Satinder Brar, James and Joanne Love Chair in Environmental Engineering at York University, studies emerging contaminants in wastewater. She creates the techniques to identify new pollutants such as pharmaceutical compounds that are hazardous at extremely low concentrations, and then eliminate them in ways that contribute positively to the ecosystem.

Jeremy Kerr, Professor of Biology at the University of Ottawa, studies the causes of biodiversity decline and ecosystem degradation. Catherine Sirois-Delisle, PhD student at the University of Ottawa, studies the effects of human activities on the ranges dragonflies and bumblebees using complex distribution models.

Dr. Steven Bittle is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Ottawa and an expert on corporate crime. We discuss how so many of the Canadians who have died from COVID have been elderly residents of for-profit long term care homes. At what point would the death of so many of a corporation’s customers be considered a crime? Steven walks us through this question, and explains what would have to happen for a long term care corporation to be prosecuted for a crime.

Bettina Forget, Sylvie Ouellette and Erica Pimentel are members of the Public Scholars program at Concordia University in Montreal. They talk to us about the link between art and space science, how bacteria scavenge iron from their surroundings, and how accountants work with blockchain. We also talk about a problematic article in a chemistry journal.

Siobhan Angus, Athina Peidou, and Stephanie Raposo are York University grad students and the 2020 recipients of the Governor General’s Gold Medal for academic excellence. Angus, an art historian, studies the visual culture of resource extraction in Canada. Peidou, an earth and space scientist, studies gravitational maps produced from satellite-based measurements. Raposo, a psychologist, studies sexual satisfaction and intimate relationships.