We're thrilled to begin our news for this month with two exciting announcements. First, Gillian Barker was the winner of the 2018 PSA Women's Caucus Prize in Feminist Philosophy of Science for her recent book, Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for an Evolving World. The full announcement from the PSA Women's Caucus can be seen here. Please join [...]
As we've done for the past two years, once again, the Rotman Institute will be recognizing World Philosophy Day with the launch of our annual philosophical photography contest. Philosophical concepts may be abstract and difficult to convey. Can a photograph show what we cannot say? Can you capture a philosophical concept in a photograph? [...]
This month we were honoured to welcome a new visiting fellow to the Institute, Dr. Diane O’Leary. Diane works on issues related to the mind and body in medicine, and has most recently worked as a Visiting Scholar in Neuroethics at the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University Medical Center. She describes her current [...]
This month came with one particularly exciting piece of news--Sarah Gallagher, an associate faculty member of the Institute, was named as the first-ever Science Advisor to the President of the Canadian Space Agency. She will report directly to the CSA President, Sylvain Laporte, to shape Canada's future direction in space science and champion Canadian space research. She will also [...]
On Friday, September 21st, we will be holding our annual research fair. This event is an opportunity for current Western graduate students interested in learning about the Institute, and opportunities for graduate student membership, to visit our workspace and meet with us. ROTMAN INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH FAIR Friday, September 21st 3:00 - 5:00 pm [...]
In August we were pleased to welcome a new postdoctoral fellow to the Institute, Vicente Raja. His research interests are distributed among philosophy, experimental psychology, and plant science. He will be working on the Neural Reuse, Embodied Cognition, and Dynamic-Systems Approaches to the Brain research project (new project page coming soon!) with Michael Anderson. Please join us [...]
Effective this month, there have been a number of changes to Institute leadership we'd like to recognize. First, Anthony Skelton has officially completed a 4-year term as the Institute's Associate Director. In this role, he has not only served on the Steering Committee, but he has also coordinated our annual speakers series and Rotman lectures. [...]
Conference season is underway, and members of the Institute have been very busy! This month the Institute hosted the Rotman Summer Institute in Philosophy of Cosmology, held in Goderich, Ontario from June 11 - 20. The 10 day workshop was made possible by the recent grant from the Templeton Foundation, New Directions in Philosophy of [...]
by Deborah Fox As a recipient of a Global Forum of Bioethics Research (GFBR) travel fellowship, Tiwonge Mtande has spent the month of June working here at the Rotman Institute in collaboration with Dr. Charles Weijer, and the ethics of pragmatic trials research team. Ms. Mtande is a Senior Research Officer at UNC Project-Malawi, and [...]
On May 4, Rob Corless was invited to give the opening talk at the Southern Ontario Numerical Analysis Day at the University of Toronto. He spoke on "Optimal Backward Error and The Leaky Bucket". Eunice Chan also attended, and gave a talk titled, "Algebraic Linearizations of Matrix Polynomials". Professor Kenyan Wu, of Chongqing U and the Chinese Academy [...]
