Posted on by Claus Rinner

Victoria Fast and Daniel Liadsky receive Ryerson’s top award

Blog post co-authored by Victoria Fast, Daniel Liadsky, and Claus Rinner

Ryerson’’s Department of Geography and Environmental Studies is celebrating two gold medal recipients this fall. The Ryerson Gold Medals are the University’s highest honours, presented annually to one graduate of each Faculty. Victoria Fast (PhD in Environmental Applied Science and Management, supervised by Dr. Claus Rinner) received the Gold Medal for the interdisciplinary programs housed at the Yeates School of Graduate Studies, while Daniel Liadsky (MSA in Spatial Analysis, supervised by Dr. Brian Ceh) received the Gold Medal for the Faculty of Arts.

Victoria’’s PhD research investigated the potential of novel geographic information techniques to reshape the interaction of government with community organizations and citizens through crowdsourcing and collaborative mapping. The study applied a VGI systems approach (Fast & Rinner 2014) to actively engage with urban food stakeholders, including regional and municipal government, NGOs, community groups, and individual citizens to reveal and map uniquely local and community-driven food system assets in Durham Region. The Durham Food Policy Council and Climate Change Adaptation Task Force are currently using the results to support informed food policy and program development. Victoria’s research contributes to geothink.ca, a SSHRC Partnership Grant on the impact of the participatory Geoweb on government-citizen interactions.

Daniel’’s research in the Master of Spatial Analysis (MSA) examined how dietary intake is mediated by individual, social, and environmental factors. The Toronto-based study was stratified by gender and utilized self-reported data from the Canadian Community Health Survey as well as measures of the food environment derived from commercial retail databases. The results uncovered some of the complex interactions between the food environment, gender, ethnocultural background, and socioeconomic restrictions such as low income and limited mobility. In addition and as part of an unrelated investigation, Daniel undertook a feasibility study into a mapping and data analytics service for the non-profit sector.

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