Arts Graduate Student Profiles
Developing a new language for multi-touch gaming
“Picture a table of about four by two-and-a-half feet where the table surface is a computer screen” says Kate Dawson, “the screen responds to multiple types of touch, like an iPod touch, allowing for new functionality and a lot of potential applications.” As an MA student of Rhetoric & Communication Design, it’s the interactive and visual ‘langauage’ of those new applications that interests Kate most. Paticipating in an unusual R & D collaboration between the departments of English...
Understanding sense of ownership in children and adults
“Early on I wanted to be a special needs kindergarten teacher, but I didn’t think I could handle university,” says PhD candidate Karen Neary. So, she attended college and went on to a career as an x-ray technician, which seemed perfectly fine until her suspicion about her young son’s autism was confirmed. “That changed everything” she states. With no services available for autistic children in the Georgia community where she lived with her family at the time, Karen took the...
Women and abduction in ancient Roman art
Visiting an Italian museum a few years ago, Laura Roncone found herself gazing at a statue of the gods Apollo and Daphne. The statue shows “Apollo trying to ‘take’ or abduct Daphne and, as the myth goes, Daphne is turning into a tree to defend herself” Laura explains. “This sculpture is so beautiful, and you kind of forget what it’s actually depicting.” As it turned out, her paradoxical experience of the ancient artwork became a catalyst for the Master’s thesis she is now researching. As a...
Public service for a changing world
Kayla
I took Social Development Studies (at Renison College, uWaterloo) and realized I was most interested in researching and analyzing social policy, combined with working in a practical way within the community. Although I hadn’t really considered government work, the Master of Public Service program attracted me because I thought it would be a good way to develop both of my areas of interest.
Matt
I’m from a small town outside Windsor – and this sparked my interest in...
A search for principles of basal ganglia function
Bryan Tripp is the first PhD graduate from the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, an interdisciplinary research centre housed in the Faculty of Arts. He has since gone on to do a postdoc at McGill University in the School of Medicine. While at Waterloo, he built biologically realistic computational models and developed theory that helps examine the role of the Basal Ganglia in controlling behaviour. Basal ganglia has been implicated in motor control, reward, and behavioural sequencing, and is...
