Concordia Journal Home > Archives > January 31, 2008 issue >

Accolades 

• Back to Original Version

Sandeep Bhagwati (CRC in Inter-X Art Practice and Theory in Music and Theatre) will premiere his new opera, Prinzessin Süssüsan, at the State Opera of Bonn (Germany) on Feb. 22. Last fall, he received accolades in Los Angeles for the world premiere of Vineland Stelae, which combined Western orchestral music with traditional percussion, and featured innovative lighting and poetry.

Kudos to Erin Jessee, an Interdisciplinary Humanities doctoral candidate supervised by Frank Chalk, who won a fellowship from the Canadian Consortium on Human Security for her dissertation, “Inscribed Intent: A Cultural History of the Rwandan and Bosnian Genocides.” Her work presents a new possibility for demonstrating genocidal intent by investigating the interface between oral history, anthropology, international law, and forensic archaeology. She is using the funds, and those recently awarded to her by CIDA, to continue fieldwork in Rwanda and plan for her next phase of research in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Finance professor Lorne Switzer is the Calgary CFA (certified financial analysts) Society’s “forecaster of the year.” When the forecasts he made at last year’s dinner were read out at this year’s dinner, according to CFA president Wes Peters, they were greeted with thunderous applause, and will be engraved on a trophy for him. His predictions were on the behaviour in 2007 of the price of oil, the level of the Toronto Stock Exchange, the price of natural gas and the level of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. As well as being a crack prognosticator, Switzer is Associate Dean, Research, holds the Van Berkom Endowed Chair in Small-Cap Equities, and is Associate Director of the Institute for Governance in Private and Public Organizations.

Professor Prabir Bhattacharya (Computer Science and Software Engineering) and doctoral student Abu Sayeed M. Sohail, were given a best paper award at the third Indian International Conference in Artificial Intelligence, held in Pune, India, for work based on Sohail’s master’s thesis, which he completed in 2007 on automated facial expression analysis. This is an important aspect of computer surveillance by cameras in airports and large office buildings to identify suspicious persons.

François Morelli (MFA Program Director, Studio Arts) is the recipient of the 2007 Prix Louis-Comtois, given annually to an artist in mid-career by the City of Montreal in association with the Association des galeries d'art contemporain (AGAC).

Congratulations to Clement Lam (Computer Science and Software Engineering), who will receive the 2006 Euler Medal from the ICA (Institute of Combinatorics and Its Applications) in March during the Southeastern Conference in Boca Raton, Florida. The Euler Medal is presented to mathematicians who are still active in research for a distinguished lifetime contribution to combinatorial research.

Concordia has the highest number among Canadian universities of graduates holding a chief executive officer (CEO) position in a leading Global Fortune 500 company. They include André Desmarais, of Power Corporation, Dominic D’Alessandro, of Manulife Financial, and Gerald T. McCaughey, of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). A study by the École des Mines de Paris looked at the performance of educational training programs at 338 universities throughout the world based on the career accomplishments of their graduates. The results are available at: www.ensmp.fr/Actualites/PR/EMP-ranking.pdf.