Five Queen's University professors have been elected as fellows to the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), one of the highest honours for Canadian academics in the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences. The five newest fellows from Queen's have a wide variety of research interests, including health, chemistry, computing and music composition.

"The five newly elected fellows have all made important contributions to their respective fields and are a testament to Queen's commitment to excellence in research," says Principal Daniel Woolf. "I wish to congratulate, on behalf of the Queen's community, these researchers on this tremendous and well-deserved honour."

The five new RSC members include:

Elizabeth Eisenhauer (Oncology), a leader in the investigation of cancer drug delivery and cancer clinical trials. Dr. Eisenhauer’s work has led to new standards of cancer treatment and new understandings of how the molecular mechanisms of cancer can be altered by therapeutic invention. From 2006-2009, Dr. Eisenhauer served as president of the National Cancer Institute of Canada, and in 2013, she was elected a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

"It is an honour, of course, to be elected to the Royal Society of Canada," says Dr. Eisenhauer, "especially for work that I love."

Marjan Mozetich (Music), an award-winning composer who has uniquely blended elements of modern and classical music to develop a fusion style both innovative and accessible to all types of audiences. He has written more than 65 works of vocal and instrumental combinations for theatre, film, dance, as well as symphonic works, chamber music and solo pieces that have been performed around the world. He has received numerous Canadian and international awards and honours for his compositions.

"I feel very privileged to be recognized by my colleagues," says Dr. Mozetich. "To have what I do, as a creative, be given credence and importance by my colleagues in the arts and sciences is a tremendous honour."

Ugo Piomelli (Mechanical and Materials Engineering), a world expert in the area of fluid dynamics.  He has made fundamental contributions to the profession by developing numerical models capable of predicting turbulent flows, and by successfully applying these methods to increase the understanding of the turbulence physics. The models he developed are commonly used by the industrial and research communities, including aerospace, mechanical and environmental engineering, in geophysics and meteorology.

"I am honoured, truly honoured, to be recognized by my peers for my work," says Dr. Piomelli.

Keith Poole (Microbiology), a highly respected scholar who has made fundamental contributions to understanding the interplay between basic bacterial physiology and infectious disease. Importantly, he discovered a family of antibiotic pumps that export multiple antimicrobials out of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. These so-called multidrug pumps are common in disease-causing bacteria, and their discovery has revolutionized the field of antimicrobial chemotherapy and resistance and influenced antibiotic development in the pharmaceutical industry.

"I've never done this for accolades. I'm a scientist and, like my peers, am motivated by curiosity," says Dr. Poole. "However, to have an audience of those same peers acknowledge my work is a tremendous honour."

Suning Wang (Chemistry), a researcher whose innovative approaches to luminescent materials and inorganic chemistry has contributed to opening up a significant new research field: photo-responsive organoboron materials and chemistry. Her studies on the phenomena of photochromism, photoelimination and switchable luminescence of organoboron systems, together with her pioneering scholarship on blue fluorescent and blue phosphorescent emitters for organic light emitting diodes have reinvigorated research on organoboron photochemistry and organoboron-based materials chemistry worldwide.

"I'm very honoured to be elected into the Royal Society of Canada," says Dr. Wang. "Recognition by one's peers is the highest honour a scientist can receive."

The Royal Society of Canada is the senior and most prestigious academic society in Canada. Members represent a wide range of academic fields, including the arts, social and natural sciences and humanities. Candidates can be nominated by existing members, seconded by at least two others, or by one of the society's member institutions. Existing members of the society then vote to elect the next cohort of fellows. Election to the society is considered one of the highest honours in Canadian academia.

The RSC serves to promote Canadian research and scholarly accomplishment, to recognize academic and artistic excellence, and to advise governments, non-governmental organizations and Canadians on matters of public interest. For more information, visit the RSC website. 

Queen’s University developmental psychology professor Stanka Fitneva has co-authored a study in the journal Science that, for the first time, explores the replicability of psychology research.

The Reproducibility Project: Psychology, launched nearly four years ago, is one of the first crowdsourced research studies in the field. The researchers’ most important finding was that, regardless of the analytic method or criteria used, fewer than half of their studies produced the same findings as the original study.

“This is a unique project in psychology, and maybe in all of science," says Dr. Fitneva. "It's the first crowdsourcing project where a number of labs from universities all around the world are involved in an effort to see to what extent findings that are published in major journals can be replicated by independent labs."

The 270 researchers in the study, at facilities around the globe, re-examined studies from the 2008 issues of Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Efforts were made to ensure the team re-evaluating a study had relevant research expertise, to reduce the likelihood of error. The teams then attempted to reproduce the results of the study.

Reproducibility means that the results recur when the same data are analyzed again, or when new data are collected using the same methods. While the project hypothesized a reproducibility rate approaching 80 per cent, the authors were surprised to discover that less than half of the target findings were reproduced.

Dr. Fitneva's team attempted to reproduce the results of an earlier study into the effects of language on children’s object representation. The previous study found that children were more likely to remember an object when the description of its features included direction (i.e. the red part is to the left of the green part) than when it did not (i.e. the red part is touching the green part). Dr. Fitneva's study utilized the materials provided by the authors and a larger sample size. The replication identified several factors that appear to have been excluded from consideration in the original study and may circumscribe the effect.

Dr. Fitneva and her co-authors propose three possible reasons for the surprising lack of reproducibility they encountered: small differences in how the studies were carried out; a random chance failure to detect the original result; or the possibility the original itself was a false positive. In addition, they highlight another possibility – the preeminence placed on new and innovative discoveries has incentivized researchers to aim for "new" rather than "reproducible" findings.

"Publication bias in science is a major issue and, in the last couple of years, more and more has surfaced about the detrimental consequences of this bias," says Dr. Fitneva. "Just like in any aspect of human activity, there are incentives that influence the conduct of research. Our journals have been prioritizing the publication of, and thus rewarding researchers for, novel and surprising findings."

"When we find something surprising it catches the imagination of the public and the media just as much as it catches the imagination of researchers and journal editors. We need to balance the verification processes in science against the drive for innovation. Assessing the reproducibility of findings is essential for scientific progress but currently researchers receive few rewards for engaging in this practice," says Dr. Fitneva.

The full results of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology have been published in the journal Science.

Queen’s University researcher Martin Duncan has co-authored a study that solves the mystery of how gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn formed in the early solar system.

In a paper published this week in the journal Nature, Dr. Duncan and co-authors Harold Levison and Katherine Kretke (Southwest Research Institute) explain how the cores of gas giants formed through the accumulation of small, centimetre- to metre-sized “pebbles.”

“As far as we know, this is the first model to reproduce the structure of the outer solar system – two gas giants, two ice giants, and a pristine Kuiper belt beyond Neptune,” says Dr. Duncan.

The “standard model” for planet formation states that these cores formed a slow procession of accretion. Small fragments, only micrometres across, would accumulate to form larger rocks. These rocks would then collide with other objects, combining and growing larger. These collisions must occur at a very precise angle and speed to allow the objects to combine. Too fast and they both shatter; too slow and accretion cannot occur. This process of collision and growth would continue until the core reached the mass necessary, approximately 10 times the mass of Earth, to begin collecting gasses and growing into the gas giant planets we see today.

However, Dr. Duncan points out, the gas disk from which the planets would have drawn their atmospheres would have only been present for one to 10 million years. This timeline poses a major challenge for the standard model. Given that Earth is believed to have taken between 30 and 100 million years to form under the standard model, another mechanism would have to explain how planetary cores formed.

“The model doesn’t seem to produce (cores) massive enough or quickly enough,” says Dr. Duncan.

The model created by Dr. Duncan and his team found that collisions and accumulation of the so-called pebbles would have allowed the cores to form much more rapidly. Through hundreds of computer simulations, each taking several weeks or longer to run, the team’s simulations were able to produce multiple cores within the predicted timeframe for the gas giants to form. The model also predicts the formation of one to four gas giant planets; consistent with what we see in the outer solar system.

This was a major breakthrough for Dr. Duncan and his team, as previous simulations under the standard model had only been successful in isolation without outside interference from other planets forming nearby. For the first time, the team was able to simulate the environment of the entire early solar system and successfully replicate what exists today.

“It is a relief, after many years of performing computer simulations of the standard model without success, to find a new model that is so successful,” says Dr. Duncan.

When asked what the next steps may be in proving his model, Dr. Duncan said he would like to explore the formation of the rocky planets of inner solar system like Earth. He also suggests studying some of the wide variety of exoplanets recently discovered to see if his model can remain consistent with new findings in other solar systems.

“A lot of our understanding of how planets are formed has been radically revised in view of these new observations,” says Dr. Duncan. “We’re finding amazing diversity in these systems, so it’s a very exciting time to pursue these investigations.

The full study has been posted on the Nature website.