News

On a cold spring night in 1903, John Muir sat around a campfire in Yosemite Valley alone with then President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and ever an advocate for the preservation of the great American wild, took the opportunity to speak with the president about the need for government supported conservation. That discussion had great impact. Roosevelt returned to Washington with a mission to pass laws to protect wild lands. He established the U.S. Forest Service and signed into existence five national parks and 150 national forests.

If you have driven along College Avenue in Guelph sometime in the last year and a half, you may have noticed some hefty construction happening at the corner of College Avenue and Smith Lane. The building known as the former VMI (Veterinary Microbiology and Immunology) building has undergone a complete transformation, both inside and out, in order to house the new Maplewoods Centre for Family Therapy and Child Psychology.

Eleni Nicolaides, PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science, investigates the impact of legal mobilization on judicial decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada and action taken in response.

Justine Townsend is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics. Her research interrogates the possibilities for reconciliation in the Canadian conservation sector, particularly by supporting the current surge in Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas.

What we choose to learn and who we choose to learn from shapes how we think and the futures we build. From my perspective as a grad student working under pandemic conditions, certain types of learning opportunities vanished, but there was more choice in online formal and informal learning than ever before. In fact, the abundance of webinars, online courses and conferences was overwhelming at times. So how to tune out the noise and tune in to real learning? For me real learning is when my ideas about what’s possible expand or shift.

STUDY SHOWS WHEN FATHERS AND MOTHERS ARE IN SYNC, CHILDREN ARE MORE LIKELY TO DEVELOP HEALTHY EATING PRACTICES

Raising children is hard work. Parents want their children to grow up happy, healthy and well-adjusted. Yet in the last 30 years, obesity rates among Canadian youth and children has tripled. Clearly, there is still work to be done to help parents guide their children towards healthy eating habits.

Natural ecosystems are replete with mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships. How an organism finds and fills a unique niche in a way that enriches both species is always amazing to observe and adds to the variety and beauty of life.

Similarly, Shared Value Solutions (SVS), a human environment consulting firm based in Guelph, Ontario has developed a special, mutually beneficial relationship with the University of Guelph.

Sophia Hou is an undergraduate student in the Applied Human Nutrition program in the Department of Family Relations and Human Nutrition at the University of Guelph. Sophia keeps a nutrition and health blog titled houbakes.com. In her latest blog post, she shared with us her mission to celebrate and preserve her Chinese heritage and her reasons for doing so.

My PhD journey began in September 2016. My start was probably a bit different from the average student’s. I pulled up to MacDonald Institute reminiscing about my graduate school days that I had finished a few years before. I thought about the classes I took and the friends I made during my MSc program in Family Relations and Human Development. This time I was not arriving to Student Orientation with one of my best friends (who happened to be in the same program as me during my master’s), but I was arriving with my parents and my four-month-old son.

Emily Smit is a PhD student in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph. She is also the mother of three small children. Emily shared her experience over the last year with us in her recent blog post published on nichegeographer.com.