2018 Honours Fest Winners

Crowd at Honours Fest 2018 — Students, staff, faculty and others lovers of science from across the campus and Victoria gathered to learn more about remarkable student projects, ranging in topic from the effect of stroke on synaptic morphology to wave dispersion in sea ice in Antarctica.

Last month, forty-two Honours students throughout the Faculty of Science presented their research at the seventh annual Honours Fest, a conference-style poster session. Honours Fest is the culmination of two semesters of grueling research, and an opportunity for students to show what has been occupying their time and brainpower.

Students, staff, faculty and others lovers of science from across the campus and Victoria gathered to learn more about remarkable student projects, ranging in topic from the effect of stroke on synaptic morphology to wave dispersion in sea ice in Antarctica.

Thanks to the generosity of Dr. Fritz Boehm, students who place in the top three, as well as the top presenter in each department and school win generous cash prizes. Students are judged in three areas: scientific thought and creativity, their communication skills in presenting the research, and the quality of the poster and its ability to explain complex research in a logical way.

The top Presenters for each unit are:

Biochemistry & Microbiology	Luke Neufeld	Improving Adoptive Cell Therapy: The Impact of Cytokine Supplementation on the Cancer-Fighting Fitness of T cells.
Biology	Courtney Zoschke	Examining synaptic plasticity of granule cells in distal hippocampal dendrites in juvenile prenatal ethanol exposed rats.
Chemistry	Maria Walker	Direct binding of a metabolic marker of cardiovascular disease.
Earth & Ocean Sciences	Forest Pimm	An early greenhouse gas: modelling ammonia concentrations in the Archean earth atmosphere
Mathematics & Statistics	Todd Schmid	Dreams of Computation in Operator Algebras
Physics & Astronomy	Marcus Merryfield	Reading Galaxies with MaNGA: Surveying Populations of Stars in Nearby Galaxies

The top three winners of the Boehm Family Award for Excellence in Science are:

3rd place	Lauren Caters (Chemistry)	Influence of salinity on the surface structure of polymers
2nd place	Nicholas Planidin (Biology)	Laterality of neuromasts in threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus)
1st place	Shawn Shorthill (Biochemistry & Microbiology)	Exploring Functional Relationships of Paralogous Histone Chaperones Using a Systems Biology Approach