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UBC Faculty of Education:
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.
Recent UBC Media Releases
- Sep. 14: UBC astronomers help put Einstein’s general relativity theory
through its most stringent test yet
Upcoming Event Highlights
- Sep. 15: UBC Fine Arts graduate student exhibition: Strange Bedfellows
- Sep. 15: Borealis String Quartet – works by Beethoven, Mozart and
Mendelssohn - Sep. 16: Lecture – Athens, Birthplace of Democracy
- Sep. 16: UBC Men’s soccer v. Victoria – Thunderbird Stadium
- Sep. 17: Celestial Strings Gala
- Sep. 21: How the BBC conquered the web: News in a digital age
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
- Nobel laureate wins physics education award
- UBC Okanagan hires new academic and research
leader - Seven UBC faculty join the Royal Society of Canada
- UBC Education professors receive CIHR funding
- New family and child literacy project launched
UBC People
Nobel laureate wins physics education award
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carl Wieman and
his team from the University of Colorado were awarded a 2006 Editors’
Classics award through the Multimedia Educational Resource for
Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT). The team’s site provides
illustrations of physical models and simulations that provide
different ways to study and learn, including movement of virtual
objects and manipulating numbers and equations. The simulations
use research about the ways in which students learn physics and
has shown that students who use just the simulation have a better
conceptual understanding of currents, voltages and circuits.
Wieman recently joined UBC to head up a US$12-million, five-year
initiative to help reform science education. MERLOT is a National
Science Foundation-funded digital library that provides peer-reviewed
evaluations of learning material and assignments.
For more information: http://taste.merlot.org.
UBC Okanagan hires new academic and research
leader
Dr. Alaa Abd-El-Aziz, a leading Canadian chemistry
scholar from the University of Winnipeg, has joined UBC Okanagan
as the institution’s first Associate Vice President, Academic
and Research.
Abd-El-Aziz was educated in Egypt and Canada and received his
PhD in chemistry from the University of Saskatchewan. He was an
NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and joined
the University of Winnipeg as an Asst. Prof. in 1990 and was promoted
to Professor in 1997. He has held a variety of positions at the
University of Winnipeg, including Chair of the Department of Chemistry,
Dean of Science (2000-2001), Associate Vice President, Academic
(2001-2004), and most recently Vice President of Research, International
and External Affairs.
Seven UBC faculty join the Royal Society
of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada’s Academies of Arts, Humanities
and Sciences of Canada has elected 82 new Fellows, including UBC’s
English Prof. Eva-Marie Kröller, English
Prof. Laurence Ricou, Health Care Prof. Clyde
Hertzman, Zoology Prof. Sarah Otto,
Community and Regional Planning Prof. William Rees,
Biochemistry Prof. Natalie Strynadka and Neurology
Prof. Yu Tian Wang. Founded in 1882, the RSC
is Canada’s oldest and most prestigious scholarly organization.
For more information: www.rsc.ca.
UBC Education professors receive CIHR
funding
Faculty members in UBC’s Dept. of Education and Counselling
Psychology and Special Education were awarded operating grants
from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Asst.
Prof Jennifer Shapka received $300,000 through
CIHR’s Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health
for her project entitled “Risk and protective factors associated
with adolescent Internet use: An examination of socio-emotional
well being and cognitive development.”
Education Assoc. Profs. Rod McCormick and Ishu
Ishiyama were co-applicants on a $297,240 CIHR Aboriginal
Health Human Resources in Community-Based Research project entitled
“Injury in British Columbia’s aboriginal communities: Building
capacity while developing knowledge.” McCormick is also
co-applicant on a $411,000 CIHR grant project entitled “The
impact of long QT syndrome on First Nations people of Northern
British Columbia: A community based research program.”
New family and child literacy project
launched
Enhancing family literacy and children’s school achievement is
the focus of new research launched this fall by Education Language
and Literacy Profs. Jim Anderson and Victoria
Purcell-Gates, Canada Research Chair, Early Childhood
Literacy. Over the next two years the Intergenerational Literacy
Program will develop and measure the impact of a new teaching
model that promotes literacy in the home and interaction between
parents and children using texts, newspapers, books, documents
and forms that are part of the family’s everyday routines. The
UBC Bookstore has provided $100,000 to fund this pilot project.
