UBC This Week | June 25, 2009

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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


UBC People

Geography professor to receive the Massey Medal

Prof. Emeritus Michael Church, Dept. of Geography is to receive the Massey Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS) for 2009.

Established in 1959 by the Massey Foundation, the Massey Medal is awarded annually by the RCGS to recognize outstanding career achievement in the exploration and development of the geography of Canada.

Church is the third member of the UBC Dept. of Geography to receive this recognition in the last decade.

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Engineering student to help Canada’s Arctic submission to the United Nations

UBC Engineering graduate student Alex Forrest is part of a team supporting the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to collect scientific data for Canada’s Arctic submission to the United Nations.

Forrest, a civil engineering PhD candidate, has been working with International Submarine Engineering Ltd. as a support engineer and will assist in AUV operations next year when two AUVs operate thousands of metres under the ice to survey the seabed.

Canada, the U.S., Denmark and other northern nations are collecting scientific data to establish sovereign rights to parts of the Arctic Ocean under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Canada has until 2013 to provide its submission to the United Nations.

The six-metre-long, untethered AUV is designed to dive up to 5,000 metres under water and is capable of operating 400 kilometre missions that could take three to five days. It will collect depth data using single-beam and multi-beam sonars to confirm and complete information compiled over the past 30 years.

Forrest is also part of the Pavilion Lake Research Project, an international exploration of the freshwater microbialites in Pavilion Lake, BC, headed by UBC Civil Engineering Prof. Bernard Laval.

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UBC spin-off company EnWave wins innovation award

UBC spin-off company EnWave Corporation recently won an innovation award for new food dehydration technology called NutraREV™ at the largest annual food science forum and exposition in the world. Held by the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) in Anaheim, California, the event draws more than 20,000 delegates from industry, academia and government.

A research group led by Prof. Tim Durance in the UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems invented NutraREV™, which uses vacuum pressure and microwave energy to deliver rapid, low-temperature dehydration of fruits, vegetables, and other food materials, while preserving vitamins and nutrients. Compared to freeze drying, NutraREV™ requires less than one-third the energy with one-sixth the capital cost.

For more information, visit http://www.enwave.net/index.php?content=nutrarev.

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Computer science students win in competitions

Computer science undergraduate student Carson Lam won Microsoft’s “Make Web, Not War” ultimate coder competition between professional and student developers.

Lam’s project is a database search for BC Transit and can be viewed at http://www.transitdb.ca/. For more information on the competition, visit http://www.phponwindows.ca/ftw/

Two UBC teams placed ninth and 10th out of 400 teams in MIT’s annual BattleCode competition. Computer science students Dan Ballard, Shaun Evans, Andrew Tija, Patrick Nguyen, Martin Lau and Byron Knoll took first and second of the honourable mentions given to the top three non-MIT teams.

For more information, visit http://www.cs.ubc.ca/news/press/CSteamsHonorableMentionAtMITsBattleCode2009.shtml

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Just Desserts awards given in engineering

Mac MacLaclan, administrator in the UBC Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering, Michael Kingsmill, designer with the Alma Mater Society, and fourth-year civil engineering student Andrew Carne have each received a UBC Just Desserts award for 2009. The three winners were nominated by the Engineering Undergraduate Society for extraordinary service to engineering students.

A tradition since 1985, the Just Desserts Awards recognize individual contributions by faculty, staff or student body to the growth and success of students at UBC.

For more information, visit www.engineering.ubc.ca/news/2009/jun12.html

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Ike Barber Learning Centre forms committee to guide community efforts

The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre has established a 25-member advisory committee to help guide its efforts with B.C. communities.

The committee was established to connect the Learning Centre, internal UBC stakeholders and the broader community, and will serve as a forum to discuss the Learning Centre’s role and activities. The committee will meet twice a year, with the inaugural gathering to take place this summer.

For more information and to view the list of advisory committee members, visit http://blogs.ubc.ca/ikblc.

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Folk music collection presented

UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre presents 7,000 items of folk music from the Philip J. Thomas Collection.

Philip J. Thomas, who was born in Victoria in 1921 and died in 2007, co-founded the group that became the Vancouver Folk Song Society. Songs are predominantly in English and others in French, Gaelic, German and other languages. Styles include ballads, nursery rhymes, work songs, sea shanties, spirituals, national songs, soldier songs, bawdy songs, political songs, blues and more.

For more information, visit the catalogue page at http://webcat2.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First and enter “Philip J. Thomas Popular Song Collection” as an author search.