Studies that stand out

Graduate students can sometimes get trapped in the grind of academia — working on very specialized projects, attending conferences, presenting papers and publishing in journals. The result being that their research is often only understandable to others in their discipline.

It’s precisely for this reason that the School of Graduate Studies rolled out its new Concordia Stand-Out Graduate Research Award last summer.

“Fifty per cent of the way we evaluate the application is by looking at the ability of the author to disseminate their research to a wider (non-specialized) audience,” says Luca Caminati, the associate dean of Recruitment and Awards for the School of Graduate Studies.

He says the Stand-Out Graduate Research Award was in part inspired by a nation-wide initiative called the Three Minute Thesis Competition (3MT), which challenges graduate students to present their academic research in a way that’s accessible to those outside of their scholarly domain.

“At its core this new award teaches students to speak about their work, which is sometimes obscure, obtuse and extremely detailed, in language more accessible to the layman,” Caminati says.

PhD engineering student Morteza Mohammadi was the first to win the Stand-out Graduate Research Award, which was presented during the summer 2014 semester.

The following are the winners for the 2014–15 fall and winter terms:

Evangelos Tziallas

After spending years labouring over it, Evangelos Tziallas published his winning submission — "The New 'Porn Wars': Representing Gay Male Sexuality in the Middle East" — in Psychology and Sexuality. The paper, which looks at the representation of Arab and Muslim men in gay male pornography, is the synthesis of his master’s thesis and an unpublished paper on the porn film Men of Israel.