Thanks to their high standard of achievement, four StFX graduate students have received the prestigious Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s (CGS-M), which helps develop research skills and assists in training qualified personnel.
Kulani de Larrinaga, Leah Baylis, Riley McInnis, and Patrick Bowen have each received a CGS-M Scholarship valued at $27,000 for one year. Their research projects focus on female pipe bands in Nova Scotia; reducing climate change; better conservation of Unionidae mussels; and the mitigation of age and gender bias through personalized language modeling.
MUSIC IMPACT
Kulani de Larrinaga, a second year masters student in Celtic Studies from Ottawa, ON, is exploring ‘The prevalence of female piping and piping bands in Nova Scotia during the mid-20th century.’
“This opportunity has provided me funding to be able to follow my passion for Celtic music and be able to further work and develop my thesis project for this year, which I am very excited and grateful about,” she says.
Ms. de Larrinaga is passionate about the various Celtic regions, specifically their music. “I am also very interested in the Celtic influence on Nova Scotia song, music history, and culture and that is what initially drew me towards starting this project.”
Her research will investigate different female piping bands across Nova Scotia in the mid-20th century. She says there is limited writings and research published regarding this topic. “It will be intriguing to see what type of archival information there is accessible in Nova Scotia. In order to develop this thesis topic, I will have to investigate more into what brought this phenomenon of all these female piping bands competing and playing in groups in the 1950s across various different counties and areas in Nova Scotia. These various female bands include The MacDougall Girls Pipe Band of Glace Bay and Dominion in Cape Breton, The Heatherbell Girls Pipe Band in Pictou, The Ceilidh Girls Pipe Band in New Glasgow, The Balmoral Girls Pipe Band in Stellarton, and The Truro Girls Pipe Band.”
She plans to use ethnomusicological feminist methodology to illustrate how these female bands had an impact on music during this period in Nova Scotia history.
Ms. de Larrinaga is supervised by Dr. Michael Linkletter, a StFX Celtic Studies professor who is also a piper and who has played in various pipe bands and competitions across the Maritime provinces.
Completing her master’s degree at StFX, one of the only Celtic graduate programs in North America, she says will be an opportunity to illustrate research in a unique field that links past and present traditions.
RARE OPPORTUNITY TO POTENTIALLY IMPLEMENT SOLUTIONS
Patrick Bowen of Antigonish, a first year MSc student in computer science, says the support of the CGS-M scholarship means he can continue his education and research in a field he finds so interesting and he believes has the capabilities to provide widespread benefits. His thesis work, under the supervision of Dr. Milton King, is on the ‘Mitigation of age and gender bias through personalized language modeling.’
“It enables me to continue to develop knowledge and skills that are invaluable for both academia and industry. It allows me to focus on and dive deep into research and technical development, all while working in an enjoyable, rewarding environment with supportive people.”
Mr. Bowen says he had the opportunity to participate in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research several summers ago through the Alley Heaps Research Internship Award at StFX. “I thoroughly enjoyed the first-hand experience in the area and was eager to seek out opportunities to continue it. It is a very rapidly evolving field, to the point where countless new technologies have not only been researched, but even widely adopted (think Chat-GPT) in only these past few years. This presents a lot of relevant challenges in making sure these revolutionary technologies can be used fairly and effectively by a wide audience. I think this project represents a rare opportunity to potentially implement real-world, widespread, beneficial solutions within a relatively quick timespan.”
He says due to the variation in writing styles amongst age groups and genders, and the evident age and gender bias of language models, efforts have been made to mitigate discrepancies in their performance across age and gender groups. These attempts primarily fall under the umbrella of personalization, where the language model is adjusted based on perceived attributes of the author to improve performance.
He seeks to determine how much of a difference in performance is observed when large language models are tasked with next-word prediction on various subsets of demographics, including age and gender, and how much this performance can be improved through personalization techniques, including prompting. Openly available large language models like BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT will be used to perform next-word prediction on documents from authors with different demographic characteristics. “The performance of these models tuned with various prompting paradigms, measured by perplexity, can then be compared amongst authors with varying gender, age, and other demographic information. This can help provide valuable justifications for policies and guidelines involving fair assessment and use of the language models underpinning many digital technologies today.”
Dr. King says, “I am excited to see Patrick progress his work on analyzing and mitigating the biases that exist in natural language processing systems, which could benefit groups that observe poorer performance from applications, such as next-word prediction.”
BETTER CONSERVATION
Riley McInnis a first year MSc biology student supervised by Dr. Heather Penney, is working on a ‘Comparative analysis of life history trade-offs in North American Unionidae mussels.’
Unionidae mussels are among North America's most endangered organisms and are increasingly affected by human activity. This unique variety of mussels possesses diverse parental care strategies, including brooding, parasitism, and mimicry.
“Understanding the broader evolution of these adaptations will facilitate better conservation efforts and broaden our understanding of early life history traits overall. My research project will investigate Unionidae's parental care strategies across the family's evolutionary tree. I will construct a detailed phylogeny by combining existing molecular data and sequencing absent North American mussel populations,” she says.
“Given the mussels' endangered status and their significant ecological roles, such as habitat engineering and water filtration, understanding their biology becomes crucial. The research aims to identify vulnerable species and guide conservation efforts by unveiling patterns in parental care evolution. Ultimately, the resulting phylogeny intends to support environmental management strategies for preserving these endangered yet ecologically vital species.”
PLAY A ROLE IN COMBATTING CLIMATE CRISIS
Leah Baylis, a second year MSc chemistry student from Barrie, ON, says this scholarship and opportunity have provided her with valuable hands-on experience, enhancing her technical lab skills and literature review techniques, which will prepare her for a future in environmental chemistry. “I've also expanded my knowledge while connecting with a community of like-minded individuals. Moreover, participating in this research allows me to contribute to the fight against the climate crisis—a passion I've held since high school.
“I have always been an outdoor enthusiast, camping every summer and spending all my free time in nature. Due to this, the climate crisis is an especially critical issue to me. This project lets me play a role in combatting the climate crisis by investigating effective and efficient methods in which common problematic pesticide pollutants can be degraded without causing further harm to the environment or its inhabitants.”
Ms. Baylis is supervised by Dr. Geniece Hallett-Tapley and her thesis focuses on ‘A one-pot light activated approach for persistent pollutant control.’
Ms. Baylis says Canada is home to approximately one third of the world's fresh water. However, high pollution rates have rendered some of these supplied unsafe for human use. Aromatic molecules are of high environmental priority given widespread use in the pesticide and textile industries. Her current work aims to design and examine the ability of novel metal oxide/metal organic framework nanocatalysts to aide in the photoremediation of persistent herbicidal and pesticidal pollutants, such as dinitrochlorobenzene, often handled poorly by conventional waste treatment methods.
“The experimental design will be optimized with respect to nanoparticle functionalization of the solid catalyst, metal oxide composition and reagent concentration. The long-term goal of this work will be to improve on current pollution control standards by designing a light-initiated, one-pot removal of problematic pollutants. The proposed work has high industrial significance for toxin trapping and removal at the source prior to ecological contamination.”
Supervisor, Dr. Hallett-Tapley, says NSERC support is paramount to continuing to foster graduate research at StFX.
“Environmental remediation remains an ongoing global priority as the fight against climate change continues. CGS-M support will allow Leah to identify novel and sustainable methods contributing to this wide-reaching societal issue. Moreover, through NSERC funding, Leah will garner a better understanding of collaborative research through our ongoing partnerships with the groups of Drs. Marisa Marin and Francisco Paco of the University of Valencia (Spain) – illustrating the wide-reaching outcomes of sustainable pollution control,” she says.
