Excellence in Science Public Engagement and Outreach Award winners announced

The Faculty of Science congratulates Caroline Colijn, Miriam Rosin and Donya Divsalar each for winning a 2021 Excellence in Science Public Engagement and Outreach Award for their outstanding achievements in their respective fields.

This annual award was established in 2017 to recognize the contributions of staff, faculty and students toward community engagement and outreach in the Faculty of Science.

This year, a new award category was established to recognize Distinction in Science Communication and Policy Impact.  This has been awarded to professor Caroline Colijn for her research in mathematical epidemiology and evolutionary biology that has been central to the public health response to Covid-19 in Canada and internationally since February 2020. Since the outbreak, she has published numerous papers concerning COVID transmission and has been generous in sharing these critical findings with local, national and international media to inform the general public.

The award includes a $1,000 contribution to the Department of Mathematics to further its public outreach and engagement initiatives.

The Excellence in Science Public Engagement and Outreach Award for Faculty/Staff is awarded to Miriam Rosin, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Physiology & Kinesiology. She is recognized for her ground-breaking work in increasing awareness of science in society  through the BC Oral Cancer Prevention Program that she founded in 1997. The award-winning program seeks to prevent the occurrence of, and increase awareness of oral diseases through educational campaigns and clinical programs that reach diverse and often underrepresented population groups across Metro Vancouver.

This awards includes a $1,000 contribution to the Department of Biomedical Physiology & Kinesiology  to further their public outreach and engagement initiatives.

The Excellence in Science Public Engagement and Outreach Award for Students is awarded to Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology graduate student Donya Divsalar for the many volunteer hours she has devoted to providing STEM educational outreach to the public, especially youth. As a woman in a non-engineering STEM field, Divsalar is motivated to help girls and women get involved with aerospace projects. She founded SFU Aerospace to help students develop technical projects, engage the public about their work and foster entrepreneurship. Recently, Donya and the SFU Aerospace team moved their in-person Decode workshops to a virtual platform so that kids at home could continue to participate in robotics workshops. She was also instrumental in creating a partnership with UBC Orbit in building a 1U Cube Satellite that will launch into orbit in 2021 with one of her experiments in its payload - a scale model of a human centrifuge which is being developed at SFU Aerospace Physiology Lab.

This awards includes a $500 contribution to the Department of Biomedical Physiology & Kinesiology to further their public outreach and engagement initiatives.

More information on the Faculty of Science Excellence in Science Public Engagement and Outreach Award awards can be found here.