Four profs receive top academic honour

Four Waterloo faculty members are among the 85 scholars across Canada and beyond who were installed last month as new Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada — a status that’s considered to be this country’s highest academic honour.

“The newly elected Fellows have diverse backgrounds and disciplines,” a news release explained, “but they have been elected to the Academies of RSC by their peers in recognition of outstanding scholarly, scientific and artistic achievement. Founded in 1882, the RSC is Canada’s senior and most prestigious scholarly organization. The society has three primary functions: to recognize outstanding contributions to Canadian intellectual culture; to promote Canadian culture abroad; and to advise governments and organizations.

“While continuing to pursue its original mandate to promote excellence in research and learning, the RSC is also building bridges between Canada’s brightest minds and Canadian youth nationwide through the development of scholarship and mentoring programs.”

Yvan Guindon, president of the RSC, said the society “continues to adhere to its core mandate of recognizing excellence through peer review. We also recognize that our Fellows are uniquely positioned to serve as mentors to the next generation of Canadian leadership.”

The induction ceremony was held in Gatineau (Hull) on November 28. The RSC citations for the four Fellows who are based at Waterloo:

William Coleman, of the UW political science department and the Balsillie School of International Affairs, “is an internationally renowned researcher and educator who has furthered understanding of globalization in Canada. A founding director of McMaster's Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, Coleman has published twelve books, forty-three journal articles and fifty-eight book chapters examining both public policy and globalization. His leadership of a SSHRCC funded international research team on Globalization and Autonomy brought together over eighty scholars from the Humanities and Social Sciences in fifteen countries. It is producing a projected eight volume series on Globalization and Autonomy and an open access online Compendium which provides user friendly condensed versions of research to a global audience.”

Carolyn Hansson, professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering and a former vice-president (university research), “is an internationally recognized scientist and engineer whose contributions in the basic science of corrosion and metallurgical processes and applied engineering have had a profound and lasting impact on her field. Her original work on the interactive relationships between material properties and reinforced concrete behaviour, the cavitation erosion of metal alloys, and applications of ion implantation and laser surface treatment for metals and alloys are exceptional in their creativity, vision and scholarly achievement. She has authored over 100 technical articles, numerous reports, edited 3 books and has been honoured with various awards and election to several academies.”

En-hui Yang of the department of electrical and computer engineering “is an international leader in source coding, a branch of information theory dealing with how to efficiently encode information for transmission, storage, and processing. A recipient of many awards including the 2007 Ernest C. Manning Award of Distinction and an IEEE Fellow, he has made profound contributions to source coding by introducing fundamental source coding theory, solving long-standing open problems in source coding, inventing state-of-the-art lossless and lossy multimedia encoding algorithms, and transforming research results and coding algorithms into practice, which now impact on the daily life of tens of millions people worldwide in over 130 countries.”

Richard Oakley of the department of chemistry “has an international reputation for his seminal work in the area of main group chemistry. His original contributions to the discovery of new classes of molecular conductors and magnetic materials span the boundaries of inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry and solid state physics. His creative investigations of heterocyclic systems have demonstrated a mastery of synthetic chemistry. The judicious application of theoretical chemistry and physical techniques has provided a detailed understanding of the electronic and magnetic properties of novel solid-state molecular materials. he is the recipient of the Alcan Lecture Award and the Pure or Applied Inorganic Chemistry Award from the Canadian Society for Chemistry, and the Akron Section Award from the American Chemical Society. He has also been awarded a Canada Council Research Fellowship.”

The four new Fellows can be added to a long list of UW faculty, past and present, who have received the FRSC accolade.

Back to top

Notes in the final few days of the year

As the term winds down, it’s getting harder to find coffee and calories on campus. Food services closed the Bon Appetit food fair in the Davis Centre, the CEIT café, and the Modern Languages building cafeteria at the end of business hours Friday, and REVelation cafeteria in Ron Eydt Village as of Saturday night. What with other closings that had already happened, that leaves Mudie’s in Village I, Brubakers in the Student Life Centre, Browsers in the Dana Porter Library, Pastry Plus in Needles Hall, and Tim Hortons in the SLC, Davis and South Campus Hall open today, tomorrow and Wednesday. As of Wednesday, those outlets will be closed too, as well as other services and offices across the university. Wednesday’s Daily Bulletin will have the details on the few services that will be available during UW’s ten-day holiday. (A key thing to note is that the Student Life Centre with its turnkey desk will remain open 24 hours a day as always.)

Fall term exams conclude tomorrow, and then comes the marking. Behind the official statement that grades will “begin” to appear on Quest as of Wednesday is not only effort by the faculty members and others who have to mark exams and calculate final figures, but a complicated electronic system for delivering the results. Andrea Chappell of the instructional technologies unit in information systems and technology sends a reminder for instructors who use the Gradebooks portion of UW-ACE: “Once you are satisfied with the final grades, select the Manage tab. However, don’t select the Gradebook hyperlink. (Quest requires a different format than that provided by the software and IST has written a script to produce a suitable file.) Instead, select Quest Gradebook Export Final Marks from the UW Section Instructor Tools on the page. When prompted, select ‘Save the file’. Make sure to note the location to which you are saving the file and replace the default filename with your course name (e.g., ARTS101W07). This download and upload process is one we hope to automate in future.” By the way, IST advises that because of a system upgrade, Quest (not ACE, but Quest) will be unavailable from 7:00 a.m. to noon tomorrow, Tuesday.

Students in the Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology program tested the strength of their current business ventures on December 4 at the TecNet Innovation Fair. The annual event, sponsored by the Ontario ministry of research and innovation, brings together graduate students from MBET and McMaster University’s Master of Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Innovation program. Students delivered a 90-second business pitch to a panel of investors, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Five top projects were selected from each school and recognized for demonstrating solid business ideas destined for commercial success. Placing first from UW was Clip Mobile, a first-of-its-kind mobile application system that provides a platform for mobile coupons using GPS technology for distribution. (Pictured: Alaa Wafa, a member of the Clip team.) Also ranking high: ReThink Energy, an energy solution that converts waste to power through sustainable and efficient processes; GLASS, a transparent telepresence communication system that serves to eliminate the constraints of current telepresence and video-conferencing products; Lucid, a software solution for marketing lifecycle management; and SportMetrix, a technology designed to record and analyze athletic performance. “McMaster and the University of Waterloo together produced more than 20 incredible teams this year, confirming that both schools are truly committed to providing excellence in business education and performance,” said Howard Armitage, executive director of CBET.

The UW donors-and-friends report, “We’re Making the Future”, tells the story: A few years ago, deep in Australia's outback, the Midnight Sun team members found themselves standing beside their camper unable to fill the water tank. They had a canister of water, a hose, but no pump. Suddenly one student jumped on the roof, the others hoisted up the canister, and they quickly got water by siphoning. "It comes up time and again, the brilliance and quick thinking of these students. It has been such a pleasure seeing their ability any time day or night — and on any continent in the world," says Gordon Savage (left), a systems design engineering professor. As the team's faculty advisor for 17 years, Savage knows what the team is capable of achieving. And he’s also a longtime financial donor. “Why? Not only does Savage believe in the project's educational value, he knows first-hand that solar cars don't come cheap. Attending the World Solar Challenge race in Australia can cost upwards of $80,000 and vehicle parts and solar cells also add up. Now with the university's teams scheduled to move over to the new Engineering 5 building in March 2010, Savage says he's excited to spend time with them at the new Student Design Centre. No longer will the teams' accomplishments be scattered across the campus, but housed and displayed together.”

The Accelerator Centre in UW’s Research and Technology Park has announced a partnership agreement with Waterloo’s Maplesoft, one of UW’s earliest spinoff companies, to provide the AC and its technology start-up clients with access to Maplesoft’s technology suite. The partnership will provide participating companies and their employees with access to such technology tools as Maple, MapleSim, MapleNet and Maple TA. “As a Waterloo-founded and headquartered company, we are excited to work with the Accelerator Centre to foster new start-up success, and empower new technology companies in this region to flourish and grow,” says Maplesoft president and CEO Jim Cooper. “These companies will reinforce Waterloo’s reputation as a leading technology city in North America.” “We’re thrilled to welcome Maplesoft as a partner,” says Tim Ellis, AC director of operations. “The engineers, mathematicians and educators who form the fabric of our client base also represent Maplesoft’s customer base. They are delighted to have access to such a rich and pedigreed suite of tools.”

CAR

Back to top