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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.
Sign up for UBC This Week and other UBC Public Affairs e-mail services at www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/eservices.
Recent UBC Media Releases
- Apr. 16: UBC defers decision on application to join NCAA Division II
- Apr. 15: UBC receives $3M for 17 research projects from Canadian Foundation for Innovation
Upcoming Event Highlights
Visit UBCevents, UBC’s new campus-wide calendar: www.events.ubc.ca
- Apr. 17: Peak Oil and Climate Change
- Apr. 18: Quantum Mechanics and Subatomic Physics
- Apr. 20: Gender, Sexuality and Tibetan Buddhism: How Sex Is Used in the Spiritual Path
- Apr. 21: The Dalai Lama’s blending of classical Tibetan Buddhism with contemporary outlooks
- Apr. 22: Caregiving Intensity and the Labour Force Participation of Unpaid Caregivers in Canada
- Apr. 23: Acquisition Solutions – “Buying Into the Future”
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
- Sauder transportation professor wins best paper award
- UBC hosts Asia Voila festival
- UBC researchers put a new spin on electrons
- UBC researchers join inaugural Junior Fellow Academy
UBC People
Sauder transportation professor wins best paper award
UBC Prof. Tae Oum of Sauder School of Business was given a Best Paper award at the US Transportation Research Forum’s 50th Anniversary Annual Conference in Portland.
The paper, entitled Ownership Forms Matter for Airport Efficiency: Bayesian Estimation of Stochastic Cost Frontiers on Worldwide Airport Data, investigates the managerial efficiencies of eight types of airport ownership forms. The co-authors are UBC Sauder School lecturer Chunyan Yu and Asst. Prof. Jia Yan from Washington State University.
UBC hosts Asia Voila festival
In celebration of Asian Heritage Month, UBC will host a festival entitled Asia Voila. The event will feature traditional Asian dance and music performances, film, art and photo exhibitions, lectures on poetry and calligraphy, guided library tours and workshops.
Date: April 18
Time: 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.Place: Asian Centre,1871 West Mall
Info: www.library.ubc.ca/asian/asiavoila/ or contact 604-822-0019
UBC researchers put a new spin on electrons
In the first demonstration of its kind, a team of UBC researchers led by Asst. Prof. Joshua Folk, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, has controlled the spin of electrons using a ballistic technique. The findings, published this week in www.nature.com, could have implications for the development of so called ‘spintronic’ circuits: systems that use the directional spin of electrons to store and process data.
For more information, visit http://science.ubc.ca/news/254.
UBC researchers join inaugural Junior Fellow Academy
Correction in last week’s story:
Siwan Anderson and Ray Laflamme are not Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Junior Fellows. Anderson is a Fellow and Laflamme is a program director. Both presented their program’s research at the inaugural meeting Junior Fellow Academy meeting on April 14-15.
The additional CIFAR Junior Fellows from UBC are:
• Jelena Obradovic is the Great-West Life Junior Fellow of CIFAR, working under the supervision of Experience-based Brain and Biological Development Fellow and co-director Tom Boyce at the UBC Human Early Learning Partnership Obradovic studies how children’s self-regulatory abilities and stress reactivity enable some socio-economically disadvantaged children to demonstrate resilience, while placing others at risk for maladaptive outcomes.
• Ion Garate will begin his CIFAR Junior Fellowship in the fall of 2009, under the co-supervision of Quantum Materials Fellows Ian Affleck and Marcel Franz in the UBC Dept. of Physics and Astronomy. Garate is working to advance the theoretical understanding of magnetism and superconductivity, manifestations of the quantum physics governing the behaviour of electrons in solids.
