About MacSphere

MacSphere is McMaster University's Institutional Repository (IR). The purpose of an IR is to bring together all of a University's research under one umbrella, with an aim to preserve and provide access to that research. The research and scholarly output included in MacSphere has been selected and deposited by the individual university departments and centres on campus.

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Communities in MacSphere

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Recent Submissions

“Well, what do girls do?”: Using the Arts to Learn Why and How Girls Engage in Activism
(2025) Bernier, Alexe
The aims of this arts-based dissertation are to highlight and better understand the experiences of girls who are engaged in activism. Inspired by years of community social work practice with girls, I came to this project with the firsthand knowledge that girls were working hard to create change in their schools, communities, and beyond. I also saw through my community practice that girls’ efforts were often patronized, ignored, and not taken seriously. The goal of this project was, therefore, to showcase and learn about the social and environmental change work of girls, including what motivated, helped, and hindered them in their political pursuits. My dissertation was guided by a critical childhood citizenship theoretical framework, which I developed by integrating theoretical concepts from critical childhood studies and critical citizenship studies. Methodologically informed by principles of feminist participatory action research, I engaged nine girls, aged 8-12 years, from the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (Ontario, Canada) in individual semi-structured qualitative interviews and arts-based focus groups. Girls who participated in this study thus had opportunities to both individually and collectively articulate their key concerns and tensions as related to their engagement with gender and activism. Study findings illuminate why gender matters when thinking about girls’ activism and citizenship. More specifically, these study findings elucidate the gendered nuances of citizenship, the impacts of feminist and postfeminist tensions on girls’ social and environmental change work, and what may constitute “good” and “bad” citizenship for girls. This co-created knowledge makes meaningful contributions to child-centred research, social work research and practice, and the broader study of girls’ citizenship. It is my dream that this work inspires others to take girls seriously as citizens and change-makers, seek out and centre their perspectives and knowledge, and to turn to them as collaborators and co-conspirators as we work towards more socially and environmentally just worlds.
THE ROLE OF EXTERNAL MEMBERS IN COMPETENCE COMMITTEES
(2026) Eskandar Nadeen
Introduction: Competency-based medical education (CBME) is transforming residency training by emphasizing outcomes, including the knowledge, skills, and professional behaviours required for high quality patient care. In Canada, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC) has implemented Competence by Design (CBD) as its national CBME framework. Within CBD, competence committees (CCs) play a critical role in reviewing residents’ progress and making decisions about their advancement. An increasing number of residency programs have begun to include external members in their CC meetings, such as faculty from other departments, researchers, or non-physician healthcare providers (e.g., nurses or social workers). However, scholarly attention to how program CC members and residents perceive external members and the challenges external CC members encounter has been limited. Methods: This qualitative case study was conducted at McMaster University across multiple residency programs. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with program CC members, external members, and residents, as well as direct observations of CC meetings. All interviews were transcribed, and data were analyzed inductively using Yin’s “working your data from the ground up” strategy. Transcripts were coded and organized; themes were iteratively developed, reviewed, and refined. Results: Five themes were developed: 1) Multiple models and roles of external CC members, 2) Preference for one type of external CC member’s expertise over another, 3) External CC members as promoters of integrity, 4) Facilitators for the inclusion of vi external CC members in CCs, and 5) Practical challenges and structural constraints in the inclusion process of external members in CCs. Conclusion: The findings of this work confirm that external CC members are perceived to be a positive addition to CCs, enhancing decision-making processes. The findings have also identified multiple facilitators and challenges to the inclusion of external members in CCs.
WAVEFORM DESIGN FOR MONOSTATIC DOWNLINK INTEGRATED SENSING AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS
(2026) Liang, Runchen
With the opportunities provided by higher frequencies, larger bandwidths, and intelligence, Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is widely recognized as one of the new applications that will drive the development of future generations of wireless networks. This thesis focuses on dual-function radar-communication systems, in which a single waveform is synthesized to achieve both the communication and sensing functions. The thesis develops design techniques for that waveform, aiming to jointly optimize communication and sensing performance, under practical constraints that facilitate implementation. A progressive three-part framework is proposed, covering robust extended linear precoding, hybrid linear-nonlinear precoding, and unstructured direct waveform design. First, to address the sensitivity of the extended linear precoding scheme to imperfect knowledge of the environment, in Chapter 2 we develop a robust design that seeks jointly optimal transmit and radar receive beamformers in the presence of uncertainty. The method maximizes the worst-case Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) in the radar return signal, while ensuring communication users meet their SINR targets with a given probability of outage. Numerical results show that our proposed method can achieve better performance than approaches that are based on heuristic modifications of designs that assume perfect knowledge of the environment. The extended linear precoding architecture used in the robust design facilitates design techniques that are based on statistical models for the communication symbols. That is sufficient for design objectives that are functions of the transmit covariance. However there are several important sensing objectives and implementation constraints that are functions of the waveform itself, and not simply its covariance. In scenarios where those objectives and constraints are important, nonlinear precoding has the potential to provide significantly better performance. The existing approaches to nonlinear precoding take a block-by-block symbol-dependent design approach, and may require adaptation of the communication receivers in each symbol block. Therefore, in Chapter 3 we develop a design technique for hybrid linear-nonlinear precoders (HLNP) that fuses the operational simplicity of statistics-based design of linear precoders and the degrees of design freedom provided by symbol-dependent nonlinear precoding. We evaluate this design approach using a problem that seeks to minimize a simplified Cramer-Rao bound on angle estimation of multiple point targets. Our experimental results show that the proposed method achieves essentially the same performance as an existing symbol-dependent hybrid linear-nonlinear precoding, while being able to directly control the transmitted waveform and maintaining receiver adaption on the time scale of environment coherence time. Finally, in Chapter 4 we introduce a new approach to unstructured direct waveform design. Unlike existing approaches, which require the receivers to have fixed equalizers, or to update the equalizers for every data block, the proposed design allows the equalizer at each receiver to be adapted at the scale of the coherence time, using the conventional dedicated downlink training, while maintaining the ability to explicitly control the transmitted waveform. In an example employing sensing objectives obtained from a Bayesian Cramer-Rao bound, the proposed approach demonstrates performance that is close to the methods with equalizer adaption at the time scale of the data block, better than the methods with constant equalizers, and better than symbol-dependent linear precoding techniques.
What is the impact of a Capacity-Builder? An evidence-based account of nonprofit organizational impact
(Prepared by the McMaster Research Shop for Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion, 2025-08) Gowrikanthan, Namagal; Gupta, Ribhav; Mishra, Shraddha; Patel, Anjali; Denga, Ver-Se
The Hamilton Center for Civic Inclusion (HCCI) positions itself as a “connector” or “incubator” within Hamilton’s nonprofit ecosystem. Their work may be reflected across three defined organizational models: intermediary, network weaver and collective impact backbone organization. In the increasingly competitive landscape of nonprofit funding, successfully communicating the impact of their work is challenging compared to, for instance, a direct service provider. HCCI’s impact is essential. By using jurisdictional scan and literature review methodology, we investigated two questions whose answers would inform the way that HCCI communicates their value and impact to potential funders and other stakeholders. Firstly, we sought to understand how similar organizations define their work and synthesized model definitions and goals that are shared between each type of organizational model. Then, we investigated the evidence-based impact of each organizational model on their nonprofit ecosystem and community, with a specific focus on how each model advances equity.
Rapid evidence profile #95: Exploring the impact of exercise as a treatment for people living with mental health conditions
(2025-09) Bain T; Whitelaw H; Waddell K; Dass R; Sivanesanathan T; Bhuiya AR; Alam S; Grewal E; Osorio-Bustamante D; Saleh R; Wu N; Wilson MG
An overview of the best available research evidence from around the world (i.e., evidence syntheses) and local research evidence (i.e., single studies) and may include a scan of experiences from other countries and from Canadian provinces and territories, about the impact of exercise as a treatment for people living with mental health conditions in response to a decision-maker’s request.

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