Safe cities, smart data and identical twins: McMaster researchers awarded Banting and Vanier scholarships

Six McMaster graduate and postdoctoral researchers have received Canada’s most prestigious awards for their work in medicine, science, engineering, social sciences and humanities.

Mathematics and statistics postdoctoral researcher Michael Gallagher, a former Vanier Scholar, has been awarded the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, worth $70,000 a year for up to two years.

Gallagher will build on his doctoral research, in which he applied clustering and classification techniques to better understand social inequalities in child and youth mental health and academic outcomes in migrant groups. He will be working on three interrelated projects that examine higher order data problems and complex data structures.

Five doctoral students have been awarded the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Each will receive $50,000 a year, for up to three years.

McMaster’s newest Vanier Scholars are:

Carlo Handy Charles, from Sociology. He is studying the political and social incorporation of Haitian asylum seekers to Montréal and Cayenne (French Guiana) in light of prevalent understanding of race and ethnicity in Canada and France.

Emma Croll-Baehre from English and Cultural Studies. She will explore identical twins through multiple lenses, including literary, visual, and digital media representations, combining cultural analysis with community engagement to develop a better understanding of twins’ complex social realities.

Hamza Khattak, from Physics and Astronomy. Khattak will study interactions between microscale mobile droplets and soft materials. His goal is to provide the first direct measure of the forces on a microscopic droplet in motion. Khattak’s research could have far-reaching implications for water collection, microfluidics and other technologies.

Sarah Medeiros, from the faculty of Health Sciences, is studying how targeted treatment of blood and cell-free DNA can address sepsis.

Moustafa Naeim, from civil engineering, will study flood risks and the impact of floods on infrastructure in Canadian cities, with an eye on developing a tool to mitigate flood-induced systemic risk.

The Vanier and Banting awards programs are offered by Canada’s three federal granting agencies.