UBC Feature Web Site
Congress 2008:
UBC This Week is a weekly summary of UBC people in the news, recent media releases and upcoming event highlights. 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
Upcoming Event Highlights
- May 2: The 21st-century Engineer: A discussion of engineering education reform
- May 4: Rob Kapilow’s Family Musik: The Four Seasons
- May 6: We Are All One”—A Performance by Skeena Reece
- May 8: Taking Care of Your Mental Wellness
- May 8: Moscow Virtuosi and Vladimir Spivakov
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
- Staff members receive President’s Service Award for Excellence
- UBC professor receives Killam Prize
- Cancer Research Chair endowed at UBC
- BCNET Broadband Innovation Challenge winners announced
- Faculty of Medicine holds annual awards evening
- Deadline for proposals for e-Strategy Town Hall
- Health conference addresses millennium goals
- Cycling skills course at UBC
- Challenges of Higher Education in Japan
UBC People
Staff members receive President’s Service Award for Excellence
Five members of the university community will receive the President’s Service Award for Excellence (PSAE) during Spring Congregation Ceremonies.
This year’s winners are James Bellavance, Facilities Manager, Plant Operations; Richard Moore, Facilities Co-ordinator, UBC Library; Patricia Rose, Secretary of the Arts and Creative Writing Program; Margaret Tom-Wing, Executive Coordinator to the Dean of Arts; and Moya Waters, Associate Director of the Museum of Anthropology.
Each recipient will receive a gold medal and $5,000 in recognition for their outstanding contributions to campus life and for personal achievements.
For full biographies, visit www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/ubcreports/2008/08may01/psae.html.
UBC professor receives Killam Prize
Prof. Sherrill Grace, Department of English, is one of five Canadian scholars awarded a 2008 Killam Prize, to be presented in June. Grace is a pioneer in Canadian literary studies and the author of Canada and the Idea of North, 150 years of representations of the Canadian North in art, music, fiction, poetry and drama.
The annual $100,000 awards, inaugurated in 1981, are granted by the Canada Council for the Arts for outstanding career achievements in engineering, natural sciences, humanities, social sciences and health sciences. The Prizes are financed through funds donated to the Canada Council by Mrs. Dorothy J. Killam in memory of her husband, Izaak Walton Killam.
For more information, visit www.canadacouncil.ca.
Cancer Research Chair endowed at UBC
Prof. Carolyn Cook Gotay, Department of Health Care and Epidemiology in the Faculty of Medicine, has been named the Canadian Cancer Society Chair in Cancer Primary Prevention. She will help develop a national cancer prevention strategy by researching the links between diet, exercise, body weight, stress and environmental carcinogens to specific types of cancer.
The Chair was created by a $4 million endowment from the Province of B.C. to the Canadian Cancer Society.
The Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation will provide $750,000 towards the chair, together with support from Canadian Cancer Society donors.
For more information, visit www.gov.bc.ca/aved.
BCNET Broadband Innovation Challenge winners announced
UBC computing students dominated the awards in last week’s BCNET Broadband Innovation Challenge. The event pits students who have developed computer applications that utilize super-broadband networks, like the network that BCNET operates provincially, against each other for a prize purse of $10,000 and a boost in confidence in their skills.
PhD candidate Brendan Cully won the top prize in the graduate category for his application SecondSite, which uses a virtualization platform for seamless, efficient disaster recovery.
MA candidate Samer Al-Kiswany took second place in the graduate category for his application The Scavenged File System, an alternative storage system that is more economical and reliable than systems currently implemented in business environments.
Charles Bihis, Victor Chan, Jason Hui and Andrew Tjia took first place in the undergraduate category for their photo-sharing application, Picture2Picture, which improves on photo-sharing applications like Flickr by cutting out the need for a central server.
Two other UBC teams tied for second place in this category: Daniel Dent, Chris Binckly, and Ian South-Dickinson for their Distributed Content Delivery and Processing System and Taivo Evard, Yanick Berube, and Tane Adam for Ramet, a peer-to-peer back-up system based on erasure codes. This team also took third place in the poster competition.
For more information, visit www.cs.ubc.ca/news/press/BCNetCompetition2008.shtml.
Faculty of Medicine holds annual awards evening
UBC’s Faculty of Medicine hosted its annual awards evening this week, celebrating the achievements of more than 230 faculty and staff members in research, teaching, administration, innovation and public service.
Of special note is Prof. Robert Molday, Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, who was awarded the 2008 Faculty of Medicine Bill and Marilyn Webber Lifetime Achievement Award.
For a full list of award recipients, visit www.med.ubc.ca.
Deadline for proposals for e-Strategy Town Hall
UBC e-Strategy is calling for proposals for seminars or posters at June’s e-Strategy Town Hall on the theme, Here and Virtually There – UBC and the Digital Generation.
Town Hall is a free day-long conference open to the UBC community to learn about and discuss the latest developments in e-learning technology. Speakers include President Stephen Toope and Dr. David Wiley, Director of the Centre for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University, with discussion moderated by Brian Lamb, Manager of Emerging Technologies and Digital Content at UBC’s Office of Learning Technology.
To submit your proposal for a poster or seminar, visit www.estrategy.ubc.ca by May 5. Registration for Town Hall will open in mid-May.
Health conference addresses millennium goals
Simon Fraser University’s Global Health Program and UBC’s Centre for International Health will host the 6th Annual Western Regional International Health Conference later this month. This year’s theme is Meeting the Challenge: the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and Beyond, framed to examine development and its effect on the health of diverse populations.
Registration is now open for this multidisciplinary conference for faculty, students, and community members.
Date: May 23-25
Place: SFU Burnaby campus
Info: www.sfu.ca/wrihc2008
Cost: $45 – registered full-time students ($49.95 after fees); $80 – non-student participants ($88.80 after fees)
Cycling skills course at UBC
The UBC TREK Program Centre and the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition will offer a commuter cycling skills course combining classroom and on-road training to teach participants to ride safely, choose equipment and plan the best routes.
Classes are aimed at those who are interested in using their bikes for transportation but lack the confidence or skills to ride in traffic. Participants are expected to bring their own bike and helmet.
Date: May 10
Time: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Place: Scarfe 201, 2125 Main Mall
Info: www.vacc.bc.ca/bikeskills
Cost: $35
Challenges of Higher Education in Japan
UBC’s Centre for Japanese Research will host a lecture by Yasuko Ikenobo, Member of the Japanese House of Representatives and Senior Vice-Minister, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. She will speak on the Challenges of Higher Education in Japan and Role and Mission of Japanese Traditional Culture in the 21st Century. The lecture will be in Japanese.
Date: May 2
Time: 3 – 4 p.m.
Place: Room 120, C.K. Choi Building, 1855 West Mall
Info: www.iar.ubc.ca
