Tuesday October 25, 2016 at 7:30 pm
in the Valhalla Room of the Scandinavian Centre,
739 – 20th Ave N.W. Calgary.
 
Speaker:
Patricia A. Pardo  – Director, Accessibility Services, Mount Royal University

The Talk:
Post-secondary institutions are required to take a pro-active approach in addressing disability related issues, and in establishing policies and programs that are accessible, equitable, and inclusive for students experiencing disabilities. Academic accommodations play an important role in creating an equitable environment where respect for the dignity of persons experiencing disabilities and respect for confidentiality are both realized. This presentation will provide an overview of the academic accommodation process, the disability related paradigms underlying the process, and an introduction to universal design for learning.

Biographical Notes:
Dr. Pardo was born in Mexico City and immigrated to Canada with her family in 1967. She speaks Spanish fluently and has, over the course of her career, worked in both Mexico and Central America. She has spent the last twenty-eight years of her career examining disability, diversity and equity issues and has also had the opportunity to work with post-secondary students by teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in the areas of equity and disability.  Dr. Pardo received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology with a specialization in Disability and Multicultural Organizational Change. She was the Director of the Disability Resource Centre (Student and Academic Services) and an adjunct assistant professor with the Faculty of Education, both at the University of Calgary.   She has been the President of both the Canadian and Alberta Associations of Disability Service Providers in Post-Secondary Education and is currently President Elect of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services.  Dr. Pardo is a Chartered Counsellor through the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association and is the Director of Accessibility Services at Mount Royal University.

​Nobuyuki Matsuzawa1,Hiroyuki Maeshima1,Hideyuki Arai1,Masaru Sasago1,Eiji Fujii1,Karl Leswing2,Mathew Halls2,Tim Robertson2,Kyle Marshall2,Joshua Staker2,Gabriel Marques2,Tsuguo Morisato2,David Giesen2,Alexander Goldberg2

​Materials exhibiting higher mobilities than conventional organic semiconducting materials (e.g. fullerenes and heteroacenes [1]), are in high demand for applications such as printed electronics. In order to explore new molecules in the heteroacene family that might show improved mobility, a massive theoretical screen of hole-conducting properties of molecules were performed using a cloud computing environment. Over 7,000,000 structures of fused furans, thiophenes and selenophenes were generated, and 250,000 structures were randomly chosen for subsequent DFT (Density Functional Theory) calculations of hole reorganization energies (λh). Utilizing the cloud-computed DFT dataset of a quarter-million reorganization energies, the de novo design method proposed by Gomez-Bombarelli [2] was applied to find further chemical structures with minimal reorganization energy. This method converts molecular structures into continuous variables by applying the variational autoencoder/decoder technique, which enables optimization of chemical structures in a continuous numerical space. Results of the inverse design showed that the method has the ability to generate exotic chemical matter, such as structures with a seven- and eight-membered rings, with reasonably low calculated reorganization energies.