Dr. Somayeh Kafaie, Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Computer Science, Faculty of Science

TOPIC: Network Science for Safer Medicine

Network science provides a powerful framework for modelling complex systems and has increasingly been applied to address critical challenges in healthcare. This talk will present an overview of how network-based and machine learning approaches can be used to predict harmful drug–drug interactions (DDIs), a major concern in the era of polypharmacy. I will first briefly highlight the broader role of network science in understanding interconnected biomedical systems, and then present recent work on the use of hypergraph neural networks to capture higher-order, multi-drug interactions associated with adverse outcomes. I will also discuss ongoing research on constructing demographic-aware biomedical knowledge graphs that incorporate patient-specific factors to enable personalized DDI prediction. Together, these efforts illustrate how network science and AI can contribute to safer medication practices and more personalized healthcare.

Research Expo

Dr. Paulo Ravecca, Associate Professor of Political Science, Faculty of Arts

TOPIC: Reading the Far Right Beyond Self-Righteousness

My intellectual project is anchored in the power of self-reflection, understood as a theoretical and affective praxis. I have explored this theme in my work on the politics of political science in the Americas (Ravecca 2019; Ravecca, Rossello and Seri, 2025), narrative and autoethnography (Ravecca and Dauphinee 2018), attachments to innocence (Ravecca and Dauphinee 2022), and far-right politics (Ravecca et al. 2023; Ravecca 2024). Building from this trajectory, this talk reflects on what it means to study the far right beyond self-righteousness. Both journalistic commentary and much scholarly work tend to approach the far right as an abnormality—as the radical Other of democracy, liberalism, the liberal order, globalization, and modernity. This move not only mirrors the “populist” scapegoating so forcefully rejected by liberals and progressives, but also rests on a series of historical and intellectual inaccuracies. Against this complacency, I argue that the rise of the far right constitutes a powerful opportunity to exercise radical critique and self-critique. I examine how key elements of liberalism, neoliberalism, political science’s conventional conceptions of democracy, and identity politics are appropriated, reworked, and weaponized by far-right actors. Moreover, these reactionary forces have already reshaped mainstream conversations around immigration, inequality, minority rights, and related issues. In this sense, the far right is not—nor has it ever been—external to “our” institutions and subjectivities.