April Newsletter

April 2025

Exceptional Undergraduate Learning

ACHIEVEMENTS

Top MacEwan Research Honours Awarded

Recipients share thoughts on scholarship

Dr. Aiden Forth, Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities, MacEwan University’s Distinguished Research Award “ As a historian, I am convinced that we cannot understand the present without examining the past. My scholarship seeks to illuminate contemporary issues with historical context, from asymmetric warfare, food insecurity, and global pandemics (in my first book Barbed-Wire Imperialism ) to the detention of migrants, refugees, and political ‘enemies’ (in my second book, Camps: A Global History) . Generous support from the Distinguished Research Award will contribute to my new project, which examines the history of globalization and technological disruption in the nineteenth century. How did innovations in transportation and communication transform the way human beings interacted with the world and with each other? And what lessons might this history offer in today’s age of AI and social media?"

Dr. Sarah Copland, Associate Professor in the Department of English, 2025 MacEwan University Chancellor’s Research Chair “ I eagerly await the dedicated time to continue my ongoing research and to start a new project. My ongoing rhetorical narrative theory work focuses on author-audience relationships and the ethics and politics of narrative forms. One current project uses the data of social reading—Amazon and Goodreads reviews—to put lay reader responses in conversation with scholarly accounts of literary controversies and scandals. Another, a book co-authored with narrative theorists James Phelan (USA) and Henrik and Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen (Denmark), builds on developments in fictionality theory to center intentionally communicated invention as literary fiction’s core feature.”

Dr. Habib Rezanejad, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and students Madelaine Britt and Nicholas Abdilmasih published Pancreatic Ductal Cell Heterogeneity: Insights into the Potential for β Cell Regeneration in Diabetes in Stem Cell Reviews and Reports by Springer Nature. They reviewed the heterogeneity among pancreatic ductal cells and their potential as stem cells for beta cell regeneration in diabetes.

Dr. Brian Franczak, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, 2025 MacEwan University Chancellor’s Research Chair “ I am developing a research program that trains undergraduate students to conduct modern statistical analysis. To be appointed a MacEwan University Chancellor’s Research Chair is a significant achievement because it recognizes the contributions and potential of my research program. Further, to share this designation with the other excellent researchers that have received this appointment is a great honour.”

PUBLICATION