Announcement: RSD 2025, March 31 - April 4
The Office of Research, Scholarship and Community Engagement is happy to announce that Research and Scholarship Days 2025 is scheduled from March 31 - April 4. The Main Street Poster Presentations will happen over two days on Tuesday, April 1 and Wednesday, April 2. Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.
Research and Scholarship Days at Mount Royal
Research is about breaking boundaries, testing the limits of knowledge, applying expertise for a greater good, and changing the world around us for the better. Change. Research is inherently connected to change, as a researcher shapes the future through their work. Every researcher is a Changemaker, and as a Changemaker campus, Mount Royal is dedicated to celebrating research excellence and how our students and faculty contribute.
Change can also affect research itself. The way it is performed, how research changes across disciplines, and how it is disseminated. During Research and Scholarship Days let's celebrate the change that is both enacted and experienced through the research process. Join Mount Royal from March 31 to April 4 to acknowledge the research excellence demonstrated by undergraduate students and faculty across all disciplines. Students beginning their changemaking journeys will demonstrate their knowledge and inspire the changemakers of tomorrow.
Please seek out our info pages if you want to participate as a student or faculty member. Students have various opportunities to disseminate research projects they have worked on through coursework or independent projects. Faculty have various volunteer opportunities available to them and can always help inspire students by integrating research into their course materials. See the events page for a full list of events offered during Research and Scholarship Days.
Research and Scholarship Days Student Profiles
Each year the top Research and Scholarship Days student presentations are recognized. For RSD 2024, the event was held on March 26 and featured around 50 poster and creative works presentations.
The three profiles below highlight the research projects and students that received the highest scores from adjudicators. Look below to read about their projects and hear their stories! Congratulations to the winners!
Profile of past winners can be found here.
Sarah Lappin & Maddox Nelles
Program: Child Studies and Social Work
Supervisor: Gio Dolecore
On January 31, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced her government's intentions to introduce legislation that would drastically limit gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
Mount Royal students Sarah Lappin and Maddox Nelles were deep into a project exploring a historical timeline of the diagnosis of gender dysphoria when the announcement was made.
The pair immediately shifted gears into a new project examining and collecting scholarly evidence arguing why gender-affirming care should be supported, specifically focusing on psychosocial approaches that did not include medical care.
That meant specifically examining social aspects of gender-affirming care, such as letting people use their preferred name and pronouns or having places of support online.
Lappin and Nelles felt this was a gap in the Canadian context that should be explored, especially in light of these recent developments.
Additionally, it was a topic that hit close to home for both of them. “As both members of the LGBTQ+ community and people who know transgender individuals, it was important to get some research out there and show, in the context of this proposed legislation in Alberta, how dangerous it could be for transgender people,” Nelles says.
Lappin continues, “It was clear to me that this proposed legislation was not rooted in evidence or research. There is a total absence of it being mentioned, which is why I wanted to see the research myself.” The importance of this topic, especially within the Alberta context as harmful legislation looms over the province, meant that communicating their findings was a priority for the pair.
They set their sights on Research and Scholarship Days to disseminate their research. However, with the announcement being made on January 31 and Research and Scholarship Days starting in late March, it meant there would be a tight turnaround for this project.
A two-month timeframe meant a lot of work needed to be done. Lappin and Nelles decided to focus on producing a literature review, finding evidence through a semi-structured search strategy. The work was realistic within their timeframe and could still produce insights and evidence for gender-affirming care that could be easily disseminated.
They searched through ten scholarly databases, scanning titles and abstracts for works that matched their search criteria, eventually gathering a pool of evidence that supported the use of gender-affirming care.
It was a tall task. Thankfully for Lappin, research was not a process she was unfamiliar with, having been immersed in research since high school. Lappin’s experiences include working with Alberta Health Services as a patient advisor and involvement in research projects with the University of Alberta and Brock University. “I was trained in community-based participatory research and participatory action research…As a young person who has accessed mental health services and had lived experiences with mental health, I worked with researchers to inform their research,” Lappin says. This included helping with interview questions, writing, and analyzing data, which was a boon for her Research and Scholarship Days efforts.
Nelles notes that this process will be invaluable as he goes through the rest of his program and eventually into graduate school. However, being able to research a topic he was invested in was the most valuable part of the experience. “I think the most important part for me was to have the support to research an issue that really matters to me…Having the support to do what we are supposed to do as social workers. Supporting a marginalized community is an important professional and personal opportunity,” Nelles says.
Even though Research and Scholarship Days are over, Lappin and Nelles are still committed to spreading the word about their research and communicating it to Albertans.
Kobe Tulloch, Julie Patton & Connor Balsillie
Is Home Here?
Program: Journalism & Digital Media
Supervisor: Patti Edgar
On September 16, 2023, Calgary City Council approved the city’s housing strategy dubbed Home is Here. A proposed plan to help deal with the ongoing housing crisis. The plan outlines 98 action items that will work to achieve the plan's five desired outcomes.
The city released a large PDF document outlining the plan, but for Mount Royal journalism students Kobe Tulloch, Julie Patton and Connor Balsillie, that wasn’t enough. For such a vital issue that affects everyone in the city, they wanted to break down the plan and make it more digestible for the everyday Calgarian.
This resulted in their multimedia project titled Is Home Here? consisting of a multimedia website featuring interviews with affected sources representing several sides of the housing crisis, a video explainer, and infographics. The objective is to clearly explain to Calgarians how the plan will affect them and hopefully make the documents released by the city more comprehensible and the jargon easier to parse.
The group explored three perspectives on the housing crisis: The renter, the homeowner, and the unhoused. The group wanted to give a voice to these perspectives and let other Calgarians see the crisis from multiple angles.
As people who have lived experiences with the housing crisis, the proposed plan was the catalyst that prompted the group to take up this research project, as Tulloch and Balsillie explain. “I [Tulloch] rent in Calgary, and that is getting harder and harder. I’m one of many students who have heard conceptually about the city’s housing crisis and that a plan had been announced to deal with it.”
Balsillie continues by saying, “I thought it would be a good time to work on a project about housing...I could use my position as someone who didn’t know that much about housing and use that to my advantage to help everyday Calgarians.”
For the fourth-year journalism students, this was the perfect opportunity to test their creative talents and research skills. Everyone focused on their area of interest for creating the website, with Julie handling the writing, Connor working on infographics, and Kobe designing the layout of the website itself.
It also involved extensive hands-on experience, with each group member conducting interviews and attending in-person info sessions organized by the city. Despite the excellent group dynamic, this on-the-ground experience still caused some anxiety and frustration.
Patton says that she set up the interviews and that “I’ve never had so much trouble finding people before. People did not want to talk about this. It was a lot of reaching out to someone, and then they’d pass me to someone else, and it was a lot of back and forth repeating that. It took a lot of time, but it brought us to some amazing people.” The struggle to find sources was contrasted by their experiences at the city info sessions, where people were eager to speak with them on this topic
Ultimately, the group found through this hunt and the info sessions that this was a topic Calgarians wanted to have their voices heard on. Since the completion of the Is Home Here? website, frustrations and controversy have continued to flare as the city considers blanket rezoning for Calgary, making this research project even more timely.
While the three journalism students wanted to spread the word about this important topic, they also wanted to share this with the Mount Royal community. Patton notes that it was always their goal to present at Research and Scholarship Days, especially with how this issue impacts students.
Overall, the group felt it was a rewarding experience, with Balsillie saying, “Talking to citizens, ordinary Calgarians, and talking about their concerns was really enjoyable. I felt fulfilled and satisfied after doing that.” While creating a memorable presentation, the project also provided a resource for Calgarians navigating this complicated issue.
McKenzie Thompson
Sexually exploited youth in care: An integrative review of treatment models and policies
Program: Criminal Justice
Supervisor: Scharie Tavcer
Fourth-year criminal justice student McKenzie Thompson had always had a clear idea of the direction she wanted her university career to take. “Since starting school, I knew I wanted to go into honours, and I initially wanted to look at perceptions of the decriminalization of drugs. That was always my idea,” Thompson says.
That changed when she started working at a youth group home last summer, and her perspective shifted. Seeing and working with vulnerable youth living through difficult situations changed the direction of her research interests, with Thompson saying, “I wanted to look at the problems these youth face, especially because I worked in it. I knew what was going on, how youth felt, and how they were vulnerable.” That led to her project examining sexually exploited youth living in group homes and what treatment models and policies were currently in use.
The research project primarily consisted of an integrative literature review focusing specifically on the Canadian context. Thompson aimed to determine why youth in group homes were more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and what preventative methods group homes could utilize to reduce risk factors.
Interaction with strangers online was identified as one of the biggest factors in youth exploitation, which aligned with her own experiences working in a group home. “We can’t patrol everything youth participate in online 100 per cent. Things can slip through the cracks,” Thompson says. Educating youth in group homes about online interaction and how to spot exploitative behaviour is a big preventative measure.
Furthermore, through the literature review, Thompson determined that trauma-informed care was the most effective measure to reduce risk factors of exploitation. Supportive environments that build trust and allow youth to tell their stories in safe spaces at their own pace was proven to be an effective method of care in Canadian youth group homes.
Through these findings, Thompson hopes her research will be built upon further with stakeholder interviews, both with workers in youth group homes and the youth who live there. Building upon this researcher would ideally inform policy decisions at high levels.
Thompson also notes that this doesn’t just affect youth in group homes. Exploitation of youth through the internet and online interactions can affect anyone. Education in schools would be an important step for youth to develop the skills to recognize exploitative behaviour. This again ties into the importance of building upon this research and informing policymakers.
While this was a topic Thompson was invested in and passionate about, that didn’t make the research process any less intimidating. “This was my first time ever working on a project this big, so it was really daunting going into it,” Thompson says. Support from resources in the library proved invaluable, and the actual act of research is something Thompson says improved her education immensely. “I was unaware of this entire process, and it really helped my writing. Even as a fourth-year student, I thought I knew everything about APA, and I didn’t. I needed to review my work a lot.”
Thompson will continue working with youth as she moves beyond university, continuing to work in a group home this coming summer with Heritage Family Services.
Faculty of Arts Podium Presentations
On March 28 the Faculty of Arts hosted podium presentations. There were 9 presentations from 11 students, as a well as a poster showcase for the participants of the 2023 Sri Lanka field school. The top three presentations from this event are listed below.
How National Parks Uphold Colonialism: A Case Study of Jasper National Park
Student: Eliot Scharnau
Faculty Advisor: Aaron Johnson
The Prevalence of Suicidality in Eating Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Student: Katilin Berlinguette
Faculty Advisor: Dan Devoe
Roman Digital Osteology
Students: Kayla Praill, Grace Blott
Faculty Advisor: Rebecca Gilmour
Faculty of Science and Technology Poster and Video Presentations
The Faculty of Science and Technology hosted research poster and video presentations on March 27, where 70 posters and 7 video presentations were showcased at the event.
The top three poster presentations for each category, and the best video presentation are listed below. Congratulations to all the winners!
Can You Stand It? Balance Responses to Visual Perturbation in Virtual Reality
Student: Minal Ahuja
Faculty Advisor: Nick Strzalkowski
Mode of Action of Corynacin, a Novel Bacteriocin against Lactococcus lactis
Student: James La
Faculty Advisor: Jeella Acedo
The Impact of Landslides on the Genomics of Pacific Salmon: The Downstream Effects on Upstream Populations
Student: Samantha Cassidy
Faculty Advisor: Sarah Smith
Streamlined Success: Mapping the Morphological Impact of Restoration in Radiant Creek
Student: Pelvain Dhanda, Brock Pearson
Faculty Advisor: Lynn Moorman
Radiant Creek Land Cover Classification and Change Detection Using GIS
Student: Alfred Jageregger
Faculty Advisor: Lynn Moorman
GIS Analysis of Stream Restoration Impact
Student: Depanshu Suyal
Faculty Advisor: Lynn Moorman
Problematic Conical Fossils from the Silurian of Anticosti Island, Quebec: Morphology, Paleoecology, and Evolutionary Relationships
Student: Sarah Newsted, Jessica Faye
Faculty Advisor: Paul Johnston
The Breaking Point" Fragmentation Patterns in Silurian Crinoids
Student: Jasmine Sigurdson
Faculty Advisor: Paul Johnston
Orientation in the Water Column of Baculites, from Upper Cretaceous, Bearpaw Formation
Student: Thomas Hillis
Faculty Advisor: Paul Johnston
Structural, Optical, and Dielectric Insights to Transparent Integration of PZT for Sensor Application
Student: Frederick Harford
Faculty Advisor: Nicoleta Nedelcu
Get involved
Students
Register by March 1 to participate in Research and Scholarship Days