Media Releases
Below is a selection of recent press releases. For all the latest news please visit www.utoronto.ca/news
General Inquires +1 (416) 978-0100 Email media.relations@utoronto.ca
Rotman MBAs reach finals of international business competition in singapore
TORONTO, ON - For the second consecutive year a team of MBA students from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management made it to the finals of the Cerebration business competition organized by NUS Business School in Singapore. While the team of Zeeshaan Mustafa, MBA'12, and Nina Krook, MBA'13 didn't win it all, they did manage to place second in the competition held in Singapore on October 14 and 15. They were also the only team from any business…
International experts in Toronto as first Marshall McLuhan Centenary Visiting Fellows
TORONTO, ON - The Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, is pleased to announce five media, communications and technology experts as the first McLuhan Centenary Visiting Fellows with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, signifying a revitalization of the previously unpaid Fellowship program. Awarded $10,000 each, the newly appointed Fellows will spend up to a half year at the University of Toronto exploring the future as well as the past and the present of Marshall McLuhan's influential theories. They…
World-renowned chemist speaks at U of T about ground-breaking renewable energy discovery
TORONTO, ON – Daniel Nocera, The Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and Professor Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will be visiting the University of Toronto on Tuesday, October 18 to speak about the exciting discovery in his lab of a practical way of using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, a process that could provide a renewable source of clean energy for the world. His vision is to provide inexpensive solar devices to everyone wherever…
Seed time-capsule will aid study of plant evolution amid environmental change
TORONTO, ON – Everything that scientists can ever know about long-gone creatures is what they can deduce from fossils. But what if they could resurrect actual specimens and compare their features with their modern-day descendants? That’s a notion that has University of Toronto biologists helping to create a seed bank that will let future researchers do exactly that with plants, allowing them to measure evolution caused by global change. “Today’s plants are the ancestors of future generations,” says Arthur Weis,…
New course engages students in citizenship and connects them to Toronto
TORONTO, ON – Citizenship in the Canadian City – a stream in University College’s new UC One program – aims to connect first-year students to the Toronto community. Led by Emily Gilbert of the college's Canadian Studies program, the stream will include guest faculty lecturers, tours around the city and discussion on issues facing Toronto. "Some of the students are quite active in political ways but not ways we associate with voting, more activism behind the scenes," says Gilbert. "I'm…
What’s going on in the Cloud?
TORONTO, ON - The increasing popularity of storing large amounts of data in a virtualized "cloud" environment raises important and potentially new law and policy issues in such areas as jurisdiction, privacy and security, competition law, data portability and consumer protection, intellectual property, and law enforcement. Media are invited to attend the Cloudlaw: Law & Policy in the Cloud Conference, Oct. 14, 2011, hosted by the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.…
Bicycle built by University of Toronto engineering students reaches 117 km/h
TORONTO, ON – The University of Toronto’s Human-Powered Vehicle Team placed third overall at the 2011 World Human-Powered Speed Challenge, held in Battle Mountain, Nevada. The competition took place from September 12 to 17 on a flat and almost perfectly straight eight kilometre stretch of highway in the Nevada desert. The U of T team had a top speed of 117 km/h, which was a personal best for racer and PhD candidate Todd Reichert, who spent the last year cycling…
Examining Canadian refugee policy in a global context
TORONTO, ON – As the national debate over a new and more aggressive refugee policy intensifies, the University of Toronto will bring together a panel of international experts to examine Canadian refugee policy in a global context. The panel discussion – co-hosted by the Harney Program in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies at U of T and the Munk School of Global Affairs – will take place on Thursday, October 20, 2011 from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Vivian…
Astronomers find bounty of failed stars
TORONTO, ON – A University of Toronto-led team of astronomers has discovered over two dozen new free-floating brown dwarfs, including a lightweight youngster only about six times heftier than Jupiter, that reside in two young star clusters. What's more, one cluster contains a surprising surplus of them, harbouring half as many of these astronomical oddballs as normal stars. "Our findings suggest once again that objects not much bigger than Jupiter could form the same way as stars do. In other…
Fall market jitters a SAD thing, suggests paper from Rotman School of Management
Toronto, ON – It’s no surprise to researcher Lisa Kramer that financial market dips and crashes typically happen in the fall. Her most recent study, forthcoming in Social Psychological and Personality Science, shows that people who experience seasonal depression shun financial risk-taking during seasons with diminished daylight but are more willing to accept risk in spring and summer. The work builds on previous studies by Kramer and others, suggesting seasonal depression may be sufficiently powerful to move financial markets. “We’ve…