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Doctoral Examinations & Schedule

Overview

The Final Oral Examination (FOE) is the capstone experience of your doctoral studies. General information about the FOE is outlined in the SGS Calendar. The Final Oral Examination schedule (see calendar below) lists current thesis defenses, and is updated periodically.

Additionally, you may find helpful the Guidelines for the Doctoral Final Oral Examination (FOE), a document that outlines the responsibilities of the graduate unit, SGS, the Examination Committee, and the Chair of the Committee in the planning and conduct of a Final Oral Examination. Faculty and Staff can access additional resources on the SGS Final Examinations webpage.

Academic fees for continuously registered Ph.D. candidates in the final year of the program are pro-rated over the 12–month academic year, based on the date of the final approved thesis submission to SGS. Incidental fees are charged on a sessional (term) basis. More information on the pro-rated fees and schedules can be found in Graduate Fees and on the Student Accounts website under Current Fall–Winter Fee & Refund Schedules.

In-person examinations at the School of Graduate Studies

Requests to book the rooms at 63 St. George Street are covered by the following guidelines.

  • Exam rooms are available for blocks of up to three (3) hours between 9:30 AM and 4:30 PM ET, Monday to Friday.
  • Exam rooms have maximum capacities as indicated on the Book a Meeting Room website.
  • All participants should bring their laptop or tablet with them; the computer, camera, and microphone in the room can be used to provide a full room view for remote participants. The computer is currently configured for anyone to sign into their Zoom or Microsoft Teams account. Teleconference is also available for a maximum of two participants.
  • All signature files and forms will be administered electronically.
  • Please avoid the use of perfume, cologne, hairspray and other scented products when you visit the School of Graduate Studies. Refer to the University’s Guidelines on the Use of Perfumes and Scented Products.

Doctoral examination schedule

Exam DateStudent NameExam Information
(Thesis, Supervisor(s), Graduate Unit)
Jan 5Name: Mohammad Haghighi Week-Long Microsimulation of Activities Using Data from a Smartphone Application-Based Activity-Travel Survey
Supervisor(s): Prof. Eric Miller
Graduate Unit: Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering
Jan 5Name: Mohammad Hesam Rashidi Human-Centred Last-Mile Logistics
Supervisor(s): Prof. Matthew Roorda, Prof. Mehdi Nourinejad
Graduate Unit: Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering
Jan 6Name: Stephanie J Ziembicki Improvements in Exposure Assessment Methodologies for Diesel Engine Exhaust Exposure
Supervisor(s): Prof. Victoria Arrandale, Prof. Paul Demers
Graduate Unit: Department of Public Health Sciences
Jan 6Name: Doris Maria Theresa Adao The Role of microRNAs in Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy
Supervisor(s): Prof. Filio Billia, Prof. Craig Simmons
Graduate Unit: Institute of Biomedical Engineering
Jan 7Name: Anas Mahmoud Multimodal Learning for 3D Perception in Autonomous Driving Environments
Supervisor(s): Prof. Steven Waslander
Graduate Unit: Institute for Aerospace Studies
Jan 7Name: Jeffrey Stulberg The molecular and cellular changes that define Muller glial cell reprogramming in the regenerating larval zebrafish retina
Supervisor(s): Prof. Vince Tropepe
Graduate Unit: Department of Cell and Systems Biology
Jan 8Name: Gautier Courbon Structure, function, and inhibition of mycobacteri al ATP synthase and EtfD
Supervisor(s): Prof. John Rubinstein
Graduate Unit: Department of Medical Biophysics
Jan 8Name: Benjamin Gallagher “I’d kind of like to know how this was supposed to go”: Poetic Practice, Pedagogy, Resilience, and Responsibility in a Community Writing Workshop
Supervisor(s): Prof. Rob Simon
Graduate Unit: Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning
Jan 8Name: Sheida Monica Stephens Toward Solar-Powered Cell Factories: Integrating Materials, Measurements, and Metabolic engineering in Rhodopseudomonas palustris
Supervisor(s): Prof. Grant Allen, Prof. Radhakrishnan Mahadevan
Graduate Unit: Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry
Jan 8Name: Katherine Ilia Nicoll The Structure and Meaning of Container Phrases in Labrador Inuttitut
Supervisor(s): Prof. Keir Moulton, Prof. Suzi Oliveira de Lima
Graduate Unit: Department of Linguistics
Jan 8Name: Geetam Mall Using scintillation to measure pulsar orbits and probe the structure of the interstellar medium.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Ue-Li Pen, Prof. Marten van Kerkwijk
Graduate Unit: Department of Physics
Jan 9Name: Honghua Dong Towards Reliable and Practical Language-Model Agents: Evaluation and Development
Supervisor(s): Prof. Xujie Si, Prof. Christopher Maddison
Graduate Unit: Department of Computer Science
Jan 9Name: Ehsan Etesami Distributed Multi-domain Application Service Chain
Supervisor(s): Prof. Alberto Leon-Garcia
Graduate Unit: Edward S. Rogers Sr. Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engin.
Jan 9Name: Nicholas Smith Transitory Affects: Remote work and financial frontiers in Athens, Greece
Supervisor(s): Prof. Chris Krupa
Graduate Unit: Department of Anthropology
Jan 9Name: Jiajia Zhou The Populist Challenge to Democracies in Real and Nominal Terms
Supervisor(s): Prof. Phillip Lipscy
Graduate Unit: Department of Political Science
Jan 9Name: William Aidan Staples Moral Judgment of Macrosocial Systems
Supervisor(s): Prof. Jason Plaks
Graduate Unit: Department of Psychology
Jan 9Name: Dafe Oputu Who Needs City Hall? Patterns of Local Democracy in Urban West Africa
Supervisor(s): Prof. Antoinette Handley
Graduate Unit: Department of Political Science
Jan 9Name: Amanda Norton An Assessment of Air Pollution Exposure: Exploring NO2 and PM2.5 Exposure Injustices in the the Peel Region of Ontario, Canada
Supervisor(s): Prof. Matthew Adams
Graduate Unit: Department of Geography and Planning
Jan 9Name: Judith E. MacKinnon THE QUEST FOR MEANINGFUL EMPLOYMENT: PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES ENTRY INTO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AS PART OF THE DISABILITY INCLUSION ACTION PLAN, 2025
Supervisor(s): Prof. Tanya Titchkosky
Graduate Unit: Department of Social Justice Education
Jan 12Name: Christian Eros Drago The birth, life, and death of squeezed light
Supervisor(s): Prof. John Sipe
Graduate Unit: Department of Physics
Jan 12Name: Louis Ngai Regulation of Intestinal Homeostasis Through a BMP2-CSF1 Circuit
Supervisor(s): Prof. Arthur Mortha
Graduate Unit: Department of Immunology
Jan 12Name: Fei Wang Revealing and Mitigating Privacy Leakage in Distributed and Foundation Model Learning
Supervisor(s): Prof. Baochun Li
Graduate Unit: Edward S. Rogers Sr. Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engin.
Jan 12Name: Ladan Berahman Exploring the Relationship Between Residential Parking and Travel Behaviour Through a Smartphone-Based Survey
Supervisor(s): Prof. Eric Miller
Graduate Unit: Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering
Jan 12Name: Vikas Srinivasan Sridhar Efficacy, Mechanisms and Safety of SGLT2 Inhibition in Participants at Varying Cardiovascular Risk and in Kidney Transplant Recipients
Supervisor(s): Prof. David Cherney
Graduate Unit: Institute of Medical Science
Jan 12Name: Rachel Windsor Playing Dirty: Surviving Girlhood Sexual Trauma in Contemporary American Literature and Culture
Supervisor(s): Prof. Naomi Morgenstern
Graduate Unit: Department of English
Jan 13Name: Alix Julia Jansen Delegation at the Street Level: Employment Service Delivery in Practice
Supervisor(s): Prof. Linda White
Graduate Unit: Department of Political Science
Jan 13Name: Shivam Sharma Engineering Diabetic Wound Healing Solution: Mechanisms, Modeling, and Smart Nanotherapeutics
Supervisor(s): Prof. Anil Kishen
Graduate Unit: Faculty of Dentistry
Jan 13Name: Shivam Sharma Engineering Diabetic Wound Healing Solution: Mechanisms, Modeling, and Smart Nanotherapeutics
Supervisor(s): Prof. Anil Kishen
Graduate Unit: Faculty of Dentistry
Jan 13Name: Shashank Motepalli Decentralization in Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms: Quantification and Advancement
Supervisor(s): Prof. Hans-Arno Jacobsen
Graduate Unit: Edward S. Rogers Sr. Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engin.
Jan 14Name: Alice Shan Dissecting the Heterogeneity of Metastatic Neuroblastomas with Single Cell Transcriptomics
Supervisor(s): Prof. David Kaplan, Prof. Meredith Irwin
Graduate Unit: Institute of Medical Science
Jan 14Name: Melissa Biscardi Oculomotor Rehabilitation After Concussion in Adults
Supervisor(s): Prof. Tatyana Mollayeva, Prof. Angela Colantonio
Graduate Unit: Rehabilitation Sciences Institute
Jan 15Name: Eli S Joseph Jany “You think we are half shadows, but we know more than you”: Lives and Life Writing of Disabled Yiddish Speakers in Interwar Poland
Supervisor(s): Prof. Angelica Fenner, Prof. Doris Bergen
Graduate Unit: Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures
Jan 15Name: Belay Tadesse Gebregergis Investigating the Role of C9orf72 in Synaptic Func tion
Supervisor(s): Prof. Janice Robertson
Graduate Unit: Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology
Jan 16Name: Eva Kristina Plesnik In the Shade on Parnassus: Places of Otium in Renaissance Humanism
Supervisor(s): Prof. William Robins
Graduate Unit: Centre for Medieval Studies
Jan 16Name: Miad Laghaei Peak-to-Average-Power-Ratio Reduction Techniques for Discrete Multi-Tone Systems
Supervisor(s): Prof. Ali Sheikholeslami
Graduate Unit: Edward S. Rogers Sr. Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engin.
Jan 19Name: Joseph McGowan An Amplified Stern-Gerlach Measurement of a Bose- Einstein Condensate
Supervisor(s): Prof. Aephraim Steinberg
Graduate Unit: Department of Physics
Jan 20Name: Alexandra Noelle Atiya Economic and Spiritual Conflict in Medieval East Anglian Drama
Supervisor(s): Prof. Suzanne Akbari
Graduate Unit: Centre for Medieval Studies
Jan 20Name: Garrett Morgan Goals, Gaps, and Good Intentions: Characterizing Justice in the Municipal Climate Action Strategies of Amsterdam, Glasgow, New Orleans, and Toronto
Supervisor(s): Prof. Blake Poland, Prof. John Robinson
Graduate Unit: Department of Geography and Planning
Jan 21Name: Raul Salas Reyes The Influence of the Differential Treatment Norm in the International Governance of Climate Change
Supervisor(s): Prof. William Gough
Graduate Unit: Dept. of Physical & Environmental Sci (UTSC)
Jan 21Name: Sebastien Roy-Garand Searches for Heavy Neutral Leptons in the ATLAS detector
Supervisor(s): Prof. Nikolina Ilic
Graduate Unit: Department of Physics
Jan 22Name: Fatemeh Mirshafiei Langari Targeting Metabolic Dysregulation in Ischemic Heart Disease by Identifying Reparative Mediators from Pediatric Stromal Cells
Supervisor(s): Prof. Jason T. Maynes
Graduate Unit: Department of Biochemistry
Jan 22Name: Yuqiu Zhang Taming Complexity and Uncertainty: An Adaptive Approach to Resource Management in Cloud-Native Systems
Supervisor(s): Prof. Hans-Arno Jacobsen
Graduate Unit: Edward S. Rogers Sr. Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engin.
Jan 23Name: Kiley Goyette Direct and Indirect Platform Labour Cleaning for Short-Term Rental Platforms
Supervisor(s): Prof. Deborah Leslie
Graduate Unit: Department of Geography and Planning
Jan 23Name: Mahreen Khan Characterizing Tandem Repeat Expansions and their Contributions to Disorders
Supervisor(s): Prof. Christopher Pearson
Graduate Unit: Department of Molecular Genetics
Jan 23Name: Sean Edward Grisdale PUBLIC LAND, PRIVATE PROFIT: LAND PRIVATIZATION AND THE RISE OF THE CONDOMINIUM IN THE CONDOMINIUM IN THE GREATER TORONTO AREA 1978-2023
Supervisor(s): Prof. Alan Walks
Graduate Unit: Department of Geography and Planning
Jan 26Name: Steven Botts Uncovering Regulation of Aortic Endothelial Cell Fate by the ETS Transcription Factor ERG: Towards Novel Therapeutic Targets for Atherosclerosis
Supervisor(s): Prof. Jason Fish, Prof. Kathryn Howe
Graduate Unit: Institute of Medical Science
Jan 26Name: Zoya Fatima Tawhidi FcγRIII as a Central Effector in Antibody-Med Platelet Clearance: Mechanistic Insights Across Im mune Thrombocytopenic Disorders
Supervisor(s): Prof. Alan Lazarus
Graduate Unit: Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology
Jan 27Name: Sophia Hailemariam Molecular characterization of the human immune response to Plasmodium falciparum transmission-blocking antigens
Supervisor(s): Prof. Jean-Philippe Julien
Graduate Unit: Department of Biochemistry
Jan 27Name: Jennifer Gottwald Toward Quantitative PET Imaging of Tumor Hypoxia i n Cervical Cancer
Supervisor(s): Prof. David Jaffray
Graduate Unit: Department of Medical Biophysics
Jan 28Name: Xiao Min Chang Retribution vs. Restoration: A Developmental Investigation of Judgments and Reasoning about Post-Transgression Interventions
Supervisor(s): Prof. Tina Malti
Graduate Unit: Department of Psychology
Jan 28Name: Gabrielle Migliato Marega Designing and Operating Sanitary Sewers Under Uncertainty in Data-Scarce Contexts
Supervisor(s): Prof. David Meyer
Graduate Unit: Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering
Jan 28Name: Namjee Kim Gallium Nitride High Electron Mobility Transistors for Liquid Cooled Power Module and Radio Frequency Applications
Supervisor(s): Prof. Wai Tung Ng
Graduate Unit: Edward S. Rogers Sr. Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engin.
Jan 28Name: Zijin Liu Bayesian Causal Inference Methods for Matrix-Value Data in Radiotherapy Planning
Supervisor(s): Prof. Olli Samuli Saarela, Prof. Zhihui Liu
Graduate Unit: Department of Public Health Sciences
Jan 28Name: Nana Gulic Gender and Citizenship Education: The Case of Croatia
Supervisor(s): Prof. Miglena Todorova
Graduate Unit: Department of Social Justice Education
Jan 29Name: Kleio Chatanaka Blood-based Proteomic Signatures for Distinguishin g Glioma Subtypes and Predicting Patient Outcomes
Supervisor(s): Prof. Eleftherios Diamandis
Graduate Unit: Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology
Jan 30Name: Julia Tom From touch to movement: the role of central tactile suppression in the fine motor performance of expert musicians and musical novices.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Joyce Chen
Graduate Unit: Department of Kinesiology (Graduate)
Jan 30Name: Michael G Reid Sodomites and Woman-Haters: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Queer Experience
Supervisor(s): Prof. Simon Dickie
Graduate Unit: Department of English