UBC This Week

Premier Gordon Campbell exhorted a group of researchers gathered at UBC Hospital to join forces – with each other, and with the broader society – in the fight against Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias.

Speaking to members of the Canadian Dementia Action Network (CDAN) who were meeting at the Brain Research Centre Jan. 28, Premier Campbell said the approaching wave of aging baby boomers will multiply the disease’s heavy toll, not only on the victims themselves, but on their families and society as a whole, and thus will require a level of collaboration rarely seen in public life.

The CDAN conference was organized by Dr. Pat McGeer, professor emeritus in the Dept. of Psychiatry at UBC, and Team Leader of CDAN’s Basic Research Team. Speakers included researchers from McGill University, University of Toronto, Dalhousie University, University of Calgary and University of Alberta.

Two members of Parliament – Ed Fast of Abbotsford and Ujjal Dosanjh of Vancouver South, the Liberal Party’s Health Critic – as well as Colin Hansen, BC’s Minister of Finance and Minister of Health Services, also addressed the gathering.

Max Cynader, Director of the Brain Research Centre, a joint network of UBC-Vancouver Coastal Health scientists, spoke as well.

For more information, visit http://www.med.ubc.ca/media/201101/Premier_Campbell_opens_conference_on_dementia_at_Brain_Research_Centre.htm

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UBC has launched aboriginal.ubc.ca, a single online destination to learn about UBC’s Aboriginal student services, academic programs, research community and outreach programs. 

The site uses video to help put a human face on the team that exists to support and mentor Aboriginal students through admissions, graduation and beyond. 

“We want to help students and their families get to know the people who are here to support them,” says Linc Kesler, Director of UBC’s First Nations House of Learning and Senior Advisor to the President on Aboriginal Affairs. “We felt that a personal medium like video would help to do that.” 

The portal features dozens of videos of key UBC contacts. This ranges from basic information on admissions, scholarships and day care to profiles on UBC’s Indigenous Academic Caucus, an informal association of 26 faculty members who identify as Indigenous and are actively involved in research, teaching and administration, much of it with an Aboriginal focus and substantial community engagement. 

Since UBC’s Aboriginal Strategy was launched in 2009, the university has nearly doubled its complement of Aboriginal faculty to 26, making UBC one of the top recruiters of Aboriginal faculty among research universities.   More than 630 UBC students current self-indentify as Aboriginal. Graduate student enrolment has jumped 16 per cent since 2008. There is record enrolment in the Faculty of Law, home to UBC’s First Nations Legal Studies Program that along with the Faculty of Education’s Native Indian Teacher Education Program was launched in 1975 to help address a national shortage in Aboriginal lawyers and educators. 

Since 2008, UBC has created 13 courses with significant Indigenous content, bringing the total to 66 across the faculties of Medicine, Law, Business, Arts, Education, Forestry, Graduate Studies and Continuing Studies. 

Visit the UBC Aboriginal portal at www.aboriginal.ubc.ca.

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UBC professors Xiaotao Bi, Vikram Krishnamurthy and Don Mavinic are among the winners of UBC’s annual research awards.

Bi, a chemical and biological engineering professor, has been awarded a UBC Killam Faculty Research Fellowship, which assists faculty members in devoting full time to research and study in their field during a recognized study leave.

Awarded annually to UBC’s top researchers in recognition of distinguished research and scholarly contributions, UBC Killam Research Prizes have been awarded to two Applied Science professors.

Krishnamurthy, an electrical and computer engineering professor, is an internationally leading expert in the area of statistical signal processing. His research has resulted in pioneering contributions to hidden Markov model signal processing, defense sensor networks and smart radars, and cross layer optimization in wireless communication.

Civil engineering professor Mavinic’s primary scholarship contribution over the last 25 years has focused on biological treatment of wastewater. This includes nutrient removal, biosolids treatment and disposal and recently, nutrient recovery in the form of a phosphorus-based fertilizer. This latter effort resulted in the formation of a UBC spinoff company, Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, Inc.

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UBC Development and Alumni Engagement Annual Giving won eight 2011 CASE District VIII Communication Awards. Three gold awards were awarded to the the Hong Kong, Belkin Art Gallery and Year End campaigns, three silver awards for the Camp Out, Belkin Art Gallery and the annual alumni appeal campaigns, and two bronze awards for the Museum of Anthropology campaigns. 

The Alumni Affairs Trek Magazine was also recognized with a silver in the Print General Interest Magazines category.

The UBC Public Affairs office has won silver in the Projects and Programs category of the 2011 CASE Awards Competition for its UBC Media Outreach Campaign in the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.  

In 2010, UBC launched a media relations outreach with the objective of raising the university’s international profile during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and beyond.

UBC’s 2010 media relations outreach positioned UBC students, faculty experts, and research for national and international media covering the Games. The strategy garnered an 18 per cent increase in media coverage, giving the campus more media coverage than any other Canadian university from January-March 2010.  

Key elements included a flagship media relations booth, an online newsroom, experts guides, daily tipsheets of experts and story ideas, a programmable TV system, and strategic advertisements.

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Over the holidays, workers completed one of the first steps in a major new landscape project: pedestrianizing four of the most travelled routes on UBC campus. The first is Agricultural Road, an east-west corridor that runs from Place Vanier residence to Main Library and the Student Union Building. 

The university is working to improve the campus’s walkability because a vast majority of trips made on campus are by foot. In a recent survey conducted for Transportation Consultation 2010, 84.8 per cent of respondents said that once they reached the campus, their primary mode of transportation was walking. Improving walkability on campus is one of the goals of both the Vancouver Campus Plan, adopted in June 2010, and UBC’s Public Realm Plan.

The transformation of Agricultural Road is a precedent for the creation of other pedestrian corridors on Main Mall, University Boulevard and Memorial Road. The facelift involves ripping out the existing roads, curbs and sidewalks and replacing them with decorative paving blocks and greenery.  The broad paved walkways will still be accessible to emergency and service vehicles, but some roadway is being removed, and a few parking spots are being pushed to the periphery.

For more information, visit http://www.planning.ubc.ca/vancouver_home/news_and_events/enewsletter/february_2011/articles427.php

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UBC Thunderbots remained undefeated in the U.S. Open Jan. 20-23 in Atlanta, keeping opponents MIT, Harvard and Georgia Tech scoreless throughout the three-day competition.

 “Our success at this competition can be attributed to the hard work and innovation from our members, some of the best and brightest engineers and computer scientists from UBC,” says team leader Alim Jiwa.

UBC Thunderbots, an interdisciplinary student design team comprising students from electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, engineering physics and computer science, aims to create a fun environment that encourages collaboration and mentorship opportunities and fosters research initiatives on robotics at the undergraduate level.

For more information, visit http://www.engineering.ubc.ca/news/2011/jan27.html 

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Two UBC engineering students—Will McClary and Fraser Macdonald from the Integrated Engineering program—placed first in the debate at the Western Engineering Conference held this past weekend in Saskatoon. They will be advancing to the 2011 Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC), March 10-13 at McGill University in Montreal. The impromptu debate competition challenges students to argue a topic from a given viewpoint, which is disclosed just prior to the event. Each team is composed of two members who are expected to present a structured proposition or defence of the assigned issue.

UBC engineers Lin Watt, Madeleine Schaefer, Hans Seidemann and Shane Beaton placed third in the Consulting Engineering category in which teams of four are given four to six hours to devise an innovative solution to a real-world problem prescribed by a hypothetical client. Each team is expected to assess the economic and social aspects of the problem and present a proposal to the client.

Engineering students Gordon Ross, Eric Baikie, Ska-Hiish Manuel and Devyn Farr from UBC’s Okanagan campus finished third in Senior Design, and Kavish Bujun, Aurelien Schilles, Sanjesh Mudallar, Andrew Boitchenko received honourable mention in Consulting.

For more information, visit http://www.engineering.ubc.ca/news/2011/jan31.html

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The UBC School of Population and Public Health will host a presentation with Dr. Clyde Hertzman, who will give a talk entitled “Simple stats & sad stories: Early child survival and development in Canada.” 

Hertzman is a professor at SPPH, Director of the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP), College for Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC; and Canada Research Chair in Population Health and Human Development. 

This free talk is open to the UBC community and the public. For those who are unable to attend in person, the video recording will be available at www.spph.ubc.ca the following day.

Date: Feb. 10
Time: Presentation 4:30 p.m.  Reception: 5:30 p.m.
Place: Presentation: Michael Smith Laboratories, Lecture Theatre 102, 2185 East Mall                
Reception:  SPPH foyer, 2206 East Mall, UBC
Info: www.spph.ubc.ca, or contact patricia.hall@ubc.ca

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UBC Continuing Studies, the Dept. of Asian Studies at UBC, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the Laurier Institution present Global Islam: Past, Present and Future, a series of free public lectures delivered by some of the world’s most renowned scholars in Islamic studies. 

As part of this series, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, a professor of History and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto and the chair of the Dept. of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto – Mississauga, will be giving a free talk on Feb. 5 at UBC Robson Square.  He is the author of numerous articles and two books, including Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Nationalist Historiography (2001).

Date:  Feb. 5
Time:  7 – 9 p.m.
Place:  Theatre, UBC Robson Square, 800 Robson Street
Info: http://cstudies.ubc.ca/community/courses.html

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SAFE/NOT SAFE, a group photography exhibition featuring the work of 30 women who live and work in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside will be exhibited on Feb. 5 at the Interurban Gallery.  UBC School of Nursing graduate Karen LeBeau (BSN ’06) is the curator/project coordinator. 

The project utilized the research method Photo Novella, which is the telling of stories through photographs. Thirty women participated by taking photos of environments that made them feel safe or not safe. Each woman has chosen her best photographs and was asked to discuss issues of safety, recommendations for change to improve safety, how this project has changed their perception of safety, and to share a personal character trait or quality.

Date:  Opening night Feb. 5, 4 – 6 p.m. 
             Runs Feb. 7-12, 12 – 5 p.m.
Place: Interurban Gallery, One Hastings Street

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International Development Week (IDW) at UBC is taking place from Feb. 7 -11 and will highlight the work of Canada’s development community.  To celebrate IDW, the Global Lounge is holding events to inform participants about the role Canadians play in international development and to illustrate what life is like in developing countries. Participants will also learn what it means to be a global citizen and how to get involved in international development.

Date: Feb. 7 – 11
 Place: Global Lounge and Resource Centre, 2205 Lower Mall, Building 1
 Info: http://blog.students.ubc.ca/globallounge/2011/01/31/international-development-week-at-the-global-lounge/

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The Centre for Applied Conservation Research and Fac­ulty of Forestry hosts Nancy Baron, a renowned science communication educator who will give a public lecture on how to get environmental and conservation scientists ‘out of the ivory tower’ and to become more effective at commu­nicating their research to media professionals and the general public.

Date:  Feb. 3
Time:  5 – 6 p.m.
Place: Forest Sciences Centre, Room 1005, 2424 Main Mall
Info: http://peter-arcese-lab.sites.olt.ubc.ca/workshop/

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The School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture hosts Dana Cuff and her talk Excess and XS: The Shape of Public Architecture. With experience in the Los Angeles area, she is the director of CityLab and a professor at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. The talk is free and open to the public.

Date: Feb. 8
Time: 6 p.m.
Place: UBC Robson Square, 800 Robson St.
Info: www.sala.ubc.ca

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