A visual arts professor is looking for fellow enlightened artists, musicians, performers and high-energy art lovers to join her on a bus ride to Toronto to take part in an illuminating art parade this fall.

Jennifer Willet, a professor in the School for Arts and Creative Innovation, wants people to march in the Eco Nuit parade on October 5. The parade is part of the Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, an annual sunset-to-sunrise celebration of contemporary art.

In collaboration with the Ontario Science Centre’s !dea Gallery, the procession will be a parade of “local nocturnal ecology” that will “illuminate and reveal a menagerie of living organisms via digital media and phosphorescence,” according to Dr. Willet, who specializes in bio-art, and is director of the University’s Incubator lab.

Interested artists can make glow-in-the-dark costumes, and devices that emit sound and light.  Marchers eager to join the parade will be given masks, streamers, noisemakers, and take-home lab experiments, Willet said.

Arturo Herrera, left, who will enter the University’s master of fine arts program this fall, is one of the artists who will participate in the parade. He made a giant mask out of old T-shirts, cheese cloth and wire that goes over his entire head and illuminates from the inside with flashing LED lights. He said the costume is a statement about identity and how others make assumptions about people based on their appearances.

“It’s a ton of fun,” Herrera said of the event, which he has participated in before. More than 500 artists took part in last year’s Nuit Blanche.

The parade begins at 7 p.m. on October 5 and runs through the night to 7 a.m. the next morning. Marchers will depart from Windsor on October 5 and set up a home base tent in from of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health on Queen Street. They’ll join the parade at 9 p.m., 1 a.m., and 5 a.m., freeing them up to take part in the event’s other festivities through the night.

Willet is looking for about 40 marchers and artists to take part in the parade. If you’d like to participate, or would just like more information, contact Pearl Van Geest at vangee@uwindsor.ca, or check out the event’s Facebook page.

Artists who want to perform in the parade should prepare a one-page proposal about their submissions, which should be unique portable art/science projects that explore themes around the local ecology and the night, and emit light or glow in some sense. Send proposals to Van Geest at the address above by no later than August 20.

Tonight’s opening ceremonies for the 47th International Children’s Games is sold out, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on what is being billed as an artistic multi-faceted spectacle showcasing Windsor-Essex culture and talent.

The entire event will be broadcast live on TVCogeco, channel 11 on local cable, starting at 7 p.m. Thursday, August 15, and repeated at 1 and 8 p.m. August 16, 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. August 17, and 7 p.m. Monday, August 19.

The public is also invited to the Riverfront Festival Plaza on Friday, August 16, for Passport to the World—a free event to meet the athletes and share food and cultural performances. Food vendors will represent a number of world cuisines, including Mexican, Filipino, Croatian, Greek and Japanese. Hosted by the Multicultural Council of Windsor and Essex County, it runs 6 to 11 p.m.

The Games’ closing ceremonies, also free to the public, will take place in the Festival Plaza on Sunday, August 18, starting at 7 p.m. Besides the ceremonial lowering of the flag and extinguishing of the Games flame, the evening will feature a fireworks show and entertainment by UWindsor grad, DJ Josh Karmin.

Finally, the competitions themselves are free and open to the public, including athletics events in the south campus stadium and basketball in the St. Denis fieldhouse. Find more information and a full timetable of all the sports on the International Children’s Games website.

Holly Hennin thought she was going to have a nice, quiet, and uneventful summer in her office writing about her findings on the common eider, a large sea duck known to inhabit the cooler northern regions of the planet.

A doctoral student in biology, Hennin has spent her last two summers on East Bay Island, a tiny piece of land in an inlet on the south east side of Southampton Island, located in the northern section of Hudson Bay. She studies eiders in order to better understand their chances for successful reproduction, and was planning on analyzing two summers' worth of data for her dissertation, which she hopes to defend next year.

Her plans, however, were unexpectedly but happily interrupted when she got a last minute call in June from her academic supervisor Oliver Love asking her to drop what she was doing, fly up to the island and fill in for another student from Queen’s University who fell ill and had to be flown out.

“I was like, of course, I’d love to go!” said Hennin, who spent the next several days making travel arrangements for the four-flight journey.

When she landed on the mainland a few days later, she was greeted by Dr. Love, who had walked about five kilometers over the ice from East Bay Island to meet her. The two exchanged pleasantries and then Love got on the plane to come home to Windsor, while Hennin made the trek back across the ice to the remote island camp.

“We spoke for about 10 minutes and then I was off,” said Hennin, who spent the next 10 days at the camp, which consists of a cabin that sleeps eight, a research cabin, a cooking tent and an outhouse.

Hennin’s work involves analyzing the blood from eiders for triglycerides and a hormone called corticosterone. Both are indicators of fat levels and energetics in the birds, which migrate from Greenland to the Southampton area for their summer reproductive season.

“They have to accumulate enough fat before they can lay their eggs because they fast through their entire incubation period, which is about a month,” she explained.

Hennin will discuss her adventure today on Research Matters, a weekly talk show that focuses on the work of University of Windsor researchers and airs every Thursday at 4:30 p.m. on CJAM 99.1 FM.

Editor's note: this is one of a series of articles about students who were engaged in cool research projects and other scholarly activities this summer.

UWindsor alumnus Malcolm Campbell (BA 1974, 1975, B.Ed 1976) won Monday’s DailyNews quiz but doesn’t plan to keep the prize—a cotton T-shirt embroidered with the University’s logo—for himself.

A retiree from CBC Windsor, Campbell said his daughter Taylor will begin studies in digital journalism here this fall.

“She’ll be on campus in September, proudly wearing this T-shirt,” he said as he picked up his prize Wednesday.

Campbell’s entry was drawn from all those who correctly identified the tenures of Lancer football head coaches: Gino Fracas from 1968 to 1986, John Musselman from 1986 to 1998, Mike Morencie from 1998 to 2011, and Joe D’Amore from 2011 to the present.

Lancer football will kick off its 2013 season at 1 p.m. Sunday, August 25, when the team tackles the Waterloo Warriors on Alumni Field.

To help celebrate the University of Windsor’s 50th anniversary, DailyNews will run a contest at the beginning of each week, offering a prize donated by the University Boookstore. Today’s prize, a T-shirt embroidered with the UWindsor logo, is available for purchase from the Bookstore kiosk in the CAW Student Centre at a cost of $17.95.

Local youth participating in this summer’s “Changing the Odds: Community transformation through the arts” program will present a free public performance Friday, August 16, at 7:30 p.m. in the Jackman Dramatic Art Centre’s Studio Theatre.

The program, led by Charlotte LeFrank, public education coordinator for the Windsor-Essex Children’s Aid Society with the assistance of three drama students, has engaged 30 Windsor teens in experiences with a view to expanding their horizons through drama, music, dance and art.

Organizer Tina Pugliese, director of the School of Dramatic Art, says the program has thrived on community outreach.

“We have had a number of community guest artists visit over the summer, bringing inspiration and positives messages that have reinforced the program’s objectives,” she says.

Among them were Chris Reid, a field learning specialist in the School of Social Work, leading a tour of the Campus Community Garden, and philosophy professor Jeff Noonan discussing the essence of his discipline.

Partner agencies hope to keep the youth involved, including roles as peer mentors for next year’s participants.

Professor Jeff Noonan told participants in the “Changing the Odds” program that the essence of philosophy is “being engaged with what’s going on in the present moment and learning from it.”

Accounting professor Jagdish Pathak is proud to be the first Canadian recipient of a research award from the American Accounting Association, but was quick to credit the Odette School of Business for providing a climate conducive to success.

Dr. Pathak received the 2013 Outstanding Researcher Award from the association’s Strategic and Emerging Technology section, last week at its annual meeting in Anaheim, California. The award, created in 1994, cites Pathak for his extraordinary academic achievements and leadership in research.

“I dedicated my plaque to dean Allan Conway for his support and impetus to research,” says Pathak, who joined the school’s faculty in 2002.

His research explores issues of fraud, e-commerce assurance, and continuous auditing, and has been employed by law enforcement and insurance organizations. In addition to his certified general accountant designation, Pathak holds consultancies with the World Bank and the US Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection for the Department of Homeland Security.

Faculty, students and staff who use the Leddy Library’s Interlibrary Loan service can now get direct delivery of articles to their e-mail inbox.

The service allows patrons to order materials unavailable in Windsor from partner institutions through the system, called RACER.

While books must be picked up at the Leddy circulation desk once they arrive on campus, as of this week, articles will now be e-mailed to the researcher.

Learn more about the service on its website, by phoning 519-253-3000, ext 3192, or e-mailing racer@uwindsor.ca.