UBC This Week | May 8, 2008

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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.

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UBC People

John Robinson named 2008 Trudeau Fellow

Prof. John Robinson, of UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and the Department of Geography, has been named one of five 2008 winners of the Trudeau Foundation Fellowship Prize. Robinson is recognised for his expertise in climate change mitigation and his capacity to build bridges between academia, industry and NGOs. He authored parts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, and is a member of the B.C. Climate Action Team and the Vancouver climate leadership council.

Five fellowships of $225,000 over a three-year period are awarded each year by the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation in recognition of research achievements, creativity and social commitment. The Foundation was established in 2002 with an endowment of $125 million from the federal government.

For more information, visit www.trudeaufoundation.ca.

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UBC the only Canadian university in College Sustainability Leader top 25

UBC is the sole Canadian university among the top-25 North American universities rated a College Sustainability Leader in the College Sustainability Report Card 2008, a survey of 200 public and private post-secondary institutions with the largest endowments.

Published by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, the survey looks at categories such as climate change and energy, transportation, green buildings and endowment transparency.

UBC rated higher than last year, with improvement particularly in endowment transparency and climate and energy. In the category of green buildings UBC Renew and LEED certified buildings gained recognition. Additionally, transportation has been added as a new category allowing achievements like the U-Pass to stand out.

This is the second report card from the Institute, a Massachusetts-based non-profit organization engaged in research and education to advance sustainability in campus operations and endowment practices. Founded in
2005, the Institute is a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

To view the report card, visit www.greenreportcard.org.

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Grad Gazette wins CCAE award

The Grad Gazette newsletter, sent to nearly 70,000 UBC alumni monthly, has received a silver award in the electronic newsletter category in the CCAE Prix D’Excellence awards program.

To view archived editions, visit www.alumni.ubc.ca/grad_gazette.

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Carl Wieman elected to US National Academy of Education

UBC Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Education, joining an elite cohort of 169 members and 17 foreign associates. He is the only physicist among current members of the Washington D.C.-based organization, which include former Harvard University President Derek Bok and former University of Chicago President Hanna Gray.

Wieman is director of the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI) at UBC and director of the Science Education Initiative at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Both initiatives work with departments to improve science education by incorporating the latest research on teaching and learning.

For more information on CWSEI, visit www.cwsei.ubc.ca.

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Over 20 UBC film students and alumni nominated for Leos

26 UBC Film students, alumni and current and past adjunct film professors have been nominated for the 2008 Leo Awards in categories including directing, sound design, screenwriting and student film.

Highlights include recent MFA Film graduate Gwen Haworth and her thesis film She’s a Boy I Knew which has been nominated for four awards, and recent BFA graduates Cat Mills and Lindsay Allikas’ film September.

In addition, the short films Hirsute and The Porcelain Man, directed and produced by recent alumni A.J. Bond, Amy Belling, Mark Ratzlaff and Jessica Cheung, have collectively garnered 11 nominations. In the television category, the series Road Hockey Rumble, produced by alumnus Cal Shumiatcher and written/hosted by alumni Calum MacLeod and Mark McGuckin, received seven nominations.

The winners will be announced at the gala awards ceremony on May 24.

For a complete list of the nominees, visit www.leoawards.com/nominees_2008.html.

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Museum of Anthropology appoints new curator

UBC’s Museum of Anthropology (MOA) has appointed Jasleen Kandhari as Curator, Asia for the next two years. In addition to researching MOA’s Asian collections, Kandhari will work with other MOA curators on a strategy for displaying Asian collections in the Museum’s new Multiversity Galleries (replacing existing Visible Storage), opening in the fall of 2009.

Art historian Kandhari previously worked on the Asian Ethnographic and First Nations collections at the British Museum, London, and was a Curator of South Asian Art at the British Library, London. She is interested in the development of Asian artistic heritage and the value of cultural diversity, as well as virtual initiatives to create collections.

For more information, visit www.moa.ubc.ca/collections.            

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Computer science student garners national thesis award

Computer Science PhD candidate Abhijeet Ghosh has been awarded the Alain Fournier Thesis Award by the Vancouver Foundation, given in recognition of an exceptional PhD thesis completed in a Canadian university in the area of computer graphics.

For more information, visit www.iro.umontreal.ca/~poulin/fournier/memorial.fund.html

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UBC students gain featured article status on Wikipedia

11 UBC literature students have created the first Wikipedia article written by university students to gain "featured article" status by Wikipedia, a designation given to less than 0.1 per cent of the open-source site’s articles. The team collaborated closely with Wikipedia’s anonymous panel of academics, experts and online gurus and were judged on content, citations, style, punctuation and grammar.

The article, on a Nobel Prize-winning Latin American literature text by Miguel Ángel Asturias, El Senior Presidente, was a class project in a Latin American Literature class taught by Prof. Jon Beasley-Murray. The article was featured on May 5 on Wikipedia’s homepage.

Two other groups from the class have also authored “featured articles’; publication dates will be announced.

To view the article, visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Se%C3%B1or_Presidente.
To read about the project, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jbmurray/Madness.
For an interview with the students, visit http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews_interviews:_The_team_behind_the_2%2C000th_featured_Wikipedia_article

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Polar bears and seals affected by climate warming

UBC’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum will host a public lecture by biologist Ian Stirling about the consequences of climate warming on polar bears and seals in Canada’s north.

Stirling is a Scientist Emeritus with the Canadian Wildlife Service and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta.

Date: May 11
Time: 6 p.m.
Place: UBC Woodward Building, Room 2, 2198 Health Sciences Mall
Info: www.biodiversity.ubc.ca/museum/proglect7.html

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Round table on international surgery at UBC

UBC’s Branch for International Surgery, an initiative in the Faculty of Medicine, will host the 8th Annual Bethune Round Table on International Surgery, along with co-hosts University of Toronto’s Office of International Surgery and the Canadian Network for International Surgery. The conference will focus on the theme Assessing Outcomes and Impacts in International Surgery Initiatives.

Date: May 9 –10
Place: Paetzold Centre, Vancouver General Hospital, 855 W. 12th Ave.
Info: www.internationalsurgery.ubc.ca/

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Eventful weekend at the Botanical Garden

UBC’s Botanical Garden will host a garden course on Organic Gardening All Year Round with Linda Gilkeson, PhD in entomology from McGill University. The course will cover how to grow a healthy supply of food year-round, as well as organic methods for preventing and controlling pests, diseases and weeds. Participants will also receive a copy of Gilkeson’s book, Year-Around Harvest: Winter Gardening on the Coast.

Date: May 10
Time: 9:30 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Place: UBC Botanical Garden Pavilion, 6804 South West Marine Drive
Cost: (General) $55 or (Garden Members) $50
Notes: Advanced registration required at botg@interchange.ubc.ca or 604-822-3928
Info: www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org/education/courses/organic_gardening.php

The annual Perennial Plant Sale at UBC’s Botanical Garden features a wide selection of plants propagated by the Friends of the Garden, including small shrubs, grasses, perennials, native plants and more.

Gardening experts will be on hand to answer questions, while children can visit the Children’s Corner. Admission to the garden is free; garden tours will be offered at 11:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 1:30 p.m.

Date: May 11
Time: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Place: UBC Botanical Garden Pavilion, 6804 South West Marine Drive
Notes: Free shuttle from the West Parkade, or take the C-20 bus from the UBC bus loop or the 41st Ave. bus with a stop at 16th Ave and Marine Drive
Info: www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org/community/002516.php

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Engineering centre launches logo

UBC’s Centre for Metallurgical Process Engineering (CMPE) will launch their new logo on a day of demonstrations of cutting-edge research in areas such as steel processing. Indira Samarasekera – former UBC Vice President, Research and CMPE Director, and current President of the University of Alberta – will be a special quest at the event. Light refreshments will be served.

Date: May 13
Time: 3:30 – 5 p.m.
Place: AMPEL high head area, 2355 East Mall
Info: www.cmpe.ubc.ca/cmpehome.html