Four Queen’s University doctoral students have earned Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships designed to help Canadian institutions attract and retain highly qualified doctoral students. The four winners’ areas of study include Indigenous public protest, kidney function, low income populations, and assisted dying.

The scholarships provide each student with $50,000 per year for three years during their doctoral studies. Scholarships are funded by either the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

"Our heartiest congratulations are extended to each of the four recipients of this year’s Vanier award," says Fahim Quadir, Vice-Provost and Dean of the Queen's University School of Graduate Studies. "As Canada’s premier graduate scholarship, the Vanier award recognizes outstanding academic achievements, extraordinary leadership skills, and an unwavering commitment to fostering excellence and innovation in research in service of the global society. The School of Graduate Studies is looking forward to supporting our new Vanier scholars in continuing to pursue cutting-edge research in the disciplinary realms of social and health sciences."

This year’s recipients include:

Miles Howe (Cultural Studies) - Howe's SSHRC-funded research focuses on analyzing policing tactics in relation to episodes of Indigenous public protest. Specifically, he is exploring how developments in policing theory and crowd theory have influenced Canadian policing practices, and how recent trends in “strategic incapacitation” have impacted the work of police and security agencies in regards to Indigenous public protests.

Christine Moon (Kinesiology and Health Studies) - Moon’s dissertation project, funded by SSHRC, will explore experiences of racialized Canadians with medical assistance in dying. Her proposed doctoral work will help the public understand what assisted dying means to racialized Canadians and provide a previously unexplored, qualitative, and in-depth look at how they think about, request, or receive assisted dying.

Sarah Sharma (Political Studies) – Sharma’s doctoral research examines how financial and environmental inequalities affect low-income populations in major global cities. Specifically, she is studying informal settlements to understand the economic and environmental threats to attaining safe and secure housing in growing urban centres. Her work is funded by SSHRC.

Mandy Turner (Biomedical and Molecular Studies) – Funded by CIHR, Turner’s work combines laboratory research with clinical research in an innovative way to better understand the negative impact of phosphate on blood vessels and the heart, especially in patients with impaired kidney function. Her research team is generating a new clinical test to identify those with phosphate imbalance at an early stage in order to manage these patients and decrease the risk of heart disease in this population.

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