Student leader, prof, finally chaplain

A man with a unique position in UW’s history will retire officially on September 1.

He’s Gerry Mueller, most recently the chaplain at Renison College, the Anglican presence on campus — but before that a faculty member in engineering, and before that a student leader in UW’s formative years.

In fact, Mueller (right) was the first president of the Federation of Students. While studying chemical engineering he had been active in the Engineering Society, winding up as EngSoc president, and was elected president of students’ council, which linked the student societies in those pre-Fed days. Then the Federation was incorporated as an umbrella for organized student activities, and Mueller is now remembered as the Feds’ 1965-66 president, although previous students’ council leaders also appear on the Feds’ historical list. (The inset in the photo shows a 1965 Coryphaeus portrait of him.)

After receiving a BASc in 1966 he did graduate work at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, with research on the dynamics of aircraft gas turbines, then taught at what's now Concordia University for two years before returning to Waterloo. He was a faculty member in chemical engineering from 1971 to 1988, working “mostly in control engineering and related mathematics”, and was also a Tutor in Village I.

“Through involvement with students in many ways, I became interested in psychology and eventually theology,” Mueller recalls. He first took training in pastoral counselling, then eventually earned a graduate degree in divinity from the Toronto School of Theology, being ordained by the Anglican Church in Canada in 1988.

“I had hoped to combine my two vocations, continuing to teach in engineering and doing chaplaincy and counselling, but that didn’t work out,” he says. “Thus I resigned from the university and became a parish priest for 13 years, serving parishes in Cambridge, Mississauga and Scarborough. Renison College was looking for a chaplain in early 2001. I rather hurriedly applied, and was very pleased to be selected. . . . The position at Renison combined very nicely the various loves of my working lives: liturgy and preaching, counselling and otherwise working with students, staff and faculty, and classroom teaching. It has been a marvelous five years.”

He observes that “one never really retires from the church” and he’s sure to wind up in an “honorary assistant” position at a local Anglican church, as well as filling pulpits while clergy are on holidays. “But I am also looking forward to being just one of the people in the pews,” he says. The future also promises time with grandchildren, an opportunity to catch up on “a huge backlog” of reading, a chance for travel (he and his wife are starting with a 21-day cruise through the Panama Canal, leaving in late September), and new projects in his life-long hobby of photography.

It’s also possible, he says, that he will finish a graduate degree in homiletics (preaching) that he started long ago: “My fantasy is to do research on some obscure English preacher, where the source material requires travel to a number of cities, towns and villages, thus combining travel plans and education. This would be my fifth degree, and third Master’s.”

Back to top

Cheriton to make Waterloo visit

Computer scientist and entrepreneur David Cheriton (left) will be on campus next week to hear some of the thanks that he couldn’t hear first-hand when UW’s school of computer science was named in his honour last year.

He wasn’t able to be in Waterloo for the announcement of his $25 million gift to UW and the resulting naming of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in November 2005. But Cheriton — “alumnus, friend and benefactor”, according to an invitation issued by the CS school — will be here September 8 for a celebration event in the great hall of the Davis Centre, followed by an academic symposium at which he will speak.

Cheriton, a UW graduate (MMath 1974, PhD 1978), is a professor of CS at Stanford University and a noted venture capitalist in high-tech companies. After earning his graduate degrees from UW, he spent three years at the University of British Columbia, then began his career at Stanford, where he heads the Distributed Systems Group. He is widely known for research in high-performance scalable systems, Internet architecture and hardware-software interaction, and successful commercialization of his research results. His current interests include distributed systems, next-generation Internet architecture, operating systems and object-oriented design techniques. He received a SigComm Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 2003.

In addition to his achievements in research, he has been involved in a number of startup companies as co-founder and as investor, and has been a technical advisor to Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Google, VMware and Tibco. He was named one of Forbes magazine's Top Ten Venture Capitalists (2005) based on his seed investment in Google. Three years ago he received a Mathematics Alumni Achievement Award from UW.

His gift to UW will establish the David R. Cheriton Endowment for Excellence in Computer Science to fund research chairs, faculty fellowships and graduate scholarships.

The public celebration on Friday of next week is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. in the great hall of Davis — “meet Dr. Cheriton and celebrate his significant gift”, followed by a light lunch.

Then at 1:30 comes the symposium in a nearby lecture hall, with five speakers from the CS school — Ashraf Aboulnaga, Peter Forsyth, Srinivasan Keshav, Pascal Poupart, and Ian Munro — as well as Cheriton himself. It will be the first Cheriton Research Symposium, “an annual series of presentations on the leading/innovative research being done” in the school. The day will wind up with dinner for invited guests at the home of UW president David Johnston.

Back to top

Three candidates for staff board seat

an announcement from the university secretariat

Voting is to begin Tuesday as UW staff members elect a representative on the University's Board of Governors. One of the two staff seats has been vacant since Catherine Fry of the Conflict Management & Human Rights Office finished a three-year term on April 30.

Brief campaign statements are available online for the six candidates who are now contesting that position: Chandrika Anjaria (Information Systems & Technology), Laura Briggs (Library), Trevor Grove (Computer Science Computing Facility), Stephen Markan (Information Systems & Technology), Keith Kenning (Co-op Education & Career Services), and Patrick Mihm (Plant Operations — Mechanical).

Ballots will be mailed to full-time unionized staff members, but full-time non-union staff will vote online. The election runs through September 18.

CAR

Back to top