The UTM Office of the Dean, Experiential Education Unit and Mississauga Library System are proud to present Lecture Me! a series of lectures by UTM Faculty
The Lecture Me! series highlights research from different departments by UTM faculty members in a way that is approachable and fun for the whole family. This multidisciplinary series will feature a different faculty member each month who will deliver their presentation to the community about their research.
The events will be hosted in-person at the Mississauga Library Noel Ryan Auditorium typically on the first Tuesday of each month from 7:00-8:15pm.
Registration is required for all talks and can be completed through the Mississauga Library on Eventbrite. Registration information and links will be posted on this page as they become available.
For any issues relating to registration, please contact customer service at 905-615-4100 or email rec.info@mississauga.ca.
The 2026-27 Season is now here!
| Date | Faculty Name | Description | Event Registration |
|---|---|---|---|
Tuesday, September 15, 2026 | 
Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences | Demystifying Artificial Intelligence: Big Ideas Behind How Machines Learn Modern generative artificial intelligence feels like magic. But actually, under the hood, it's all math that has been developed over many decades. This talk will pull back the curtain, taking a historical perspective before developing intuitions for how these newer models are built, what they are capable of, and why they make the kind of mistakes they do. The goal is to have very little math (maybe a few multiplications and additions) and focus more on the "big ideas." Throughout, the talk will draw on research related to misconceptions and mistakes that learners make about artificial intelligence and machine learning | Register Here |
| Tuesday, October 6, 2026 | 
Professor Christina der Nederlanden Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences | Learning to Communicate: How Do We Pay Attention to What's Relevant in Our Busy Auditory World? Dr. Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden studies how children become fluent in two of the most important forms of human communication: music and language. As a developmental cognitive neuroscientist, her work uses lab tasks and electroencephalography (EEG) to measure how infants, children, and adults perceive pitch and rhythm in speech and song and how perception and production changes as children develop. Christina will also highlight how musical features can be leveraged to improve speech perception and how the human brain is biased to seek out certain types of sounds in our busy auditory environments. | Register Here |
| Tuesday, November 3, 2026 | 
Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment | Disabling Cities: Stories about Food, Barriers and Safety Cities are often celebrated as places of opportunity, connection, and inclusion. Yet for many disabled people, everyday activities such as buying groceries, travelling across town, or crossing a street can become difficult, frustrating, and dangerous. The problem is not disability itself, it is often the ways cities are designed, organized, governed, and experienced. More than one quarter of Canadians aged 15 and over identify as disabled, and most live in urban areas. Many report disabilities related to pain, mobility, flexibility, and mental health, ways of being that shape how people move through and experience city life. Drawing on decades of research, as well as my experiences with acquired hearing loss and as the parent of a disabled child, I explore how cities can disable the people who live in them. Using stories from research and everyday life, I examine three interconnected issues: the hidden relationship between disability and food insecurity; the nature of barriers that can turn an apparently accessible city into an impassable one; and the ways traffic and pedestrian environments can create disproportionate safety risks for disabled people. Taken together, these stories show how disability is shaped not only through bodies and minds, but also through the design and organization of urban life. After all, cities are not accidents; they are made by us. | Register Here |
| Tuesday, March 2, 2027 | 
Department of English and Drama | Real Estate Fictions This talk approaches real estate as fiction. Although it denotes material ownership of spatial commodities, real estate also operates in the world of storytelling, fantasy, and projection. Stanka Radovic, Associate Professor of English at UTM, will discuss how contemporary real estate discourse constructs “dream houses” for potential buyers. Her talk will consider various examples of real estate listings, photographs, staging blogs, and interior design publications to reflect on the aspirational identities woven into real estate listings. As a literary scholar, Radovic is especially interested in the “story” that underpins these real estate narratives as well as the speculative fiction—the buyer’s future—that they seek to articulate. The goal of this talk to interrogate how the materiality of real estate relies on and generates powerful fictions. | Registration Opening Soon |
| Tuesday, April 6, 2027 | 
Department of Sociology | Aboriginal vs. Indigenous: What’s in a Word? In 1982, s.35 of Canada’s Constitution Act embedded the word “aboriginal” in Canada’s contemporary legal and political foundation. In 2020, the Canadian government’s chief/manager of the Library of Parliament, Tonina Simeone, uploaded a blog post directed towards civil servants, titled “Indigenous peoples: Terminology Guide.” In it, Simeone advises federal public servants to, wherever possible, privilege the use of the world "Indigenous," over that of "Aboriginal." What happened in the 40 years since its introduction in federal legislation, to make the word Aboriginal fall so far out of favour as to be relegated to the dustbin of terminological history? Simeone’s blog reflects a societal shift worth noting. The word Indigenous is now the obvious choice when one needs to draw on a broad term of reference for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. It has also become a significant part of many people's identities. It shapes socio-political interactions, culture, and increasingly, law. In 2017, Indigenous-led digital agency Animikii wrote that unlike the term Aboriginal, the usage of the word Indigenous comes “from within the Indigenous communities themselves.” They thus insist that the term Aboriginal has been imposed on Indigenous peoples by the federal government— and ultimately by non-Indigenous peoples. This talk offers context for these debates over terminology while also asserting that the introduction of Aboriginal, its power and its decline, marks a significant moment in the struggle for Indigenous rights recognition and the relationship between Indigenous nations and the Canadian state. | Registration Opening Soon |
Additional lecture details will be posted as they become available!