Meet the 2018 BLUE Fellows
This collection of incredible students and recent grads were chosen from a over 100 competitive applications we received. With projects ranging from understanding the mental, physical, and philosophical effects of parachuting on the body to how commensal bacteria can shape urban environments, we are excited to see where the summer takes our BLUE fellows.
Here are the 2018 fellows:
Leila Alfaro
Leila recently completed a bachelor's degree in French Language and Literature, specializing in Translation. Her academic interests are very broad and they relate to all kinds of social sciences and humanities. Her BLUE project, which she is working on along with a fellow McGill grad, focuses on the interconnectedness between subjectivity, (self)censorship, and computer-assisted translations (CATs). The project also seeks to explore the possibilities that automated translations softwares can offer within the frame of creative process. Leila was born in Honduras, but she was raised in Mont-Saint-Hilaire, a Montreal suburb in the South Shore.
Talk to Leila about: education, language(s), and travel.
Damian Arteca
Damian is an undergraduate student studying Anthropology. He's interested in an eclectic array of topics, but particularly fascinated by ways we can create theories across cultural, ontological, and epistemological barriers. His BLUE project focuses on understanding how "becoming non-human" can be a cultural process. He's specifically examining how this occurs within cyber-social spiritual communities. He's originally from Sudbury, Ontario, but now lives in Montreal.
Talk to Damian about: ethical dilemmas (those sweet sweet trolley problems), social theory, and science fiction.
Tanor Bonin
Tanor’s research and creative training span neurobiology and physiology; the perceptual and cognitive sciences; aesthetics of material and sound design; mythology and social organization; and finally physics and computational modelling. He has instructed and received instruction in each of these various modes of intellectual inquiry, and maintains to the best of his ability an active engagement in each of these disciplines. Tanor’s research and creative work has been facilitated by highly creative and intimidatingly intelligent mentors who have allowed him a flexibility of intellectual investigation and development that he has not been able to find in the standard university paradigm.
Eloise Chakour
Eloise is a U3 Honours Physics student. Her main academic interests are early universe cosmology, string theory and quantum loop gravity. The goal of her BLUE project is to explore representations of higher dimensions, with a focus on spaces with four spacial dimensions or 3+1 dimensions (i.e. three spacial dimensions and one time dimension).
Talk to Eloise about: weird physics and physicists, McGill STEM Support Committee, and how amazing ant colonies are.
Su Yu Ding
Su Yu studied physics at McGill as an undergraduate and wishes to go on exploring quantum mechanical formulations of gravity in graduate school. His BLUE project gives him a head start on this investigation: it asks how the laws of physics and symmetry would be altered if space and time cannot be infinitely divided, i.e. if spacetime has a fundamentally discrete structure.
Talk to Su Yu about: physics, music (sharing songs or composing), and 2KSQUAD.
Jake Errington
Jake is a recent computer science & mathematics grad and beginning graduate student in the McGill's computational logic lab. His research focuses on program synthesis: how can software generate programs conforming to given specifications?
Together with Eric Mayhew, their BLUE project is to create a video game to teach highschoolers about the early history of New France.
Talk to Jake about: programming languages, Linux systems use and administration, free and open-source software / data privacy.
Takuto Fukuda
Takuto Fukuda (b.1984/Japan) is a composer, sound artist and gestural controller performer pursuing his D.Mus in composition at McGill University. He has been researching the enhancement of liveness - what makes music live such as spontaneity, corporeality and interactivity. His approaches encompass, among others, gestural control of music, interactive audiovisual installations and Game Pieces. His BLUE project focuses on Gamification of Human-Computer Interaction in Audiovisual Performance. His pieces have been prized at several competitions such as Andrew Svoboda Memorial Prize (Canada), CCMC 2011 (Japan) and Musica Nova 2010 (Czech).
Talk to Takuto about: train, gamification of music performance, and terrible Canadian food
Mercedes Garcia Holguera
Mercedes is a PhD student in the Department of Bioresource Engineering and the McGill School of Environment. She is working on biomimetics, ecological engineering and regenerative architecture to optimize resources use in buildings. She is assesing ecosystem patterns and developing conceptual and quantitative architectural models using ecological engineering tools. Her research will provide the scientific basis for biomimetic and regenerative architecture design.
Talk to Mercedes about: biomimetic design, teaching and learning, and road trips.
Iris Gaudin
Iris is a first-year management student doing a double concentration in Entrepreneurship and Orgazinational Behaviour, and a minor in French Literature. She grew up in the south of France, moving to San Fransisco when she was 14. She says that goint to the US was an amazing experience as a teenager as it made her realize that there is so much opportunity outside of France, and that she should be open to all those opportunities.
Talk to Iris about: skydiving, and creative writing.
Alison Hirukawa
Alison recently completed her PhD in Biochemistry, studying breast cancer epigenetics. She is interested in way too many things. Her BLUE project is creating a Virtual Reality installation that will use sound, space and visuals to display multi modal data gathered from honey bee hives in Montréal. Alison is Tokyo-born, Vancouver-raised.
Talk to Alison about: honey bees, the microbiome and Yayoi Kusama.
Madeleine Hykes
Madeleine is a U3 student completing her degree in honours urban studies, with a minor in sociology. She was born in France and lived in Paris until she was seven, subsequently moving to the East Coast before coming to Montreal for her studies. Her academic interests lie in understanding different urban fabrics and the relationship between power, design, and day to day urban use and mobility. Her BLUE project is focusing on better understanding and visualizing the relationship between a physical disability and urban space use, looking to create an immersive art installation conveying these exploratory findings and contribute to ongoing discussions concerning issues of accessibility and physical disability in Montreal.
Talk to Madeleine about: avocados, qualitative research methods that are rooted in feminist theory, and ruminating about the lives of strangers you pass by everyday in the city and what it means to be 'here' and not 'there'
Eric Mayhew
Eric is a preservice history teacher. Eric is also passionate about music and has combined these interests as a music tutor.
Together with Jake Errington, their BLUE project is to create a video game to teach highschoolers about the early history of New France.
Talk to Eric about: history, the news, viola.
Cassiel Moroney
Cassiel is a third year computer science and world religions double major with particular interest in digital narratives, alternative storytelling, and the future of media. Her project is to interpret the spoken word so as to manifest it in VR. She's originally from Palo Alto, California.
Talk to Cassiel about: cartography of planets & maps in general, your writing, and being kind to yourself.
Nathan Mousseau
Gabriel Proulx
Gabriel Proulx is a graduate student whose research focuses on contemporary French literature, translation and Samuel Beckett studies. His BLUE project aims to evaluate the French translation of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch by Éric Kahane, retranslate important passages with the help of computer-assisted translation (CAT) softwares and explore the creative possibilities that these softwares open up for artists. The goal of these three interrelated micro-projects is to analyze the link between censorship and translation, be it self-censorship (in the case of literary translation by one translator) or automated translation (in the case of CAT tools).
Talk to Gabriel about: literature, research, and translation.
Avery Shoemaker
Avery is a 4th year undergrad in the School of Environment, majoring in Environment and Development. Her academic interests include environmental humanities (literature, philosophy, and art), as well as conservation. Her BLUE project focuses primarily on creative writing, including fiction and poetry, that investigates environmental topics such as the Anthropocene, inter-species interaction, and micro-plastics through a literary lens. She is currently experimenting with different forms of storytelling including video, VR, installation, and even mushroom cultivation. She is originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Talk to Avery about: symbiosis, fungi, and how people behave in transit.
Sophie Strassmann
Sophie is from Cambridge, Massachusetts and studies economics, minoring in statistics and Urdu. Her BLUE project focuses on the intersection between language diversity, extinction, and the possible effects on the global economy.
Talk to Sophie about: economics, identity, education, and jellyfish.
Jasmine Wong
Jasmine Wong is a recent graduate from McGill in Psychology and International Development Studies. After her break from school, she intends on pursuing her graduate studies in a psychology-related field and make lots of money with it. Her study passions driving her BLUE 21 research stem from a desire to find ways to decrease unnecessary pain experiences in women and find out if and how we can potentially improve the overall health of society this way. Jasmine grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, and she and her Montrealer husband are expecting a baby in July that probably loves olives and chocolate cake.
Talk to Jasmine about: childbirth, maternal health, and chocolate cake and olives (no, not together! I'm pregnant, not crazy...)