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Type d'Item : Item , What is Arctic Sustainable Development? Pressuring Energy Development and Natural Resource Exploitation under Inuit Self-Determination in Nunavut and Kalaallit Nunaat(Université d'Ottawa | University of Ottawa, 2026-08-27) Soer, Anna; Katz-Rosene, RyanAs the media and states have picked up on the narrative of the Arctic as a goldmine for rare earths and minerals and resources, both Nunavut and Greenland are at the centre of international attention. The coming to power of President Trump of the United States of America in 2025 has started with a second heavy push to purchase Greenland from Denmark. Greenlandic officials however have reiterated that the answer to these pressures is not a debate on who would be a better colonizer between Denmark and the USA, but to remain focused on Greenland’s self-determination and path towards independence. Meanwhile, in the case of Canada’s Arctic, midst the threats to Canadian sovereignty by claiming the country as a 51st state, Inuit officials in Nunavut remain clear on their own path towards self-determination within the Canadian federacy. This thesis-by-article is situated within this complex social, political and economic ecosystem and asks the fundamental question: “How do global and national energy-transition resource exploitation pressures reconfigure environmental governance in Greenland and Nunavut?” The first article of the thesis-by-articles – published in the Arctic Yearbook - dissects the underpinning political dynamics in regional natural resource development and global decarbonization. The main research question for this article is “How are natural resource exploitation pressures during the global energy transition reshaping environmental governance in Greenland and Nunavut, and what do these dynamics reveal about the applicability of Arctic Exceptionalism as a defining concept for the region?” The second article – currently under review with The Polar Journal - continues with the topic of natural resource development in line with Inuit self-determination, zooming in in Greenland as an independent state-to-be. It asks “How do Greenland’s political–economic choices in resource and energy development shape its pursuit of energy sovereignty?” The third article – published at The Northern Review - zooms in on Nunavut at the municipal and territorial governance level and dives deeper in the question of Inuit knowledge advanced by the previous article. The study asks “In what ways are community consultation practices and Inuit Knowledge embedded in renewable-energy decision-making in Nunavut, and how effective are they under Nunavut, Canadian, and international frameworks?” The articles each identify key findings for the fields of International Relations and critical political geography in their applicability to Arctic studies. The thesis helps address theoretical gaps of epistemological nature and empirical gaps in this field through a multidisciplinary approach. The main findings of the first article point towards an enmeshment of regional securitization with imperatives of environmental (sustainable) governance. Specifically, natural resource development (especially mining) has become a powerful avenue for decolonial and ecological self-determination against the colonial state (Canada and Denmark) and international growing pressures. The main findings of the second article are situated at the conceptual refining of the tensions between agency and structure where energy sovereignty, under the ‘post’ of Greenland’s colonial era, is structured by a balancing act between extractivism and ecology. Global interests thereby underscore Greenland’s sustainable development paradigm. The results elaborated on in the third article how differences in (i) federal language versus territorial language, in (ii) the theory of centering Inuit knowledge versus its implementation, and in (iii) the theory of community consultation based in the Duty to Consult and the Free, Prior and Informed consent frameworks versus its implementation in federal and territorial policy on resource and energy development. These tensions between the federal, the territorial, and intra-territorial, showcase how Inuit self-determination becomes a maneuver against colonial imposition in defining sustainability.Type d'Item : Item , Evaluation of Virtual Reality-Based Diagnostic Devices in Tertiary Care Ophthalmology(Université d'Ottawa | University of Ottawa, 2026-08-27) Dang, Catherine; Tsilfidis, CatherineThe integration of virtual reality (VR) technologies into clinical ophthalmic practice has accelerated in recent years. VR-based diagnostic platforms have the potential to provide comparable diagnostic performance relative to conventional ophthalmic testing while offering advantages in portability, cost-effectiveness, standardized test administration, and accessibility. This comparative cross-sectional study evaluated the validity and diagnostic utility of two commercially available VR headsets integrated with two novel diagnostic applications, (i) Order of Magnitude (OM) and (ii) Retinalogik ©, for visual field and pupillary assessment relative to the current standards of care at the University of Ottawa Eye Institute. Primary visual field outcome measures included test duration, mean deviation (MD), and pattern standard deviation (PSD). Agreement between the VR-based systems and the reference standards was evaluated using Pearson correlation and Bland–Altman analysis, while pointwise threshold agreement was assessed through heatmap visualizations and spatial analyses. Pupillary assessment focused on the detection and categorical grading of a relative afferent pupillary defect (RAPD), with diagnostic concordance evaluated through a contingency table analysis. The VR-based diagnostic platforms demonstrated diagnostic performance comparable to the standard of care testing methods, supporting their diagnostic validity relative to conventional clinical methods. Overall, this study demonstrated the feasibility and diagnostic validity of integrating VR-based diagnostic platforms into tertiary eye care settings, while highlighting their potential to expand access through remote and decentralized clinical workflows.Type d'Item : Item , Docile Bodies or Resistant Bodies? Tracing Power Dynamics in Elite Iranian Muslim Sportswomen's Experiences(Université d'Ottawa | University of Ottawa, 2026-08-27) Saffari, Marjan; Dallaire, ChristineThis dissertation examines how power operates through mechanisms of regulation, normalization, moral governance, and resistance in shaping the lived experiences, ethical subjectivities, and professional identities of Iranian elite sportswomen. This research addresses a significant gap in understanding how relations of power are exercised and experienced within the elite sport system of the Islamic Republic of Iran. While Iranian sportswomen have gained increasing international visibility, existing scholarship has often overlooked the institutional, religious and moral conditions through which this visibility is produced and regulated. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s conceptualizations of sovereign power, disciplinary power, biopower, pastoral power, and ethics, this dissertation conceptualizes elite sport in Iran not simply as an athletic field, but as gendered site of state governance. This research is based on semi-structured interviews with 26 Iranian elite sportswomen, coaches, and referees and consists of four interconnected articles examining different dimensions of the Iranian elite sport system. The findings demonstrate that elite sport in the Islamic Republic of Iran operates through overlapping regimes of surveillance, religious regulation, and moral governance that extend beyond athletic performance into athletes’ bodies, conduct, visibility, and private lives. Women athletes emerge not only as competitors, but also as symbolic carriers of religious and Islamic Republic values whose legitimacy remains conditional upon conformity to dominant gendered expectations. Surveillance operates through institutional monitoring, digital observation, interpersonal relations, and self-regulation, producing athletes who continuously negotiate the boundaries of visibility, intelligibility, and participation. The dissertation further shows that women are not merely passive subjects of domination. Rather, they engage in ongoing practices of strategic compliance, concealment, selective visibility, silence, and resistance in order to sustain participation within restrictive conditions. Resistance emerges not outside power, but within the very relations through which elite sportswomen are governed. Policies such as mandatory hijab and sex segregation, often framed through discourses of protection and morality, function simultaneously as technologies of discipline and control that reorganize vulnerability while obscuring institutional accountability. Within this context, silence frequently becomes a necessary strategy of survival and increases the likelihood of exposure to sexual exploitation during training sessions and competitions. The dissertation also demonstrates how ethical subject formation differs across generations of Iranian elite sportswomen. While the earlier “lost generation” experienced exclusion, erasure, and withdrawal from elite sport, the contemporary “conditional generation” encounters forms of regulated inclusion in which participation depends upon conformity to prescribed moral and ideological norms. Across both generations, compliance often reflects negotiation, survival, and aspiration rather than moral alignment with dominant norms. Returning to Foucault’s metaphor of theory as a toolbox, this dissertation mobilizes Foucauldian concepts not as a closed explanatory system, but as analytical tools for interrogating how power, surveillance, and moral regulation shape women’s participation in elite sport. The analysis unsettles taken-for-granted assumptions surrounding visibility, participation, protection, and resistance, demonstrating how practices such as silence, strategic compliance, and negotiated visibility emerge as conditions of possibility within structured relations of power, while simultaneously challenging dominant assumptions regarding neutrality, autonomy, and safeguarding within elite sport.Type d'Item : Item , An Integrated PS-InSAR and Machine Learning Framework for Bridge Displacement Monitoring(Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2026-08-26) Sadeghian, Ehsan; Dragomirescu, Elena; Cusson, Daniel; Inkpen, DianaEnsuring the safety and long-term performance of bridge infrastructure requires reliable methods for monitoring structural behavior over time. Traditional structural health monitoring (SHM) systems often rely on in-situ sensors that provide detailed measurements, but are typically limited in spatial coverage and access to the bridge site. In contrast, satellite-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) enables millimeter-level displacement monitoring over large areas without the need of installing and maintaining sensors. This thesis develops a new approach for integrating the time-series modeling, SAR satellite interferometry and machine learning techniques, to better support data-driven structural monitoring. As employing ML techniques for structural investigations must be correctly applied, initially, a FEM model of a cantilever beam and dynamic loading was investigated and its response time-series modeling approaches, similar to the ones used in SHM, were examined, with particular attention to deep learning methods such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, multivariate time-series transformers and LSTM-based autoencoders. These models are reviewed and analyzed for their ability to capture complex temporal patterns in structural response data and their potential for supporting data-driven damage detection. Once these techniques were confirmed as accurately performing for structural applications, a real bridge was selected for monitoring with remote sensing methods (satellites) and used the ML techniques for the assessment of the measured responses. Thus, Persistent Scatterer InSAR (PS-InSAR) method was applied to derive displacement time series for persistent scatterer points, over five years, located on the Victoria Bridge in Montreal. Statistical and temporal features were extracted from the displacement signals and an unsupervised anomaly detection framework based on the Isolation Forest algorithm was developed to identify unusual displacement patterns. Spatial filtering, to ensure the neighborhood consistency of the identified anomalous points on the deck, and bridge deck-axis segmentation, to create regular bins of measured data that are easier to interpret statistically but structurally as well, were developed and implemented to improve the robustness of anomaly identification. These techniques are newly developed in the current study. The proposed framework was extended to a multi-satellite analysis of PS-InSAR observations from Sentinel-1, RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), and RADARSAT-2 to identify the challenges and compatibilities between the measurements of the same monitored structure. Having access to data from three different satellites tasked to monitor the same structure, Victoria Bridge in this case, is very rare and very valuable. Using an enhanced anomaly detection workflow that integrates statistical filtering and spatial constraints, displacement trends and anomaly patterns were compared across different satellites datasets to assess the consistency and reliability of satellite-based bridge monitoring. The PS-InSAR investigation of the Victoria Bridge, enhanced with anomaly detection using spatial filtering techniques, demonstrated that the proposed approach can effectively highlight spatial zones with concentrated anomalies, while improving the interpretability of satellite-derived displacement measurements. Together, these contributions illustrate the potential of combining satellite remote sensing and machine learning techniques to support scalable and data-driven approaches for long-term bridge monitoring.Type d'Item : Item , Structural Studies of the Sterol Transporter ABCG5/G8: Nanodisc Reconstitution, Cryo-EM, and Nanobody Discovery(Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2026-08-26) Gursu, Gonca; Lee, Jyh-YeuanABCG5/G8 is a heterodimeric ATP binding cassette transporter that mediates cholesterol and dietary plant sterol efflux in the liver and intestine and plays an essential role in sterol homeostasis. Dysfunction of ABCG5/G8 is associated with sitosterolemia and cardiovascular disease risk. Despite progress in structural characterization, available structures have been determined in detergent micelles or restricted lipid environments which may not accurately reflect the native membrane context. In this thesis, ABCG5/G8 was expressed in Pichia pastoris, purified, and reconstituted into lipid nanodiscs by evaluating four membrane scaffold protein and lipid combinations. The optimal MSP1E3D1/POPC condition enabled single particle cryo-EM structure determination in a native-like lipid bilayer environment under apo, cholesterol-incubated, and cholesterol/AMP-PNP-incubated conditions, with the apo reconstruction reaching 3.15 Å resolution. In parallel, five unique ABCG5/G8 binding nanobodies were identified using yeast surface display. Together, this work establishes a foundation for structural studies of ABCG5/G8 in a native-like lipid bilayer environment and provides ABCG5/G8 specific nanobodies as new molecular tools for future structural and therapeutic applications.