Accolades for the week of February 27
Diane Poulin-Dubois, professor in Concordia’s Department of Psychology, is part of a multi-university team that has received a $2-million grant to measure language comprehension in young children.
The funding, which comes from the National Institutes of Health in the United States, will permit Poulin-Dubois to work with researchers from San Diego State University and the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
By following children’s language and thinking at 6-month intervals, the researchers hope to discover links between early comprehension and school readiness. As part of the study, researchers will assess children from English, Spanish and French monolingual homes, as well as Spanish-English and French-English bilingual homes.
Each year, Compute Canada allocates grants to leading-edge research projects across the country. This year, $80 million was up for grabs.
Of the 159 projects submitted, four grants have been awarded to Concordia researchers: Clement Lam‘s research relates to the computation of the van der Waerden number; Marius Paraschivoiu is working on the Aerodynamic Simulation of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines; Gilles Peslherbe is using his grant for the Application of Quantum Chemistry and Molecular Dynamics Simulations to Materials, Solvation and Biophysics; and Guillaume Lamoureux is working on two projects: Large-scale dynamics of metalloproteins and ammonia transport in membrane proteins.
Compute Canada integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and academic research facilities around the country to support national-scale research problems. The distributed resources represent close to two petaFLOPs of compute power, which is equal to two quadrillion calculations per second, and more than 20 petabytes of storage, equivalent to more than 400 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text.
The projects — which range from aerospace design and climate modeling to medical imaging and nanotechnology — produce results and breakthroughs that in many cases simply wouldn't be possible without Compute Canada’s resources.
There’s still time to check out a truly novel symphony this Sunday when moored ships, tugboats and trains play the annual Port Symphony composed by Concordia music professor and Canada Research Chair in Inter-X Art Practice and Theory Sandeep Bhagwati.
Mumbai-born Bhagwati uses the horns of ships in the Old Port to reference the drone of an Indian instrument called the tamboura.
The second and last symphony for 2012, called Rives et Dérives, is heard on Sunday, March 4 at 1:30 p.m. outside the Pointe-à-Callière Museum (350 Royale Pl., corner of de la Commune Street) in Old Montreal.