that our undergraduates can participate in world-class research and have produced 576 publications involving 283 different students and 71 faculty members,. said Dr. Ken Friesen, the Associate Dean of Science. The Undergraduate Edge provides a complete list of these publications.

.Much of the work detailed in Monday.s poster competition will also end up in leading scientific journals,. added Dr. Melanie Martin, the competition.s main organizer and an assistant professor of Physics.

            One of the competition judges, John Graham from IBM Canada Ltd, said he was overwhelmed by the quality and quantity of the work done by these students. All the judges felt that the calibre of projects was extremely high, making it very difficult to pick winners. The distinguished panel of judges included representatives from NSERC, The University of Manitoba, National Research Council Canada and private industry.

            Dr. Gabor Kunstatter, Dean of Science, congratulated the students, .not only on the excellence of their poster presentations, but also on the high quality of the research that the posters represent..

Grand prize winners, physics students Gina Passante and Dave Ostapchuk, showcased their work on entanglement . a peculiar property of quantum mechanics which is useful in areas of cryptography, computation and teleportation.

Other winners at the event included:

physics student Jonathan Thiessen , whose second-place project examined Alzheimer.s Disease in mice,

physics student Blair Cardigan Smith, whose third place project used Magnetic Resonance Imaging to study Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in the brain,

chemistry student Carmen Edmundson, who received an honourable mention for her study of MS in the spine,

chemistry student Yonas Negasi, who received an honourable mention for his study which identified and isolated medicinal compounds in plants,

physics student Peter Winslow, who received an honourable mention for his work at TRIUMF, Canada.s National Laboratory for Nuclear and Particle Physics.

 

Contest winners pictured above from left to right: Yonas Negasi, Jonathan Thiessen, Peter Winslow, Gina Passante, Carmen Edmundson and Blair Cardigan Smith.