Talks

Learn more about the benefits of creating an accessible environment and how you play a part. Dr. Mahadeo Sukhai and Ainsley Latour are scientists, researchers, educators and IDEA professionals, who are passionate about and committed to inclusion in the scientific research and training enterprise. 

• Learning Objective 1 – provide an understanding of the “leaky funnel” in STEM training for persons with disabilities
• Learning Objective 2 – provide an overview of the principles underpinning a culture of accessibility and inclusion in the sciences
• Learning Objective 3 – provide an appreciation for the importance of accessibility in scientific conferences and publications

Dr. Mahadeo A. Sukhai (He/Him), Ph.D. is the world’s first congenitally blind geneticist. Dr. Sukhai is Vice-President Research & International Affairs and Chief Accessibility Officer for the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind), having previously served as a researcher in cancer genomics at the University Health Network in Toronto. Dr. Sukhai also holds an adjunct faculty appointment in the Department of Ophthalmology, School of Medicine, Queens University (Kingston, ON, Canada), as well as additional Adjunct roles in the Faculty of Business and Information Technology at Ontario Tech University and in the Inclusive Design Program at OCAD University. In his role at CNIB, Dr. Sukhai is responsible for organizational employee culture-building strategy related to inclusion, accessibility and employee wellness. Dr. Sukhai is the Principal Investigator for "Creating a Culture of Accessibility in the Sciences," a book based on his ground-breaking work on access to science within higher education, and serves as the principal investigator for national projects to examine accessibility and inclusion within science education and healthcare. Dr. Sukhai co-founded IDEA-STEM, and INOVA, the international Network of researchers with Visual impairments and their Allies, a new professional society with the mission to improve accessibility and inclusion in the biomedical sciences for researchers with vision loss. Dr. Sukhai is the External Co-Chair for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research External Advisory Committee on Accessibility and Systemic Ableism and the Chair of the Employment Technical Committee for Accessibility Standards Canada.

Ms. Ainsley R. Latour (She/Her), B.Ed., MLT, M.Sc. is the president and co-founder of IDEA-STEM, an organization created to enhance the participation and inclusion for people with disabilities in STEM.  She identifies as hard of hearing and neurodiverse.  She also serves on the Government of Ontario’s AODA Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committee. Ainsley's work on the experience of students with disabilities in Canada has been presented at national and international conferences on science and disability, including SciAccess 2019 and 2020, the ISLAND 2020 conference, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2018, 2019 and 2021).  She also maintains a practice as a licensed cytogenetic and molecular genetic technologist (MLT).  She holds two undergraduate degrees, two graduate diplomas and will graduate soon with a masters in marine environmental genetics from the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99867497693?pwd=ZDRkdE44dVBWRDdtS3J3ZzFOMFlHZz09

Axions and axion-like particles are well motivated candidates for dark matter (DM) and have a signature two photon vertex. The most sensitive axion DM search is at the gigahertz (GHz) regime. It relies on microwave cavities with high quality factors resonantly converting axion DM to cavity photons in the background of a static magnetic field. However, axion DM mass could span a vast range above or below GHz. We describe a new proposal using integrated/on-chip photonic systems to search for axion DM at the optical frequency. This enables the use of waveguides to collect signal photons, which improves the detection efficiency, as well as the use of single photon, micron-sized detector, such as a skipper charge-coupled device, which has a dark count rate as low as 1e-9 per second per pixel. Furthermore, by coupling a series of resonators of different frequencies to a single receiver bus, the detection can be broadband in terms of the axion masses and has sensitivities to the axion-photon couplings expected for the QCD axion at the axion masses of around 0.2 eV.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94515300239?pwd=VVBkaGM5K24yN2F4SFV0MGZ5Vk9LZz09

We use a result of Hawking and Gilkey to define a Euclidean path integral of gravity and matter which has the special property of being independent of the choice of basis in the space of fields. This property allows the path integral to describe also physical regimes that do not admit position bases. These physical regimes are pre-geometric in the sense that they do not admit a mathematical representation of the physical degrees of freedom in terms of fields that live on a spacetime. In regimes in which a spacetime representation does emerge, the geometric properties of the emergent spacetime, such as its dimension and volume, depend on the balance of fermionic pressure and bosonic and gravitational pull. That balance depends, at any given energy scale, on the number of bosonic and fermionic species that contribute, which in turn depends on their masses. This yields an explicit mechanism by which the effective spacetime dimension can depend on the energy scale.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91471624951?pwd=RDBYTXc2MGs5bkFKUytYR0huOHYwdz09

If axion Dark Matter exists, then they can collapse to form self-gravitating exotic compact objects known as axion stars. As mergers of such compact objects can potentially yield detectable gravititational waves which are correlated with a burst of electromagnetic radiation, much effort have been expended to compute these signals. I will discuss both the technical and theoretical challenges of this endeavour, and demonstrate such decays. I will show that axion stars may not be stable to electromagnetic decay, raising the question on whether we should expect to see these objects in the first place.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98298572209?pwd=WVFZUFJqQzZQdU8vcjhQRVpzVHZDdz09