UBC This Week 14-May-2015

 

UBC This Week subscriber:

Please be advised that May 28 will be the last edition of the UBC This Week newsletter.  If you work at UBC, visit the Working at UBC page on ubc.ca for the following information about the Vancouver and Okanagan campuses:

You can submit content to this page by completing this form. For all the latest UBC news, including media releases by beat area, features, Q and As, opinions and more, visit http://news.ubc.ca/.

Recent UBC Media Releases

May 7 MESSENGER reveals Mercury’s ancient magnetic field secrets
May 11  Congress approval rating tanking over poor choice of words
May 13  Satellite mapping reveals agricultural slowdown in Latin America: UBC study
 May 14  Media studies program prepares UBC students for the digital economy

Upcoming Event Highlights

May 15  Buddhism and the Ecological Challenge
May 16  Macro Photography Workshop
May 18  Third International Autonomic Symposium
May 20  Housing for All: a series of events on the future of public housing
May 20  UBC Faculty Pension Plan: 2015 Pension Forum
May 22  Creating Connections 4.0: “Engaging Our World”
May 23  TEDxStanley Park
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.

 

UBC People


UBC People

UBC named one of Canada’s Top Employers for Young People in 2015

UBC has been recognized as one of Canada’s Top Employers for Young People in 2015, and the only post-secondary institution to be chosen. This designation recognizes employers that offer the country’s best benefits for younger workers. UBC received this award for attracting and retaining young employees for the third year in a row.

Some of the services that UBC offers to support young employees are:

 More information here.

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MFA alumnus wins top prize at Hot Docs Festival

A documentary film directed by Master of Fine Arts graduate Charles Wilkinson has won top honours and a cash award of $10,000 at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto. Haida Gwaii: On The Edge Of The World is a beautiful, hopeful story about life on the archipelago along the northern B.C. coast which has been home to its residents for 14,000 years. More information here.

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HELP professor receives 2015 Joseph Zins Distinguished Scholar Award

Human Early Learning Partnership associate professor Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl is the recipient of the 2015 Joseph E. Zins Distinguished Scholar Award for Outstanding Contributions to Action Research in Social and Emotional Learning. The awards are given to researchers for advancing research and practice in the field of social and emotional learning (SEL). Their mission is to help make SEL an integral part of education from preschool through high school. More information here.

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Psychiatry professor receives honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University

Adele Diamond, a professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychiatry, received an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev on May 12. Diamond was recognized for her research on the executive functions that include thinking outside the box, mentally relating ideas, giving considered responses, resisting temptations and staying focused. Diamond also gave the Zlotowski Neuroscience Lecture, a lecture that she had given 20 years ago. More information here.

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2015-16 Peter Wall Scholars announced

The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies has announced the UBC scholars selected as Peter Wall Institute Wall Scholars for 2015-2016. Faculty members spend one year in residence at the Peter Wall Institute in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment and are selected based on scholarly achievements and innovative research proposals. Scholars are provided with shared office space at the institute and $20,000 in funding. View the list of scholars for 2015-16 here.

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PhD candidate wins CIHR Rising Star award

School of Population and Public Health PhD candidate Lianping Ti is the winner of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Institute of Health Services and Policy Research Rising Star Award for 2014/15. The award recognizes the research excellence and knowledge translation initiatives of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Ti is working as a research associate with the Urban Health Research Initiative of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS on projects based in Vancouver and Bangkok. More information here.

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S-FRAME makes landmark gift to UBC Engineering

S-FRAME Software Inc. has donated 50 network licenses to the Department of Civil Engineering’s computer labs as well as 150 annual student licenses for civil engineering undergraduate and graduate students for a period of five years. This gift is in addition to S-FRAME’s 2013 donation of 60 licenses to UBC Engineering at the Okanagan campus. More information here.

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Unmanned aerial systems team place fifth in Canadian competition

UBC’s Unmanned Aerial Systems team placed fifth in the 2015 Student Unmanned Aircraft Systems competition in Alma, Quebec. The team of twenty students from mechanical, electrical, physics and integrated engineering collaborated in the competition that involved locating 21 objects over a distance of one square kilometre in a 25 minute timeslot. More information here.

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Environmental engineering student is UNBC’s top female athlete

Sydney Roy, an undergraduate student in the joint UBC-University of Northern B.C (UNBC) Environmental Engineering program, has been named UNBC’s top female athlete of 2015. Roy, a soccer player, set a new record for goals in a season when she scored her sixth goal in the season’s final match against Thompson Rivers University. More information here.

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UBC chapter of Canadian Society for Civil Engineering wins award

The UBC chapter of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE) has won the CSCE National President’s Best Student Chapter Award. Led by president Charles Noftall, the chapter has grown from twenty members to 174 over the past two years. Throughout the year, the chapter held tours of Vancouver’s high profile construction sites, and hosted discussions and seminars with industry-leading professionals. The past year’s highlight was the UBC CSCE Industry Night which drew 384 students, faculty and industry members. More information here.

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Surgical screw cutters, artisanal mining and diabetes sniffer sensors win video contest

The inaugural Faculty of Applied Science Student Research Video Contest challenged students to tell their research story in a compelling video of 60 seconds or less.  The top three winners were the Screw Cutter Project by Shalaleh Rismani, Gregory Allan, Vivian Chung and Andrew Meyer (Biomedical Engineering); Mercury and Artisanal Mining by Brandon Nichols (Mining Engineering); and Sniffer on the Chip by David Vassiliev (School of Engineering, Okanagan). More information here.

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Engineering physics team wins Google Games

An engineering physics team SemperFizz is the winner of the 2015 UBC Google Games held on May 2 at UBC. The theme of this year’s games was “Out of this World” and included trivia, a building challenge, puzzles, word association and coding competitions. More information here.

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Help fund surgical equipment for Nepal

Arbutus Medical, a startup out of Engineers in Scrubs Program, is asking for help to send 100 surgical drill covers to earthquake victims in Nepal. The goal is to raise $25,000 to distribute the low-cost alternative to surgical drills to eight hospitals in Nepal. More information on how to donate here.

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