Zakari Thibodeau is an Intermedia Cyberarts student driven by the power of colour and visual languages. Zakari was responsible for creating the design material for the IMCA400 thesis show entitled Nth Space: distributed presence, which entails the translation of the 20 multimedia artist cohort’s vision into a consistent infographic code. His latest short film Moonfall has been nominated in film festivals internationally and has won awards, including Best Sci-Fi Short Film at the Toronto Alternative Film Festival. Zakari is currently developing an algorithm literacy project aiming to raise the awareness of young minds about the inner functions of AI systems behind social media platforms.

Tim Chandler is a writer and art historian currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at Concordia University in Montreal. His research investigates how failure was used as a narrative device in 19th-century art writing to communicate “avant-gardeness.” Prior to his time at Concordia, he worked at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery as the TD Curator of Education Fellow from 2016 to 2018 and completed his master’s in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Guelph in 2016. His research is supported by an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.

Founded in 2010, the Spacecraft Division has been building nanosatellites since the Canadian Satellite Design Challenge (2010-2012), where it won first place. The team is currently working on a 3U CubeSat by measuring aerosol particles with an RGB imager for the Canadian CubeSat Project, an initiative started by the CSA. The team plans to launch the 3U CubeSat in early 2023.

The Rocketry Division originally competed in the Base 11 Space Challenge, an intercollegiate challenge to develop a single-stage and liquid-fuel rocket to surpass the Karman line at 100 km of altitude. Currently, the Rocketry Division aims to become the first student team to build a liquid-propellant rocket able to reach space.

Sasha Friday is a Linguistics student at Concordia University. The EL Grant helped fund her internship with the Humanities+ (H+) team, which she found through participating in the H+ program. Thanks to this internship, she has explored various skill development opportunities for students earning their humanities degrees. 

Roxanne is a settler of Anglo-Italian descent from the territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) peoples' so-called Victoria. She is currently working on her undergraduate degree in the department of Fine Arts, majoring in photography. Her practice is focused on social documentary photography and aims to illuminate the different communities she lives within while portraying her subjects in a diaristic snapshot aesthetic. Through their work, Roxanne explores themes of environmental activism, decolonization, and community. She is passionate about working with archives and actively exploring the possibilities of re-energizing archives as a public resource and communal space. 

Rhonda is a PhD candidate in Education (Applied Linguistics) whose research focuses on the act of listening, specifically the inclusion of dialectal variation in the language learning classroom as a form of land-based awareness. Her interactive workshop series, Conversations that Include, gathered eleven emerging researchers from three Canadian universities, all of whom are active instructors currently using aspects of inclusive pedagogies in their fields. Inclusivity is a strategic curriculum that identifies which voices have been silenced in the classroom and aims to highlight these narratives.

Ming(yue) Tao is an MA candidate in the Drama Therapy program at Concordia University. Her current drama therapy projects center around working with adults with developmental disabilities and seniors. She is also a facilitator at the Concordia Art Hive.

Michelle is a recent graduate with a BSc and a specialization in Cell and Molecular Biology. During her studies, she became part of an ongoing research project on campus named Pytri. Pytri is an automated cell counter that analyzes biological imagery for laboratories. Her research included petri dish pictures from teaching laboratories at Concordia, using their colony count data to train the AI. Last year, the prototype was built with the help of numerous grants, while this year’s focus was on optimizing the online version of the product. The EL Grant has helped Michelle and her team improve their project, bring together students from the Biology department, and promote Pytri in many labs.

Meghan Harnum is an artist, musician, and educator originally from Newfoundland and Labrador. She completed her BFA at Concordia in June of 2022 with a major in Art Education and a minor in Psychology and is set to begin an MA in Art Therapy in September. Using the Experiential Learning Grant she was awarded, Meghan rented instruments for a group of kids at La Cabane, a local non-profit organization. With the help of a fellow Concordia student, Meghan assisted the kids in starting their very own rock band and preparing a performance for their community.

Janna is a PhD student in Communication Studies and is currently researching the material dimensions of digital infrastructures. Alongside her team, the Solar Media group, she is building a solar-powered server and a low-carbon website. Through this collaborative exercise in decarbonizing data storage systems and web traffic, the group members are exploring low-tech alternatives to extraction-heavy and resource-intensive computing infrastructures. The Solar Media group guides its project by asking how such an experimental approach can inspire and inform visions for a just and community-oriented energy transition, specifically for virtual applications.

Isabelle Boucher (MA in Philosophy) is a PhD student in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Drawing on feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), energy humanities, and waste studies, her research project examines the socio-environmental impacts of energy transition plans. Her current focus is on analyzing how Western epistemologies and ontologies inform current sustainability politics in Quebec and Canada. By considering the triangulation of knowledge, power, and aesthetics through their colonial and extractive histories, Isabelle highlights the critical intersection of environmental and social justice issues and argues for the importance of epistemic justice at the heart of decolonial and feminist energy imaginaries.

Conor is an undergraduate student in Honours Public History. Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time (DePOT) used the Experiential Learning Grant to hire Conor as a communications coordinator for summer 2022. Conor was responsible for developing ways to engage with the historical community interested in deindustrialization in North America and Europe. Such work allowed Conor to understand and be a part of the interaction between historical research and public memory, which produces richer historical understandings of complex current events. By gathering work experience with DePOT, Conor wishes to apply his new knowledge and communications skills toward a master’s degree.

Claire holds a BA in Communications from Concordia and has returned to the university to complete a BFA in Design, pursuing her interest in the creation of objects and the built environment. She is particularly interested in the potential of design in sociocultural and environmental sustainability and social innovation. All of which led her to join Concordia’s Precious Plastic Project as a product designer. For her EL project, Claire will lead the organizing, programming, and branding of a cross-department symposium on sustainability in the Faculty of Fine Arts under the supervision of pk langshaw, chair of the Design and Computation Arts department.

Caleb lives and farms in Tiohtià:ke, traditional and unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. He is a BA Student in the School of Community and Public Affairs, majoring in First Peoples Studies. After spending three seasons working on a large, for-profit vegetable farm, Caleb moved to Tiohtià:ke, where he started school with the goal of developing anti-capitalist models of food production and distribution. Caleb is working toward this goal through his Experiential Learning project: establishing CultivAction, a community-based urban agriculture cooperative that runs food-growing and education programming in Lachine and on Concordia’s Loyola Campus.

Amanda Light Dunbar is a second-year PhD student in Concordia University’s Department of Education. Her primary research focuses on students’ use of SparkNotes study guides for support with high school English Language Arts. Amanda’s work is informed by her interests in inclusive education, Universal Design for Learning, and social justice. Apart from her research, Amanda advocates for graduate students’ rights through involvement with Concordia’s TA and RA union and her department’s Graduate Student Association. Her Experiential Learning Grant supported a project to gather information about student experiences with equity, diversity, and inclusivity in the Department of Education.

Wanda Stamford is an undergraduate student studying Business Technology Management (BTM) with a minor in marketing. She has taken part in many projects and has advanced her passion for the intersections of technology and sustainability. Stamford’s EL project consists of mapping Concordia’s waste stream as a part of the Digitizing Waste initiative. As someone who is interested in finding solutions to our global waste problem, she is interested in finding ways to make changes within the context of our university, and the community at large, with the help of Faisal Shennib, her supervisor for the EL research. As co-founder of the Concordia Precious Plastic Project (CP3), an initiative that addresses the plastic waste crisis in Montreal through awareness and recycling, she helped raise $64,000 to implement on-site recycling at Concordia. Wanda is glad to be a part of the EL community and seeks to continue finding creative ways to address environmental problems at a large scale by starting at Concordia University.

Myloe recently obtained their BA in the field of Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality at Concordia while spending their time doing a range of support work including intervention-based outreach work, workshop facilitation and being a volunteer at AGIR (Action LGBTQ Immigrant & Refugee) Montreal over the past 4 years. Their knowledge mobilization project jumps off from the work already done by the Mapping project which looked at the experiences of 2SLGBTQ+ & Disabled students at Concordia. Through the findings of this research and meetings with university members, they are creating an online resource hub that will streamline and clarify existing services to support greater access and student empowerment.

Heba is a Ph.D. candidate in the Geography, Urban, and Environmental studies program. Her area of interest revolves around refugees’ home-making practices, in a host setting, that turn their new space into a home for them. A practical understanding of the resulting space, made by refugees, as a place imbued with meanings and aspirations is to be achieved through Heba’s collaboration with Action Réfugiés Montréal (ARM), a not-for-profit organization in Montreal. Through a training program that ARM offers called “Refugee sponsorship training Program”, Heba participates in the process of refugees’ resettlement in Montreal, helping break down barriers between refugees and a host state.  

Oriana is a Master of Environmental Assessment (MEnv) student at Concordia University. She has always been very passionate about the environment, and following her undergraduate degree in Forensic Chemistry, she decided to pursue her interest at the graduate level. Oriana received this grant to fund her internship at the Canadian Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation. For her internship, she is working with a collaborative team of researchers on a global review synthesizing evidence addressing the vulnerability of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians to roads and traffic. Oriana is focusing on reptiles and amphibians for her internship.

The Space Concordia Rocketry Division is currently competing in the Base 11 Space Challenge: a competition for university teams to build and launch a giant rocket to a point no student has ever reached before Space. The Rocketry Division is a diverse group of students united by a common passion: designing, building and launching rockets. We believe that through collaboration and hard work, we can make an impact on our community and the world!

Ali obtained his B.Sc. from the Department of Biology. He founded the artificial intelligence initiative Pytri. With a team of dedicated undergraduate and graduate students, he built a platform to analyse biological imagery. The project received numerous grants, and is being integrated into laboratories across Canada.

Zvart is a graduate student completing her thesis-based master’s in Chemistry at Concordia University. Her research project focuses on the fundamental study of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and their various applications. One of her passions has been to motivate and spark interest in youth to pursue science. The Experiential Learning Grant has given her the ability to explore her creativity and to improve her communication skills by co-authoring a children’s book focused on MOFs. She wants to reach children of all backgrounds with diversity present in the illustrations and story, and show them that anyone can be a scientist!

Paola is a Master’s student in Chemistry at Concordia University, and studies in the field of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs). She has volunteered at several scientific outreach events geared towards children to teach about science using a fun and creative approach. Guided by her ongoing dedication to expand her knowledge and through experiential learning, she is currently writing a children’s book with the goal of exposing the youth to science. This project has a particular focus on inspiring a young audience to engage in STEM, all while highlighting the importance of diversity and inclusion.

Michelle is a graduate student in the Special Individualized Program (Masters & Ph.D.) at Concordia. In addition, she is one of the founding members and co-coordinators of Press Start, a youth-led arcade and up-cycling project in Bâtiment 7. She has spent the last six years volunteering her time and skills to the on-going development of this project. Both her work and her research is centered on experimenting with, documenting and making visible emancipatory economic practices on the margins, namely those led by youth.

Alicia is a neurodiverse artist and a BFA candidate in Sculpture at Concordia University. Mainly active in media arts and sustainable community practices, Turgeon is currently the chairperson of the board for the Art Matters Festival and holds the position of programming coordinator at the artist-run centre Eastern Bloc. Drawn by this pandemic to explore the topic of care as a radical approach and an act of observance, Turgeon presents an art investigation on inherited objects emphasizing the concepts of memory, dialogue, labour, and reappropriation.

Zeina is an M.A. candidate in the Individualized Program in Social Sciences at the School of Graduate Studies. Her research project explores how refugee women create a sense of home in Quebec through community food production. In collaboration with Bâtiment 7, Action Gardien and le Club des Consomateurs de La Pointe-Saint-Charles, she is developing an incubator for social enterprise in food production, transformation, and distribution for refugee women with an agrarian background at the Fermette de la Pointe.

Juan is currently studying Aerospace Engineering and has been a part of Space Concordia for the past 4 years. His team is building a sub-orbital rocket to reach a 100 km into outer space. His role is to lead the sub-team in engineering the rocket airframe. This is the structure that holds and protects the internal systems from the forces the vehicle experiences during the flight. This project provides unique hands-on experiences for future engineers in an inspiring and challenging way.

Luz is a Master of Environmental Assessment (MEnv) student at Concordia University. She received this grant to support her internship at Net Impact Montreal and Concordia’s Department of Geography, Planning and Environment. The goal of this experience was to develop the ‘Flying Less Concordia’ project and website, which seeks to ignite commitment within the academic community to reduce their air-travel emissions.

Kristy's passion is water and trying to better understand the relationship(s) that human have with it. Since she began her graduate studies in 2014 she has been working with youth from the Cree Nation of Wemindji (in Northern Quebec) and also in more recent years with Indigenous communities in South Australia. Kristy’s EL grant allowed her and the group of Cree youth to make a film about a research trip they took to Australia in 2019 to learn about water, culture, connections, and resilience.

Maleika is currently a master’s student in the Department of Education’s Child Studies program. She researches children’s language development, early literacy, and storytelling abilities. In collaboration with Associate Professor Diane Pesco, she used the Experiential Learning Grant to explore self-expression and creativity in young children’s stories and to contribute to a larger project connecting researchers, kindergarten teachers, and children in Quebec schools.

Samantha is an undergraduate student in the Department of Human Resources Management. As part of the Student Learning and Professional Development team at the Institute of Co-operative Education, the grant helped fund a multitude of projects to accommodate a shift to remote learning. She lead and facilitated online workshops preparing students for virtual job interviews, as well as developed her own content and designed evaluations for various online seminars.

Olivier is currently completing his Honours of Environmental Sciences in the Department of Geography, Planning & Environment. His project called “21st Century Multi-Scale Analysis of Phenological Trends in the Tundra”, was supervised by Dr. Angela Kross. With the main objective of qualifying and quantifying changes between the 2001 - 2018 in the spatial patterns of phenological trends of the Canadian Arctic Tundra at various scales using the Google Earth Engine platform.

Ariana is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art education; working predominantly in paint and print media. Her research/studio practice concentrates on translating diverse oral histories of hopes/justice movements into multi-modal images that agitate and inspire. Working closely with issues raising awareness on social change/gender violence, she explores the conditions of women, immigrants and refugee claimants while observing and commenting on social realities.

Sonia enables future leaders through her work teaching at Concordia University and McGill University in Montreal. She is the award-winning author of The Apple in the Orchard: a story about finding the courage to emerge, which birthed the program Take the Leap! Make an Impact which she was able to develop using this grant. The now online program grounds Emerging Leaders in Purpose & Prosperity and is ideal for use in educational and corporate environments. This unique program is also being supported by the Social Innovation Incubation Program at District 3 at Concordia University.

Dr. Reilly is a faculty member in the department of Applied Human Sciences. Her particular research interest is exploring the impact of using learning as a lever for change at an individual, organizational, or community level. Dr. Reilly employs an experiential approach to learning, while emphasizing the whole person in this process-- the intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual parts of the participant.

The Space Concordia Spacecraft Division is currently working on a small satellite unit that will be launched from the ISS into low earth orbit. With a multidisciplinary team of over 30 members, the Spacecraft Division is making sure that Concordia University goes to space. Through hands-on experience we allow students to develop both technical and nontechnical skills required in any engineering project.

Dr. Shadmehri joined Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Aerospace Engineering at Concordia University in 2018. Prior to joining Concordia, he worked at Bombardier Aerospace in an R&D group called “Aerostructure & Technology Development” where he invented a novel system for inspecting composite parts made by Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) called “Laser-Vision Inspection System and Method”.

Michael teaches in the department of Marketing. He has been a communications and marketing professional, a public relations and media relations specialist, a web content and digital media writer, a freelance journalist and as an educator. He has worked in several different fields including a non-governmental organization, a multi-national printing, publishing and media company and then moving into the not-for-profit sector.

Celeste is an undergraduate student in the Department of Physics. She created the Katalís project to expose children in Haiti to the STEM field. This year she has partnered with a school in Haiti and raised over $14,000 to expand her program. She will also be starting a local outreach program in Montreal for for children in immigrant areas and a mentorship program for coming-of-age girls, immigrants, LGBTQ+ and students with learning disabilities.

Emily is an undergraduate student in the department of Communication Studies, with a minor in human relations. Part of the 62nd Cohort of the Garnet Key Society, Emily devotes her time volunteering for the university and taking part in community events organized by her fellow team members. She used the grant to build a student-staff mentorship program called Connect Concordia, and to create promotional material for an experiential learning course named the u.lab Hub.

Anja Novković is an artist, storyteller, and researcher captivated by the power of personal narratives. She holds an MSc from Concordia's Department of Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies, and her current MSc project, "Alley Stories", aims to both deepen the public's appreciation of overlooked urban spaces and strengthen the way placemakers identify and honour existing place identity. She was hired by the Office of Community Engagement using the grant to develop the Embrace the City Map, a digital platform that displays university-based community-engagement initiatives interactively. Through this project, Anja helped to create potential connections between projects and stakeholders around the university's research and partnerships.

Marcus is an undergraduate student in the Department of Journalism. The Office of Community Engagement used this grant to hire him to work on communications over the upcoming academic year. He developed a series of profiles to highlight Concordia’s role in advancing community interests with a focus on relationship-building. Marcus enjoys working in the community sector because it offers the chance to have a meaningful impact on people's lives by leveraging the power of collective action against the substantial forces of injustice and inequality in our society.