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UBC This Week is a weekly summary of UBC people in the news, recent media releases and upcoming event hightlights. UBC This Week past issues are also available on-line.
Sign up for UBC This Week and other UBC Public Affairs e-mail services at www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/eservices.
Upcoming Event Highlights
- Apr. 8: UBC Student Composers
- Apr. 8: Vancouver Institute Speakers Series: "Moses – Myth, Archeology and History"
- Apr. 8: Quartetto Gelato
- Apr. 9: Men’s Baseball vs. Albertson College
- Apr. 9: Pacific Spirit Concert
- Apr. 11: Creating a Culture of Sustainability
Find out what else is happening at UBC this week.
For sports events, visit the UBC Athletics site at www.gothunderbirds.ca/schedule.asp.
UBC People
- President Piper to be awarded an honorary degree from University of Alberta
- UBC secures two 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship Awards
- Inaugural Pollay Prize recognizes marketing in the public interest
- Pharmaceutical Sciences receives major in-kind donation
- UBC Press nominated for three industry book prizes
- Environmental engineering team places second in national competition
- Computer Science students head to world finals – third year running
- UBC hosts international anthropology conference
UBC People
President Piper to be awarded an honorary degree from University of Alberta
Outgoing UBC President Martha Piper will be one of several recipients of honorary degrees from the University of Alberta during its spring convocation June 7-13. Dr. Piper will receive an Honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD).
UBC secures two 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship Awards
UBC Professor Timothy Brook (Chinese History) and Associate Professor Linda Svendsen (screenwriter) have secured two of the highly prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship Awards. This is the first time a screenwriter has won the honour. The 2006 Fellowship winners include 187 artists, scholars, and scientists selected from more than 3,000 applicants for awards totaling $7.5 million.
The 82nd annual Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished past achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s United States and Canadian competition recognizes a wide range of expertise from 78 different fields spanning the natural sciences to the creative arts and are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisors.
Inaugural Pollay Prize recognizes marketing in the public interest
The inaugural recipient of the Pollay Prize is Marketing Prof. Marvin Goldberg from Pennsylvania State University, an expert on food marketing and its impact on childhood obesity and public health. The Sauder School of Business Pollay Prize recognizes intellectual excellence in the study of marketing in the public interest.
Goldberg will be speaking at UBC on April 7, 2-3:30 p.m. at Sauder’s David Lam Amphitheatre on “Obese Children and Public Health – Using Marketing as a Solution, Not just the Problem.” Based on his report to the US Institute of Medicine, Goldberg will discuss how food and beverage companies spend billions each year in advertising targeting children and youth. He will also review public health interventions such as advertising restrictions, limiting in-school food merchandising, labeling, and education that can help young people better defend themselves against advertising.
The prize is named after UBC Sauder School of Business Professor Emeritus Richard Pollay, an expert on tobacco industry advertising and a scholar who has investigated the history, regulation, values and social effects of advertising. The award is the first of it’s kind in North America and is open to nominations from around the world. For more information: www.liveat.ubc.ca.
Pharmaceutical Sciences receives major in-kind donation
The Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences has received an $884,600 in-kind donation of mass spectrometry equipment from Waters Limited.
"This donation represents the latest technology available and will make a huge difference to our researchers and to graduate student training," says Pharmaceutical Sciences Prof. Wayne Riggs. "In addition to low level drug and metabolite measurement, we can now undertake analyses that include exact mass determination, metabolic profiling (metabolomics) and proteomics. These latter three techniques were not previously available in our faculty."
UBC Press nominated for three industry book prizes
From more than 55 submissions, UBC Press book “Governing with the Charter: Legislative and Judicial Activism and Framers’ Intent,” by James B. Kelly has been shortlisted for the 8th annual Donner Prize, an award for the best book on Canadian Policy. The award will be announced, along with the $35,000 prize, on April 27 2006.
UBC Press book “The Courts and the Colonies: The Litigation of Hutterite Church Disputes,” by Alvin J. Esau has been shortlisted for the Margaret McWilliams Book Prize, a prize that encourages the study and interpretation of the history of Manitoba.
UBC Press book “Vanishing British Columbia,” by Michael Kluckner has also been shortlisted for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Book Prize, an award recognizing the author of the best original non-fiction literary work in the BC Book Awards Category.
Environmental Engineering Team Places Second in National Competition
Engineering students Lani McPherson, Belinda Li, Jen von Gradulewski and Marie Manchester won a silver medal in the category of consulting engineering. The team—the only winning four-person team consisting entirely of women—is currently in first and second-year at UNBC. Li and von Gradulewski will be attending UBC beginning this fall for third-year of the Environmental Engineering program, a joint-degree program offered collaboratively through UNBC and UBC’s Faculty of Applied Science.
The Canadian Engineering Competition is the largest student engineering competition of its kind in the world and invites only students who have performed at a high level at regional competitions. The 2007 Western Engineering Competition between the nine engineering schools in western Canada will take place at UBC, January 17-21. For more information: www.wec2007.wesst.ca.
Computer Science students head to world finals – third year running
A team of UBC Computer Science programming students has once again beat out more than 2000 teams in regional finals in order to attend the April 12th World Finals in San Antonio Texas. For the previous three years the team has secured the top spot at the Pacific Northwest Regional round of the international contest – affectionately named the Geek Olympics by programming enthusiasts, as well as placing 15th and 17th at the two previous finals in Prague and Shanghai respectively.
Sponsored by IBM and the Association for Computing Machinery, the 30th Annual International Collegiate Programming Contest attracts more than 5,000 university teams worldwide. The team includes Coach Bartholomew Furrow, Yury Kholondyrev, Wei-Lung Dustin Tseng, Mathew Chan, and Michael Chuang.
UBC hosts international anthropology conference
Co-hosted by Anthropology and Sociology Professor Bruce Miller, the 66th annual international meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology was held March 28-April 2, 2006 in Vancouver. Entitled "World on the Edge," the meeting brought together more than 2000 delegates from interdisciplinary backgrounds to assess central forces shaping our world — globalization, multiculturalism, boundaries and borderlands, population migration, and development.
The meeting invited papers to explore how these forces push populations to the edge of their environment, their culture, their political autonomy, and how culture and identity may be maintained in multicultural settings. For more information: www.sfaa.net.
