• GELS Project
  
• Animal Organs for Human Transplants
  
• Public Participation on Xenotransplantation
  
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Robin Downey is a PhD student in Communications Studies. She completed her MA Communications degree at the University of Calgary with a thesis on "The Social Construction of Dolly". She is currently working on the GELS project, "Genomics in the Public Sphere: Trajectories of Controversy and Institutional Learning." She will conduct studies of an agricultural (the development of terminator technology) and a medical biotechnology (stem cells) as case studies of technological controversy. Her study will be framed in the context of understanding social movements and technology innovation.

Sharon Mah is a PhD student in Communication Studies. Her thesis research focuses on how health or medical knowledge is constructed through telehealth in First Nation communities using participatory action research. Telehealth offers rural and remote communities the opportunity to enhance health care services at a distance. Telehealth involves video-conferencing between various clinics, which enable direct point-to-point health education, clinical diagnosis, consultations, mentoring, and now robotic assisted surgeries. Sharon has collaborated with First Nations communities from Treaty 8 – Alberta on several research projects and she will continue to build on these relationships in her thesis research.

Greg McMullen is a Master's student in Communication Studies. His thesis work examines the hopes certain groups hold for radical life extension technologies. Through nanotechnology and biotechnology, there are groups that hope to treat death and aging as diseases, effectively making humans immortal. These ideas seem far-fetched, but they are being pursued by both well-funded biotech startups and more radical transhumanist organizations. Greg's thesis explores the culture of these groups, their hopes for the technology, and their motivations for seeking immortality.

Jennifer Medlock is a PhD student in the Faculty of Communication and Culture. The goal of her doctoral research is to examine whether and how the Canadian government has incorporated public participation practices into policy development on biotechnology, and further, to determine lessons learned for new, emerging technologies such as nanotechnology. Before entering the PhD program, Jennifer was the project manager for the Genome Prairie GE3LS project and completed an MA in Communications Studies where her thesis evaluated a public consultation process called a citizens' jury on the topic of xenotransplantation.



Carol Neuman is a Master’s student in Communications studies. Her thesis work explores the ways that non-users and non-supporters can help to shape the development of nascent technologies. Specifically, this research focuses on the involvement of opposition groups in the emerging technology of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. While RFID tags – radio-enabled microchips that function like electronic barcodes – have yet to be widely deployed, many of the future applications of the chips remain highly controversial. Her study will involve interviews with privacy, health and other advocacy groups with the aim of understanding how the risks of RFID are socially constructed.

Kris Perraton is a Masters student in the faculty of Resources and the Environment, an interdisciplinary program at the University of Calgary. His thesis is focusing on stakeholder interactions around new and controversial innovations. For this study, he will be focusing on the rise of new agricultural biotechnology applications and in particular Plant Molecular Farming (PMF). The development of this new innovation has brought about many social issues, from economic, environmental to regulatory challenges. Such a controversial innovation elicits a wide range of stakeholder perspectives and it is these perspectives around this new innovation and how they influence innovation trajectories that will be the focus of this research.

• Science Communication Journal
  
• Canadian Journal of Communication
  
• Media Psychology