Lakehead University Knowledge Commons

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Recent Submissions

Environmental education in healthy active living education courses: a justice-oriented resource for Ontario secondary educators
(2026) Phillips, Madison M.; Russell, Connie; Kerr, Donald
The purpose of this portfolio is to develop a resource that supports Ontario Healthy Active Living Education (HALE) teachers in integrating environmental education (EE) through a justice-oriented lens. While curriculum documents may highlight the importance of EE, they often offer limited guidance on how to meaningfully apply it within Health and Physical Education (HPE) contexts. This resource aims to bridge that gap by connecting environmental issues to health, wellbeing, and social justice. There are three tasks in this portfolio. The first task is a literature review that examines how EE is defined and connected to human health, while situating it within broader social justice frameworks. It analyzes Ontario curriculum and policy documents to assess how EE is positioned within the HPE curriculum, establishing the foundation for the subsequent components of this portfolio. The second task is a digital resource in the form of a website that is designed to support HALE educators by curating relevant articles and resources. The site also features annotated summaries that outline a foundational article’s key argument and its relevance to EE, along with considerations for classroom application, to bridge the gap between theory and practice. The final task is a short reflection on the portfolio process and the portfolio's effort to challenge dominant ideologies and engage with diverse ways of knowing within HPE and EE.
Integrating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Resource Manual for Nunavut School Food Program
(2026) Villanueva, Aira Fusilero; Burnett, Kristin; Berger, Paul
This portfolio examines school food programs at Inuksuk High School in Iqaluit as a case study for addressing food insecurity and advancing Inuit food sovereignty through culturally grounded education. Drawing on experience as a school food coordinator, it analyzes breakfast, lunch, Grab and Go, and in-school food bank programs to identify best practices, barriers, and scalable solutions rooted in Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ). The guiding question asks how Nunavut schools can address food insecurity while supporting food sovereignty through student-centered programs. This question frames a 120-page resource that includes a literature review, program mapping across Nunavut communities, and a Nunavut School Food Program Resource Manual. The manual outlines standards and expectations, policies, the Inuit Calendar Year, health protocols, implementation challenges, recipe ideas, and funding strategies. Situated within Nunavut’s 46.6 percent household food insecurity rate, the portfolio contextualizes current challenges within the ongoing impacts of colonial disruption to Inuit food systems. It contrasts Canada’s Food Guide with the culturally grounded Nunavut Food Guide, emphasizing country foods such as caribou and seal. The integration of IQ is highlighted through Elders’ knowledge, harvesting practices, and intergenerational learning, alongside persistent barriers including climate-related constraints and infrastructure gaps. School food programs are positioned as critical sites for improving nutrition, strengthening attendance, and supporting cultural continuity, aligning with national policy directions such as the National School Food Program. The resource manual offers practical, adaptable tools for educators while prioritizing community self-determination, nutritional equity, and resilience.
pH-responsive lignin-incorporated PVA/chitosan hydrogels
(2026) Teapaibool, Siriream; Fatehi, Pedram; Kang, Kang; Djafaripetroudy, Seyed Rahman
Hydrogels are three-dimensional polymeric networks capable of retaining large amounts of water while maintaining structural integrity. Among them, poly(vinyl alcohol)/chitosan (CS) systems have attracted attention due to their complementary mechanical and physicochemical properties; however, they often suffer from limited functionality, insufficient environmental responsiveness, and suboptimal performance under dynamic conditions. The incorporation of lignin, an abundant aromatic biopolymer, has emerged as a promising strategy to enhance hydrogel performance. However, challenges such as poor dispersion and aggregation of kraft lignin (KL) can restrict its effectiveness. In this thesis, the effects of chemical modification and nanoscale fabrication on hydrogel performance were systematically investigated by incorporating kraft lignin (KL), lignin nanoparticles (KL-NP), carboxyethylated lignin (CE), and carboxyethylated lignin nanoparticles (CE-NP) into CS hydrogels at 6% and 8% loadings. KL-NP systems demonstrated improved dispersion, porosity, and antibacterial activity compared to raw KL, confirming the advantages of nanoscale structuring. Carboxyethylation further enhanced hydrophilicity and functional group accessibility, while nanoparticle formation promoted more uniform distribution within the polymer network. Hydrogels containing CE-NP exhibited the most uniform and interconnected porous structure, with high surface area (148–150 m²/g) and pore volume (0.138–0.140 cm³/g). Notably, these hydrogels achieved a swelling ratio exceeding 2000%, along with enhanced mechanical properties, including tensile strength of 0.246 MPa and elongation at break of 138.1%. In addition, CE-NP systems showed improved pH responsiveness and antibacterial activity against S. aureus and E. coli, particularly. Importantly, all lignin-containing hydrogels demonstrated complete UV-blocking across the UVC, UVB, and UVA regions, highlighting the intrinsic photoprotective capability imparted by lignin. These hydrogels also demonstrated excellent UV durability, with negligible changes in surface wettability and stable or enhanced mechanical properties after UV exposure. Lignin effectively protected the polymer networks from UV-induced degradation, while carboxyl functionalization and nanoparticle reinforcement promoted UV-induced crosslinking, resulting in increased stiffness without compromising surface hydrophilicity. Overall, the results demonstrate that the synergistic combination of carboxyethylation and nanoparticle formation significantly enhances polymer–filler interactions, network homogeneity, and functional performance. This work provides a systematic understanding of how lignin modification strategies can be used to design high-performance hydrogels with tunable structural and physicochemical properties.
Integrating endocrine biomarkers and landscape structure to advance non-invasive demographic and physiological monitoring of woodland caribou
(2026) Malloy, Hannah E.; Thomson, Ashley; McLaren, Brian; Laforge, Michel; Algar, Adam
Effective conservation of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) requires monitoring approaches that can provide biological information from wide-ranging, low-density populations where direct observation is difficult. Non-invasive fecal sampling is already used in caribou monitoring for genetic identification, sex determination, and population estimation, but the potential for fecal samples to provide additional information on age-class, pregnancy status, and endocrine variation remains less developed. This thesis evaluated the utility of fecal morphometric and endocrine biomarkers for deriving biological information from winter-collected fecal samples in woodland caribou from the Churchill Range of northwestern Ontario. First, we assessed whether fecal pellet morphometrics could distinguish among age-classes during winter, and whether fecal progesterone concentrations could be used to distinguish pregnant from non-pregnant females. Gaussian mixture modeling revealed no evidence of discrete morphometric size classes within sex after accounting for seasonal variation, indicating that pellet morphometrics provided limited age-class resolution. In contrast, fecal progesterone concentrations exhibited clear bimodality and supported classification of most females as pregnant or non-pregnant. Second, we evaluated whether fecal cortisol concentrations varied across gradients of anthropogenic disturbance and landscape composition. Fecal glucocorticoid concentrations were negatively associated with the proportion of the landscape burned within the previous 40 years and positively associated with the proportion of wetlands, indicating that this endocrine biomarker varied with landscape conditions. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that fecal endocrine biomarkers can strengthen non-invasive monitoring of woodland caribou by supporting pregnancy-status classification and providing insight into landscape-associated variation in fGCM concentrations.
Severity-aware optimization of UAV-based emergency medical services with AI-driven prioritization
(2026) Yeasmin, Habiba; Ejaz, Waleed; Khandaker, Faria; Hai, Shafiqul; Yaseen, Maysa
Rapid emergency medical response following disasters is often hindered by damaged infrastructure, limited situational awareness, and the difficulty of rapidly assessing and prioritizing victims using conventional emergency medical service (EMS) systems. Although uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown promise for aerial reconnaissance and disaster monitoring, existing UAV-assisted emergency-response frameworks typically focus either on victim detection or on logistics-oriented resource allocation in isolation, with limited integration between aerial perception and downstream dispatch decision making. Consequently, current systems do not adequately support severity-aware UAV-assisted EMS allocation in which dispatch decisions are informed by the inferred condition or urgency of observed victims. To address this problem, this thesis proposes an integrated UAV-assisted emergency medical response framework that links aerial victim detection, visual criticality estimation, and optimization-based UAV dispatch within a unified perception-to-decision pipeline. UAV-acquired disaster imagery is first processed using a YOLOv8-based human detection model, a deep learning–based real-time object detection algorithm, to localize affected individuals. Detected victims are then analyzed using a binary criticality classifier trained on aerial disaster imagery from the C2A dataset, augmented with posture-based criticality annotations to distinguish higher-risk victims from less urgent cases. These outputs are combined within a triage-inspired scoring framework to generate severity and priority estimates for spatial demand regions. The resulting perception-derived severity and priority information is incorporated into a tailored mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for UAV-enabled EMS dispatch and facility-allocation optimization that jointly considers travel time, operational cost, severity coverage, and priority coverage. Unlike conventional cost-focused UAV-assisted EMS baseline, which assumes homogeneous demand, the proposed model explicitly incorporates perception-derived triage information into dispatch decisions. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that incorporating perception-derived severity and priority information enables the proposed framework to allocate UAV resources in a manner more aligned with victim criticality than conventional cost-focused dispatch strategies. These results demonstrate the feasibility of integrating aerial perception with optimization-based dispatch to support severity-aware UAV-assisted EMS planning and provide a foundation for future perception-driven emergency-response systems.