WEAL's big anniversary issue

"Ours was a modest beginning at best,” says the front-page article on the new issue of the Waterloo Engineering Alumni Letter — WEAL — as it celebrates the 50th anniversary of UW and the engineering program.

The unusually fat issue of the twice-a-year alumni publication includes reminiscences, historical photos, and an update on anniversary activities and campus news. There are also several stories about current alumni achievements, including a feature on Sean McKinnon, an electrical and computer engineering graduate who won an Emmy award for his involvement in the technical production of NBC television’s 2004 Olympics coverage.

Waterloo engineering has come a long way, WEAL makes clear, from the early days in a couple of portable buildings on the campus of Waterloo College. One of the original 74 students, Bill Schneider, contributes some of his memories for the newsletter. “Gerald Hagey, the university president, once gave me a ride to class in his enormously long Cadillac coupe,” he writes. “To keep in touch, he made a practice of going to the bus stop at King Street and ferrying students to the new campus. He was a remarkable man doing a remarkable thing, that these days would be called ‘management by walking around’.”

Other reminiscences come from Jana Havard, whose MASc in civil engineering in 1968 made her the first woman to graduate from the engineering faculty. “I taught at the university in Prague for a few years before coming to Canada,” she writes. “At Waterloo I met my future husband, who was pursuing his PhD in civil engineering.” He and she are now partners in Havard Engineering Inc., and their son is a UW graduate in mechanical engineering.

And there are words from Jim Pike, a 1969 grad who was president of the Engineering Society when the “Tool” mascot was introduced: “I was the first person to touch The Tool. I picked it up from the supplier, threw it in the back of my 1962 Volkswagen Beetle and headed back to Waterloo.” Other grads talk about the advent of computers, the creation of the Waterloo Engineering Endowment Fund, a brush with Engineers Without Borders, and the early days of the Midnight Sun solar car and other student projects.

There’s even a photo of “the Stetson Gang”, five 1981 graduates of the mechanical engineering program who posed outside POETS Pub in their last year of undergraduate study and again in September 2006 at their 25th reunion.

Back to top

Of Archie and Veronica, and other studies

Here’s a list of more UW faculty members who will begin sabbatical leaves on September 1, 2007. The descriptions of their sabbatical plans are taken from material submitted to the university’s board of governors. Each of the sabbaticals listed runs for twelve months.

Adie Nelson, sociology: “It is my intention to use the period of my requested sabbatical to complete an already-contracted, sole-authored textbook, with Oxford University Press, on the subject of criminology; revise/submit for publication a series of articles that examine constructions of gender within a series of children’s comic books that have enjoyed long-standing popularity — the ‘Archie’ series; pursue investigation of Canadian media constructions of, variously, ‘infanticide’, ‘familicide’, ‘polygamy’ and ‘faith-based’ alternative dispute resolution tribunals and to present my findings in manuscripts submitted to peer-refereed journals. The research task of collecting relevant materials for each of the projects began in 2005 and is ongoing.”

Walter Duley, physics and astronomy: “I plan to visit research laboratories in the UK and France to initiate a new research program in the characterization of nano-assembled carbon films. Part of the time will also be spent at Waterloo working with students/post-docs on the development of photoluminescent techniques to study carbon nano-particles.”

John Goyder, sociology: “I plan to write a book on changes that have taken place between 1965 and 2005 in the prestige-ratings people give to occupations; work with collaborators on projects to do with attitudes towards survey research and on the work careers of students who have taken co-op education.”

Peter Hoffman, pure mathematics: “I intend continuing recent work on the mathematical logic of program verification. Also I expect to spend time revising an already often used logic text (Logic for the Mathematical) and combining it with another work on the basics of computability theory. Plans include visits to Cornell and Oslo Universities.

Richard Mann, computer science: “I plan to do research on motion categories (joint with Michael Langer, McGill), Bayesian approaches to perception (with Allan Jepson, Toronto), and visual event recognition (at Waterloo).”

Douglas Brown, psychology: “I plan to use my sabbatical leave to achieve three goals. First, I plan to initiate several new research projects with my graduate students. Second, I plan to write and submit several journal articles related to leadership and employee self-regulation. Finally, I plan to spend time updating my understanding of various statistical techniques that relate to dealing with multilevel data.”

Jacob Sivak, optometry: “The leave requested will be used to interact with collaborators in Israel (Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Haifa University) and the US (Rochester, New York) and for writing and summarizing the results of several years of research activity.”

Flora Ng, chemical engineering: “I will initiate new projects on sustainable green energy research and collaborative research related to ultra clean fuel and energy efficient technologies. I will visit and give invited seminars on catalytic distillation, green chemistry and engineering, the production of ultra clean fuel, and the upgrading of oilsands bitumen at a number of universities and research centres.”

Back to top