UBC This Week

Dec 2, 2010

Recent UBC Media Releases

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Find out what else is happening at UBC this week. For sports events, visit the UBC Athletics site at http://www.gothunderbirds.ca/calendar.aspx.

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Dean of Arts nominated for Grammy

UBC Dean of Arts and Haitian scholar Gage Averill has been nominated for a 2010 Grammy Award for his project, Alan Lomax in Haiti:  Recordings For The Library of Congress, 1936-1937.  

Nominated in the category of Best Album Notes, the nomination reflects the work Averill did to compile, edit the set and write the comprehensive book of interpretive notes. The project was also nominated for a second award for Best Historical Album, nominated in the names of the producers of the set: Jeffrey A. Greenberg, David Katznelson and Anna Lomax Wood; with Warren Russell-Smith and Steve Rosenthal as recording engineers. 

The 10 CDs and two book chronicle Alan Lomax‘s 1936 Haitian recording expedition for the Library of Congress. Each volume showcases a specific style of music that Lomax encountered, each thoroughly discussed in Averill’s meticulously researched liner notes and Lomax’s own field journal. The full-colour liner notes include song transcriptions, translations and essays.

The 53rd Annual Grammy Award ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on February 13, 2011. 

For more information, visit http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2010/11/04/dean-of-inspiration/

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UBC engineer inducted Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

UBC mechanical engineering professor Yusuf Altintas was inducted Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) in Ottawa on Nov. 27, 2010. Election to the RSC is the highest honour a scholar can achieve in the arts, humanities and sciences in Canada.

Altintas holds an National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)-Pratt & Whitney Canada Industrial Research Chair in Virtual High-performance Machining and is the leading scientific authority in machining and machine tool control engineering worldwide. In addition to having highest citation record in his field, his algorithms are used by over 130 companies worldwide in improving the quality and productivity of machining operations.

For more information, visit http://blogs.apsc.ubc.ca/engineeringnews/2010/11/29/ubc-engineer-inducted-fellow-of-the-royal-society-of-canada/

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Michael Hayden joins board of Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research

Michael Hayden, professor in the Departments of Medicine and Medical Genetics, is the latest addition to the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (MSFHR). Widely known and highly regarded in the health research community, he will provide MSFHR with a wealth of expertise as the Foundation moves towards year two of their five-year Strategic Direction 2009 – 2015.

Hayden’s involvement with MSFHR dates back to its inception. Since 2001, he has supervised 23 trainees — the highest number of any MSFHR supervisor. He was also leader of the 2003 MSFHR research unit Fundamental Innovative Neurogenerative Diseases, and is currently co-leader of the 2007 Technology/Methodology Platform BC Clinical Genomics Network (BCCGN). He credits the birth of BCCGN and its successes to MSFHR’s funding.

“This was a dream and the Michael Smith Foundation helped make it a reality,” he says. “They saw the potential and invested appropriately — and without them, this wouldn’t have happened.”

In 2008, Hayden was named Canada’s Health Researcher of the Year by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for his biomedical and clinical research. He will join two other faculty members on the board– Asst. Prof. Nadine Caron (Surgery), Prof. Emerita Judith Hall (Pediatrics and Medical Genetics), and Prof. Bruce Verchere (Pathology and Laboratory Medicine).

For more information, visit http://www.med.ubc.ca/about_us/Awards_and_Honours.htm#hayden

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Faculty of Medicine wins national awards for technological innovation

The Faculty of Medicine’s distributed medical education program has won two national awards for innovation in medical education — the Ted Freedman Award and the COACH Best Innovation in Technology Award.

The awards acknowledge the technological foundation and provincial partnerships that enabled the first-of-its-kind distributed medical education program, which has gone on to become a model throughout North America. UBC’s Faculty of Medicine launched its distributed program in 2004 with a goal to increase the number of graduating physicians and address the shortage of rural doctors in British Columbia.

“UBC is the first medical school in North America to leverage highly integrated and scalable audio-visual and collaboration technologies as part of the core strategy for distributed medical education,” the organization stated.

Partnerships throughout the province are a key aspect of the distributed program’s success. The network includes UBC’s Vancouver campus as well as the University of Victoria and the University of Northern British Columbia. Next year, they will be joined by a fourth academic site – UBC’s Okanagan campus. In addition, over 20 hospitals in all six of the province’s health authorities are linked in. By 2015, the program will have graduated 1,750 medical doctors.

To date, 47 medical schools have visited UBC to learn from its example, and the program has been replicated to varying extents to connect medical campuses across North America.

For more information, visit http://www.med.ubc.ca/media/201012/Faculty_of_Medicine_wins_national_awards_for_technological_innovation.htm

 

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Computer science professor named ACM Distinguished Scientist

Gail Murphy, acting head and professor of Dept. of Computer Science, was named Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Scientist.  The honour recognizes ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and five years of continuous professional membership who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field.

Murphy was also one of the four theme leaders for the recently announced $16.6M Network on Engineering Complex Software Intensive Systems for Automotive Systems (NECSIS). For more information, visit http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/32764.wss

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UBC professor given SOCAN Classical Music Award

The Canadian Music Centre has announced that Stephen Chatman, a professor and head of composition at UBC School of Music, has been given the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) Jan V. Matajcek Classical Music Award.

The Award recognizes Chatman’s success as a composer of choral, orchestral, and piano compositions and comes after being awarded the Outstanding Classical Composition Award at the 2010 Western Canadian Music Award for his recording of “Earth Songs,” his third such win in five years.

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UBC researchers use “virtual screening” to fight the deadliest forms of prostate cancer

UBC researchers Art Cherkasov and Paul Rennie of the Vancouver Prostate Centre are tackling the deadliest forms of prostate cancer, using a brand new field of genomics called computational chemogenomics to develop a novel class of prostate cancer drugs in order to provide new treatment options for this disease.  This new approach uses computer modeling in virtual 3D to predict how different chemicals or drugs will affect cancer tumours.

The project, titled “Methods of Chemical Genomics” has received $324,000 in funding, with $161,500 from Genome BC and the rest from other partners including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Vancouver Prostate Centre.

For more information, visit http://www.prostatecentre.com/node/253

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UBC professor/curator receives Hnatyshyn Award

The recipient of the 2010 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art is UBC’s Scott Watson, director and curator of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and professor in the Dept. of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at UBC. He is also director and graduate advisor for the Critical Curatorial Studies program, which he helped initiate in September 2002.

In making the curatorial award recommendation, the jury praised Watson’s deep understanding of artists and their work. “For almost 40 years Scott Watson has made thoughtful and substantial contributions to our understanding of contemporary art. His writings on Jack Shadbolt, Roy Kiyooka, Stan Douglas and Rebecca Belmore have broadened our knowledge of the artists work and the context in which it was produced. Watson’s curatorial practice shows an impressive range of interest from conceptual art to ceramics, and his approach has been both critical and timely. His restless curiosity and his scholarly dedication have been inspiring to his colleagues in Canada and abroad. In addition to the profound impact he has made as a curator, his leadership of the Critical Curatorial Studies program at the University of British Columbia is an important contribution to the professionalization of curatorship in Canada.”

The award will be presented in Montreal, Quebec on Jan. 6, 2011 at a ceremony and reception at the Galerie de l’Universite de Quebec a Montreal.

For more information, visit http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Artist-Shary-Boyle-and-Curator-Scott-Watson-Receive-Hnatyshyn-Awards-1361851.htm

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Engineering prof receives UBC mentoring award

Prof. Akram Alfantazi of the Dept. of Materials Engineering has been selected as the UBC recipient of the Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring (mid-career category) for 2010. The award recognizes the mentoring of graduate students.

Alfantazi joined the Dept. of Materials Engineering in 2001 and is now an associate professor. He has mentored 10 MASc students and three PhD students who have graduated from the program and is currently supervising 16 graduate students. He is highly regarded as a teacher and mentor by former and current students, graduate and undergraduate. His success as a mentor can be seen in the achievements of his former graduate students who have gone on to academic and senior leadership positions in the industry.

For more information, www.engineering.ubc.ca/news/2010/nov23.html

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New funding for research to examine population interventions and their health impacts

Fourteen research projects on population health intervention research received $2.8 million in funding. The Vice-President of Research at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Dr. Pierre Chartrand announced these initiatives during the Population Health Intervention Research Symposium in Toronto.

“CIHR recognizes the importance of supporting researchers who evaluate the effectiveness of population interventions aimed at improving the health of Canadians,” said Chartrand. “The work of talented researchers who are leading the projects announced today will contribute to our knowledge of effective population health policies, programs and strategies.”

The funding will enable two UBC research projects to:

  • Assess the influence of nutrition and physical activity policies on the school environment and weight outcomes (Assoc. Prof. Louise C Masse, Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine)
  • Use administrative data to evaluate a parenting intervention (Assoc. Prof. Susan V Dahinten, School of Nursing)

For more information, visit http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/November2010/30/c8998.html

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School of Population and Public Health celebrates grand opening

The School of Population and Public Health (SPPH) celebrated the grand opening of its new building at 2206 East Mall last Friday. The move from the James Mather building to the renovated space in the former Library Processing Centre brings the school under the same roof as the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, the School of Environmental Health, the Human Early Learning Partnership, Population Data BC, the Global Health Research Program, and the Centre for Population Health Promotion Research – all affiliates of SPPH.
 
UBC President Stephen Toope, SPPH director Martin Schechter, and Faculty of Medicine Vice-Dean Ross MacGillivray kicked off the event with speeches and a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Prof. Toope reflected back to the vision of UBC’s founding President Frank Fairchild Wesbrook—a pioneer in public health teaching and research and then president of the American Public Health Association. In a 1905 speech, Wesbrook called for coordinated specialism in public health research—eight years before he was called upon to build the University of British Columbia. 
 
“We’re celebrating today another form of coordinated specialism—the success of bringing together almost unprecedented levels of coordination to bear in the advancement of population and public health, not just for the people of Canada but for all of humankind,” Prof. Toope said. “Wesbrook was a prescient thinker but I doubt that even he could have envisioned the diversity of expertise that would one day be standing in this room wanting to collaborate across specializations, wanting to break down disciplinary boundaries to the extent that teachers, researchers and students will do within these walls and beyond.”
 
For more from the SPPH grand opening event, visit http://www.spph.ubc.ca/.

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UBC 2009-2010 Annual Review

“Where does inspiration come from? How will your work change the world?”  UBC students, staff, faculty, and alumni can now answer these questions and more in the UBC 2009-2010 Annual Review, a report highlighting the achievements of the university and the exceptional accomplishments of the UBC community.

Visit http://www.annualreview.ubc.ca/ and discover why UBC is a place of mind

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