Five New 成人大片 National Scholars Announced

Note: This article was originally published in the Queen's Gazette.

QNS program is designed to enrich teaching and research at the university while also supporting faculty renewal and diversity and inclusion efforts.

Designed to enrich teaching and research at the university, the Queen鈥檚 National Scholars (QNS) program has been bringing outstanding, early-career academics to Queen鈥檚 since 1985.

This year, five new faculty members will arrive on campus as Queen鈥檚 National Scholars, in fields of study from precision molecular medicine to African American gender history to computational neuroeconomics.

鈥淭he QNS program is an important initiative supporting our faculty renewal efforts, with a particular focus on newly-developing fields of knowledge,鈥 says Teri Shearer, Deputy Provost (Academic Operations and Inclusion), who co-chairs the QNS advisory committee. 鈥淭he program is also an excellent opportunity to reinforce the university鈥檚 commitment to diversity and inclusion through its recruitment efforts.鈥

The 2018 QNS are:

Carolyn Prouse 鈥 Queen鈥檚 National Scholar in Urban Economic Geography Carolyn Prouse
Faculty of Arts and Science

Dr. Prouse鈥檚 research focuses on critical urban post-colonial geographies in South America; her work inhabits an exciting space that combines critical economic geography methodologies to explore issues around economic uncertainty, feminism, and racism. Dr. Prouse has a well-established teaching portfolio and is capable of developing and delivering new and interesting topics to students. She was awarded her PhD in 2017 from the University of British Columbia and, most recently, held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto.


 

Chantelle Capicciotti 鈥 Queen鈥檚 National Scholar in Precision Molecular MedicineChantelle Capicciotti
Faculty of Arts and Science, Faculty of Health Sciences

Dr. Capicciotti鈥檚 research focuses on identification and chemo-enzymatic synthesis of molecules (glycoconjugates: protein- and lipid-bound carbohydrates) that are crucial to a vast array of cellular recognition processes impacting human health and disease. The methodologies she has already developed, and those she plans to advance at Queen鈥檚, are highly pertinent to the fields of disease biomarker discovery and modern biologic pharmaceutical design, both of which are primary goals of personalized medicine. She arrives at Queen鈥檚 from the University of Georgia.

 

Ashwini Vasanthakumar 鈥 Queen鈥檚 National Scholar in Legal and Political Philosophy Ashwini Vasanthakumar
Faculty of Law

Dr. Vasanthakumar鈥檚 research bridges law, philosophy, and politics. It is both theoretical and planted in the real world of lived experience and policy compromise. Her research focuses on migrants and migrant communities, exploring broader contexts of community membership, citizenship, allegiance, and transitional justice from the perspective of postcolonial states and migrant and other marginalized communities. Her most recent project seeks to understand the rights and duties of diaspora communities: in relation to each other, to compatriots remaining in their countries of origin, to victims and perpetrators of atrocities, and to their adopted countries. She arrives at Queen鈥檚 from King鈥檚 College London in England.


 

Laila Haidarali 鈥 Queen鈥檚 National Scholar in African American Gender History Laila Haidarali
Faculty of Arts and Science

Dr. Haidarali鈥檚 research is broadly concerned with race, gender, and representation in the study of African American women in 20th-century U.S. history. She engages the feminist politics of beauty to examine how mass-media representations and women鈥檚 self-styling efforts reflected one strand of civil rights activism that developed throughout the interwar decades. Dr. Haidarali鈥檚 work focuses on the rise of a beauty ideal that was defined by women鈥檚 brown complexions; she queries how and why an ideal of brown-skin beauty accrued heightened cultural currency during the era of African America鈥檚 mass modernization. She arrives from the University of Essex in England.


 

Anita Tusche 鈥 Queen鈥檚 National Scholar in Computational Neuroeconomics Anita Tusche
Faculty of Arts and Science

Dr. Tusche鈥檚 area of research interest is computational neuroscience with a focus on social cognition and decision-making. Her work seeks to disentangle computations that are generic to decision鈥恗aking, specialized for social cognition, and their interaction. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a neurally鈥恑nformed cognitive model of social decision鈥恗aking that enables targeted, process鈥恠pecific modulations to foster prosocial, healthy, and sustainable behaviours. Her research uses a highly-interdisciplinary approach that utilizes insights and methodological tools of psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience (with a focus on functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI), and computational modeling (machine learning techniques, drift diffusion modeling). Dr. Tusche arrives at Queen鈥檚 from the California Institute of Technology.

The program provides $100,000 annually for five years for each QNS and is intended to attract outstanding early and mid-career researchers to Queen鈥檚.

Principal Daniel Woolf has identified faculty renewal as a high priority for reinvestment by the university in support of the academic mission. The five-year renewal plan will see 200 new faculty hired, which nearly doubles the hiring pace of the past six years and will result in approximately 10 net new hires per year.

Faculty renewal supports Queen鈥檚 commitment to diversity and inclusion by giving the university the opportunity to proactively seek representation from equity-seeking groups such as women, people with disabilities, Indigenous Peoples, and racialized individuals. Faculty renewal also facilitates the building of Queen鈥檚 current areas of research strength, as well as developing newly-identified emerging research priorities.  The program directly supports the objectives outlined in the Academic Plan, the Strategic Research Plan, and various other institutional planning documents.

More information about the Queen鈥檚 National Scholar program is available online.