The 16th edition of the Ron W. Ianni Memorial Scholarship in Performance competition is in the books. For the first time, the annual showcase of students’ musical skill was held on Zoom and all performances had been previously recorded and loaded to YouTube.

After deliberation, the adjudicators — professors Bruce Kotowich, Nicholas Papador, and Jennifer Swanson — announced that this year’s Ianni scholarship recipient is violinist Stefanie Adams, a second-year music student and Outstanding Scholar.

“I am very grateful to have the opportunity to perform alongside such talented musicians at SoCA,” Adams said following her win. “I would like to thank my instructor, Lillian Schierich, for her incredible mentorship and encouragement this semester, and the Ianni family for this scholarship!”

Adams has studied violin with Scheirich, concertmaster of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, for six years.

“Stefanie has natural musicality, but needed to catch up and focus on her technique,” said Scheirich. “She has taken every opportunity offered to her and done the extra work. Stefanie is the poster child for being prepared. I can’t say enough good things about her.”

This past fall, Adams worked with Dr. Kotowich in her role as an Outstanding Scholar, researching British choral composer and arranger John Rutter.

“Stefanie is very curious and detail-oriented,” Kotowich said. “She found British recordings of interviews with John Rutter, which provided insight into his compositional style.”

The eight students competing for the scholarship were chosen based on their fall jury scores, drawn this year from recorded performances.

For students, there are benefits of having to record and submit their performances on video.

“Once students get past the emotional response of seeing and hearing themselves, they see that they are hunching their shoulders or something else they don’t like, and fix it,” said Dr. Swanson, SoCA’s performance co-ordinator and voice instructor. “Students are seeing and hearing things they don’t like and fixing it on their own, rather than waiting for their lesson.”

She said this allows student and teacher to focus on more impactful instruction.

Watch Adams’ winning performance of Chanson de Matin by Edward Elgar.

—Susan McKee

The Department of Physics is celebrating two of its brightest scholars with the announcement of fourth-year undergraduate Emma Blanchette as the recipient of the 2020 Lucjan Krause Scholarship, and doctoral candidate Aaron Bondy as the winner of the Tom & Mylo Drake Physics Research Prize.

Blanchette, an Outstanding Scholar, takes the Lucjan Krause award and $1,000 for her consistent record of academic achievement, her outstanding service to the department and the University, and three years researching bacterial pathogen detection using laser induced breakdown spectroscopy with her supervisor, Steven Rehse, head of the Department of Physics. She says Dr. Rehse’s exemplary dedication to mentoring his students is not only encouraging, but inspires her to succeed.

“I was very excited about winning the Lucjan Krause scholarship,” says Blanchette. “It is extremely encouraging to receive a scholarship in recognition of the academic and departmental work I’ve done, and it has certainly motivated me to reach even further.”

Blanchette was also a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Undergraduate Research Awards 2020 summer student. She presented her lab group’s research on developing a nearly real-time medical test for the diagnosis of pathogenic bacteria with their poster, Signal Optimization and Chemometric Analysis of Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy Bacterial Spectra to Quantify Detection Limits and Improve Classification Accuracy, online during the Canadian Association of Physicists annual Congress, June 2020.

Bondy will receive $1,200 as the third student to win the Tom & Mylo Drake Physics Research, a prize created by university professor emeritus Gordon Drake ­to recognize and celebrate excellence in physics research achievements, in honour of his family.

The doctoral candidate specializes in theoretical atomic physics research where he computes and analyzes the effects of atomic processes such as radioactive beta decay, where one atom changes into another. He says this probes for fundamental new physics beyond what we currently know, to reveal genuine differences between theory and experiment.

“The award means a lot to me. I thoroughly enjoy the research I do, and it is nice to be recognized for it,” says Bondy. “This award bears the name of my supervisor, Dr. Drake, and is named after his parents — this adds tremendous value to the award as Dr. Drake has been a great mentor to me and I am very grateful for this.”

Bondy was selected for his exceptional record of research achievement that has been recognized nationally and internationally. He won an NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship - Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement; studied for a semester at Drake University in Iowa; won first place in the Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics Canada’s (DAMOPC) Divisional Oral Presentation Competition; and ranked third in the overall Oral Presentation Competition of the 2020 Canadian Association of Physicist's Congress.

Rehse says Blanchette and Bondy truly demonstrate students’ commitment to service within the Faculty of Science and the University, and bring recognition and honour to the Department of Physics.

“These scholarships provide an exceptional and supportive learning experience for high-achieving students, emphasizing depth and breadth of research-based academic inquiry, strong and ongoing faculty-student mentorship, effective communication of research achievement, and achievement of external recognition of academic excellence,” says Rehse.

Lucjan Krause headed the Department of Physics through the formative decades of the 1960s and ’70s. His family established the scholarship to recognize deserving undergraduate students in any physics program who bring recognition and honour to the University of Windsor’s Department of Physics through their academic and scientific endeavors.

—Sara Elliott

The Office of Human Rights, Equity and Accessibility has posted a multicultural calendar on its website at www.uwindsor.ca/ohrea/multicultural-calendar.

Access to the electronic version requires a UWin ID and password and may be downloaded to the Outlook calendar.

While they are intended to assist with the preparation of class outlines, exam schedules, meetings, or presentations, it is not a definitive list of dates eligible for religious accommodation.

Find the University of Windsor’s guidelines and forms for observances of religious holidays and obligations for both employees and students at http://www.uwindsor.ca/ohrea/religious-accommodation.

The Odette School of Business will announce the inaugural winners of the Sue Skrobiak Awards for Excellence and Sue Skrobiak Scholarship for Excellence in a streamed ceremony Tuesday, Jan. 12, at 7 p.m. The event is open to the University community at https://www.uwindsor.ca/business/sue-skrobiak-award-excellence-2020-winners.

The awards are named to honour the impact Skrobiak had in a career of almost 40 years as a secretary in the Odette School of Business before her death in November 2018.

The Sue Skrobiak Award for Excellence is intended for an individual or organization that has made a substantial contribution over a sustained period of time to the Odette MBA program. Appropriate recipients include retired faculty, staff, or community members, organizations or alumni who have hired MBA graduating students, co-op students, worked with students on research projects, acted as guest speakers, or donated to the program.

In addition, friends and colleagues have donated to endow a scholarship to support a student who personifies the spirit of Sue Skrobiak.

The Jan. 12 online event will also include a brief tribute video to Skrobiak.

Research papers co-authored by management science professor Kevin Li of the Odette School of Business have been ranked among the most-cited works in their respective journals.

“Impact of product-design strategies on the operations of a closed-loop supply chain,” is listed among the most-cited works in the Transportation Research, Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review.

“Cooperative game approaches to coordinating a three-echelon closed-loop supply chain with fairness concerns,” is one of the most-cited works in the International Journal of Production Economics.

The two articles, both published in 2019, address different operational issues in closed-loop supply chains that are concerned with remanufacturing and recycling used products, says Dr. Li.

“The paper in the International Journal of Production Economics incorporates the retailer’s fairness concerns into surplus profit to furnish options for fostering co-operation and achieve equitable allocation,” he says.

The Transportation Research article investigates how different product design strategies affect supply chain operations.

“The results shed insights for supply chain managers to make informed product design and other operational decisions and policy-makers to better regulate remanufacturing activities,” says Dr. Li.

He notes that both lists are dynamic, changing positions of the top 25 articles as citation counts are updated. Among his collaborators on these projects were three colleagues who came to Odette from China as visiting scholars in 2017-18: Xiaoxue Zheng of Minjiang University, Zhi Liu of Anhui Polytechnic University, and Ji Chen of Zhejiang Gongshang University.

People often feel a bit down after the holidays, the Department of Human Resources says in a message shared with UWindsor faculty and staff Monday.

It offers a number of suggestions for ways to beat the winter blues, including: spend time in nature, eat a healthy diet, and practice relaxation techniques.

See the full list from the Canadian Mental Health Association - Ontario.

While Qualtrics remains the recommended tool for data collection and research projects, Microsoft Forms is an option for creating simple surveys, quizzes, and polls.

Watch Office of Open Learning’s student online learning assistant Tariq Al-Rfouh as he introduces the basic features of Microsoft Forms in this 142-second video.

Tech Talk is a presentation of Information Technology Services. More Tech Talks are available at www.uwindsor.ca/its/tech-talk.