Postdoc Talk Event:
17 November 2015 (7 PM), The Railway Club
(all welcome, more details)

Postdoc Talk Title:
Why we haven’t cured Alzheimer’s disease

Summary:
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of severe memory loss in the elderly. As people are living longer and the median age of the global population is increasing, Alzheimer’s disease is becoming one of the greatest public health challenges facing societies around the world. Although Alzheimer’s disease has been studied for over 100 years, we are still without effective treatments for this devastating and costly disease. This talk will briefly describe what we know about Alzheimer’s disease and why it is such a difficult disease to effectively treat.

Biography:
Brianne Kent is a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health. She completed her PhD as a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, after completing her Masters research at Yale University. Her research takes a translational approach to studying Alzheimer’s disease, bridging pre-clinical research to human patient clinical studies.

Postdoc Talk Event:
17 November 2015 (7 PM)
The Railway Club
(all welcome, more details)

Postdoc Talk Title:
Engineering the Rise of the Machines

Summary:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has received a lot of attention in the popular press recently, with concerns raised about super-intelligent self-aware AI taking over the planet and spelling the end of the human race. In this talk, I will explain some of the concepts underlying AI in general and machine learning in particular, a set of techniques that allows computers to learn new concepts on their own. I will de-mystify what AI researchers do and to what extent this is actually a threat to humanity at the moment. Finally, I will give my personal views on why reports on the demise of the human race have been exaggerated.

Biography:
Lars Kotthoff received a PhD from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and moved to UBC after a stint as a postdoc at UCC, Cork, Ireland. He works at the intersection of two subfields of AI and believes that eventually, computers will cause the end of the human race by frustrating them to death. He’s also been known to excavate Maya sites in Central America, looking for ancient computers.

Postdoc Talk Event: 6 October 2015 (7 PM), at the Railway Club
(all welcome, more details)

Postdoc Talk Title:
Avoiding the medical isotope crisis: Canada’s alternative production strategy

Summary:
Coronary artery disease remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in Canada. Critical to the diagnosis of coronary artery disease is a medical-imaging technique called single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), which is used to visualize regions of the heart muscle with reduced blood flow. SPECT procedures require injection of a radioactive isotope. After injection, the radio-isotope travels to the heart muscle where it emits photons that can be detected using radiation detectors that are located outside of the body. Technetium-99m (^99mTc) is the most commonly used radio-isotope for SPECT procedures.

^99mTc is currently obtained from five nuclear reactors spread across the globe. In 2009-2010, reactors in Canada and the Netherlands, which together supply approximately 70% of the global ^99mTc demand, underwent temporary maintenance shut-downs which resulted in a worldwide ^99mTc shortage. Discontinuation of the reactor in Canada in 2018 is expected to result in another ^99mTc supply crisis. If this crisis is not averted, the resulting shortages of ^99mTc will result in delays or cancellations of cardiac SPECT procedures throughout all of Canada, and potentially worldwide.

Dr. Tanguay is working with a British-Columbia-led team of Canadian researchers to develop and implement an alternative production strategy that has the potential to reduce dependence on such a centralized and increasingly unstable ^99mTc supply chain. The proposed solution would use commercially available medical cyclotrons to produce ^99mTc for regional distribution. This approach would eliminate the need for nuclear reactors for production of ^99mTc. In this Postdoc Talks, Dr. Tanguay will discuss the current status of cyclotron production of ^99mTc, and his role in developing alternative strategies for diagnosing coronary artery disease.

Biography:
Dr. Tanguay received is PhD from Western University in 2013. For his dissertation, Dr. Tanguay investigated the potential for new medical x-ray imaging technologies to improve the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. Dr. Tanguay is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Radiology at the University of British Columbia where he is working with a team of Canadian scientists to develop and implement an alternative method to produce technetium-99m, which is the most commonly used medical radioisotope.

Postdoc Talk Event: 6 October 2015 (7 PM), at the Railway Club
(all welcome, more details)

Postdoc Talk Title:
Lost in the woods: Discovering TRIUMF

Summary:
Nestled in the forest, swaddled by a blanket of Pacific Northwest woodland, just south of the UBC campus, may not be where you would expect to find particles being accelerated up to 75% the speed of light! This forested area is home to TRIUMF, Canada’s national centre for particle and nuclear physics and accelerator-based science.

An international hub for scientific exploration and discovery, at the heart of TRIUMF is its cyclotron accelerator, a machine that propels protons up to incredible speeds. Not just a few protons either – TRIUMF accelerates trillions of these particles per second. And the laboratory has been doing this for nearly 50 years!

But why? Accelerating protons is one thing, but by providing a facility to use high energy protons to investigate and benefit the world around us is where TRIUMF comes into its own. In his talk Dr. Thomas Procter, a postdoctoral researcher in TRIUMF’s Laser Spectroscopy Group, will share how TRIUMF, with the help of electricity and giant magnets, accelerates protons and what it uses these speedy particles for: like exploring the reactions that power the stars, testing electronics, treating cancer, and developing tracers for medical scans. And, if he remembers, he’ll talk about how he uses lasers to measure properties of rare elements that can only be produced with accelerators like the ones at TRIUMF…

Biography:
Dr. Thomas Procter received his PhD from the University of Manchester in 2013, working on experiments performed at the ISOLDE facility at CERN, Switzerland.  At CERN, he worked on developing a new experimental setup for extending the sensitivity of nuclear physics experiments whilst also looking into how nuclei (the tiny things inside atoms) change size and shape when neutrons are added or taken away. Thomas continues this type of research at TRIUMF, where he is a nuclear physics postdoctoral fellow in the Laser Spectroscopy Group, working on new techniques for improving sensitivity and looking at different elements to see how protons and neutrons can affect how a nucleus behaves.