In the News

UBC Reports | Vol. 49 | No. 7 | Jul.
3, 2003

Highlights of UBC Media Coverage in June 2003.

Compiled by Cristina Calboreanu

UBC Receives Major Donation

William Sauder, the 77-year-old chairman of International
Forest Products Ltd. and Sauder Industries Ltd., has given
$20 million to the University of British Columbia in the largest
single private donation ever made to a Canadian business school.
“I have been inordinately lucky and I wanted to give
something back to this country,” he said.

UBC president Martha Piper said the donation “will help
UBC move into the first rank of business education and research
in North America.” Proceeds of the endowment will be
used to create 125 new student spaces, add more faculty and
boost the scope of the research at what is already one of
Canada’s largest business schools.

The UBC Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration was
renamed the Sauder School of Business.

The story ran in The Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun and
The Vancouver Province, as well as on BC CTV.

Canadian Astronomers Find Jupiter’s New Moon

Brett Gladman, UBC associate professor of physics and astronomy,
together with his graduate student Lynne Allen and J. J. Kavelaars
of the National Research Council have found Jupiter’s
61st moon. Prof. Gladman told The Globe and Mail that new
light-sensitive cameras (mounted on telescopes situated on
the top of Mount Mauna Kea in Hawaii) and computer algorithms
to process the data helped them “wallpaper the sky around
the planet three times in three consecutive months so [they]
were sure [they] would find everything.”

A new TRIUMF for Science and Health Care

A new $27.5-million research facility opened at TRIUMF, Canada’s
national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics on the
UBC campus. The B.C. government contributed $8.7 million for
a massive building that houses an expansion of an isotope
separator and accelerator (ISAC) built in the mid-1990s to
produce exotic atoms that can be used for everything from
emulating stars to treating eye cancer.

“ISAC is the best facility in the world to do nuclear
astrophysics,” TRIUMF’s science director Jean-Michel
Poutissou told The Ottawa Citizen. TRIUMF experiments involve
chemists, physicists, computer scientists, chemical engineers
and technologists.

‘Humble’ Telescope to Seek New Planets

Canadian astronomers hope to get the first good look at planets
outside our solar system with a tiny space telescope which
rode into orbit on June 30. “If it works, we’ll
be the first humans in history to see reflected light from
a planet outside our Solar System,” Jaymie Matthews,
UBC associate professor of physics & astronomy, told The
National Post. The reflected light will reveal the size of
the planets and the composition of their atmospheres.

Dubbed the “humble” telescope, in deference to
NASA’s Hubble, the MOST telescope (for Microvariability
and Oscillations of Stars) is just 60 cm wide and 30 cm deep,
which makes it the tiniest space observatory ever built. And
at $10 million, it ushers in an era of affordable space exploration.

The Bacteria Hunter

In its Canada’s Best series, TIME profiled Brett Finlay,
the UBC professor of microbiology and biochemistry who is
leading the charge to decipher and disarm the weaponry that
harmful bacteria use to cause illnesses. According to TIME,
in two decades, Prof. Finlay has pioneered more breakthroughs
in microbial pathogenesis than most microbiologists will in
a lifetime. One of his most astounding discoveries was defining
how the crafty E. coli 0157:H7 bacterium, which causes bloody
diarrhea and kidney failure in children, binds to its host.
Finlay’s discovery has prompted other scientists to identify
different bacterial pathogens that bind to host cells by a
similar mechanism.

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