For the final edition of Rotman member news for 2017, our members have several important updates to share. One exciting announcement regards Derek Oswick who was awarded a 2016 Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Doctoral Scholarship. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) recently announced the November 2016 awards on their site here. Please join us in congratulating Derek!

Additional member announcements are listed below in alphabetical order.

Michael Anderson was keynote speaker for the International workshop on structure-function relationships, held as part of the annual conference of the Associazione Italiana di Scienze Cognitive.

Lucas Dunlap had a paper published in Erkenntnis titled, “Would the Existence of CTCs Allow for Nonlocal Signaling?”

Mel Goodale and Adrian Owen hosted the first CIFAR Winter School for the Neuroscience of Consciousness Dec.7-10th, 2017 in Montebello, Quebec. This was a unique, four-day event where tomorrow’s neuroscience leaders worked closely with world-class researchers studying the neuroscience of consciousness – it was a great success! Catherine Stinson was one of the participants.

A post by Henrik Lagerlund titled, “Philosophy in the Contemporary World: The Philosophy of Food” was published on the APA Blog on December 7.

Alida Liberman will be presenting a paper at the Workshop in Normative Ethics in Tucson, Arizona, called “‘But I Voted for Him for Other Reasons!’: Moral Responsibility and the Doctrine of Double Endorsement.” This conference has a published volume (Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics) of the proceedings.

Alida Liberman has had a paper accepted for publication at the Journal of Medical Ethics called “Sex Rights, Disability, and the Scope of Sexual Exclusion.“–she began working on this paper during her time at the Rotman Institute as a post-doctoral fellow.

Joshua Luczak will be giving a talk titled “More Talk About Toy Models” at Models and Simulations 8, to be held March 15-17, 2018 at the University of South Carolina.

Joshua Luczak will be presenting a talk titled “On the Aims of Statistical Mechanics” at the American Philosophical Association: Pacific Division Meeting in San Diego, on March 28-April 1, 2018.

Markus Müller published a new paper titled “Could the physical world be emergent instead of fundamental, and why should we ask?” as part of the Emergent Objective Reality project. A short and full version of the paper are available.

Researchers in Adrian Owen’s lab have two new recent publications: Bayne, T, Hohwy, J., Owen, A.M. Reforming the Taxonomy in Disorders of Consciousness. Annals of Neurology, 82:866-872, 2017; and Abdalmalak, A., Milej, D., Norton, L., Debicki, D.B., Gofton, T., Diop, M., Owen, A.M., St. Lawrence, K. Single-session Communication with a Locked-In Patient by Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. Neurophoton, 4(4), 040501 (2017), doi: 10.1117/1.NPh.4.4.040501.

In December, Catherine Stinson participated in Canada Beyond 150: Policy for a diverse and inclusive future, a policy-building initiative of the Privy Council Office and Policy Horizons Canada. She was interviewed about the future of Canadians’ health by the Socio-economic Inclusion team, and took part in a stakeholder consultation meeting with the Feminist Government Team.

Jackie Sullivan has a paper forthcoming in Psychology, Crime and Law, which she co-authored with Emily Baron, a former MA student in Philosophy at Western (2017) who is currently a first-year student in the J.D. Program in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. The paper is titled “Judging Mechanistic Neuroscience: A preliminary conceptual-analytic framework for evaluating scientific evidence in the courtroom.”

Valérie Therrien gave a talk at the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) Winter Meeting at Waterloo University on December 9th, entitled “The Axiom of Choice and the Road Paved by Sierpiński”.

In December, members of the Ethics of Pragmatic RCTs research team (including Charles Weijer, alumnus Spencer Hey, and Alex London) published a defence of clinical equipoise as part of a “head-to-head” debate in British Medical Journal.

Tony Weis is spending his sabbatical year as a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich. Video of a public lecture he presented there on December 14, titled “Ghosts and Things: The Trajectory of Animal Life“, is available online.

Pictured above (clockwise): Valérie Therrien and Rotman alumnus Nicolas Fillion at the 4th International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Computing in October 2017; Derek Oswick, winner of a 2016 Doctoral CGS (pictured in Gros Morne National Park); a photo of Chateau Montebello, the world’s largest log house, taken by Catherine Stinson.