Smoking researchers win health award

A trio of UW researchers are among the eight winners of the first Top Canadian Achievements in Health Research Awards, announced a few days ago by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The awards “recognize and celebrate Canadian health research and innovation excellence”. Winners were selected by a peer-review panel of Canadian and international experts who looked for “the discoveries and innovations that had the biggest impact on the health of people in this country and around the world”.

Waterloo’s Geoffrey Fong, Mary Thompson and David Hammond were cited for “their outstanding work with the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project in assessing the effectiveness of various programs to reduce smoking around the world”.

“It’s worth noting that all the winners of this new award have placed a strong emphasis on translating their research discoveries and knowledge into innovations that have resulted in practical ways to improve health outcomes,” said Ian Graham, vice-president (knowledge translation) at CIHR. “That’s a crucial test for health research: how it can make a difference in people’s lives.”

Fong, Thompson and Hammond are key figures in collecting and interpreting research evidence to promote methods for reducing the “preventable deaths” that result from tobacco use, including 37,000 Canadians each year, CIHR says. Background: “The global tobacco epidemic will reach unprecedented proportions in the 21st century, because tobacco use is increasing in low and middle income countries. By the end of the century tobacco-related deaths are projected to grow as high as 1 billion. To reduce preventable deaths from using tobacco, the nations of the world, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, created the first-ever health treaty: the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which includes tobacco control policies that ratifying nations (now over 160) are required to implement, such as more prominent warning labels, smoke-free laws, and higher taxes.

“While many public health authorities hope FCTC policies will be effective, the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project, centred at the University of Waterloo, is providing evidence from a state-of-the-art multinational evaluation program to give strength and direction to those hopes. The ITC Project is the only research program that focuses on evaluating FCTC policies as they are implemented throughout the world.

“As an example, when Ireland decided to ban smoking in public places, including their famous pubs, the ITC Project was on hand to collect data on public opinion and behaviour before and after the change. What they found in Ireland was significant for tobacco control throughout the world. Compared to the United Kingdom, which did not implement a smoke free law, one year later Ireland saw a dramatic reduction of smoking in public places. In addition, smokers and non-smokers alike widely supported the ban. This set of findings from the ITC Project provided powerful feedback for politicians and public health officials, and has been the foundation for the many smoke-free laws that have been implemented throughout the world.”

Says Fong, of UW’s department of psychology: “We are one of eight researchers/research teams to receive this award, and the only one not given to a medical school. The ITC Project is centred at UW, although the project is a true collaboration, most notably with Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo (our lead U.S. collaborating institution) and the Cancer Council of Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia.

“We are very proud of the fact that the ITC Project is an equal working collaboration across three faculties at UW.” Those would be arts, which includes Fong’s psych department; mathematics, where Thompson is a faculty member in statistics and actuarial science, responsible for sampling and analysis methods; and applied health sciences, where Hammond is in the department of health studies and gerontology.

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Faculty evaluation 'needs improvement'

With midterm season arriving, it might be some comfort to students to know that faculty members at UW also face an appraisal, in the form of the annual performance evaluation — and that process, in turn, came under scrutiny this year. Some changes in UW’s formal policies, as well as administrative moves, are needed in order to improve the way faculty members’ performance is evaluated, said a memo in early summer.

A Working Group on Faculty Annual Performance Evaluation submitted its report to the provost and the president of the faculty association in April. Association president George Freeman announced this week that the goal is to have any resulting changes approved "so they would apply to the year 2010, that is, to the assessments which are done in 2011".

“Compared to other universities,” last spring's report pointed out,”the merit process at UW plays an unusually important role in determining annual pay increases for faculty. The salary structure for university faculty has low salaries early in careers, with provisions built into the structure for annual increases so that career average earnings are commensurate with qualifications. The size of these increases is entirely dependent on the faculty member’s merit evaluation.”

However, “the existing system is not being used as effectively as it might be, there is unfortunate variation in the way it is implemented across campus, and it is poorly understood.”

One problem is that merit ratings depend mostly on the department chair. The committee suggests creating a performance evaluation committee in each department, to provide expertise on the various fields of study in the department and “reduce concerns about arbitrary decisions made by one person”.

Faculty are rated in three areas — teaching, research, and service, usually weighted at 40, 40 and 20 per cent of the total. “There is a great deal of variation from discipline to discipline in terms of expectations,” says the report. “However, the working group judges that it should be possible, at the department level, to make expectations clear.

“We cannot remove judgement from the process, but a written statement of the relevant evaluation criteria, suitably worded to indicate that the criteria are general rules-of-thumb to which exceptions are possible, is the appropriate way to address this tension.”

The report points out that not everybody understands one principle already written in to the rules: “When a person’s weightings depart from the standard 40/40/20, the expectations for quality of work are unchanged, but the expectations for quantity do change.” It suggests making more use of that mechanism — for example, allowing young faculty members with children to have less weight attached to teaching and more to research as part of a reduced-load arrangement.

Says the report: “It is particularly important that tenure track faculty annually receive detailed information about their progress toward tenure and specific recommendations about what to change, if anything, to improve the likelihood of tenure and promotion.” However, it suggests, professors who have tenure don’t need evaluations that often, and energy could be saved by evaluating them every other year.

The report also includes some specific remarks about all three areas in which faculty are rated. About teaching, it points out that “there are other legitimate sources of information about quality of teaching beside student evaluations”, but suggests that evaluations could be used better, and calls for deans’ council to see about implementing “a common course evaluation instrument for use across campus”.

About scholarship, it notes that “the most frequently voiced concerns have to do with the difficulty of properly valuing scholarly contributions of a non-traditional nature (e.g., works of art, knowledge transfer, and social innovations). Another frequent concern is that a one-year ‘snapshot’ is not an appropriate way to evaluate scholarly contributions.” Rating of scholarship should be based on three years’ worth of work, it suggests, and UW should “clarify that scholarly work outside of the usual peer reviewed venues is valued, but that the onus is on the faculty member to provide evidence of its quality, impact and relevance.”

Finally, it says, “there is more serious discontent about the evaluation of service than either of the other two areas. . . . Important informal contributions to the University — things like being available to undergraduate or graduate students, mentoring new faculty members, or being willing to teach unfamiliar courses when the department needs someone to do it — are not being recognised sufficiently.”

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Enrolment above target; other notes

How many first-year students are there this fall? The answer comes from Mary Soulis of the institutional analysis and planning office, although it remains preliminary until after the official count date of November 1. By then, she says in a memo this week, “our total year one enrolment should be between 6,100 and 6,200. Of the total about 5,700 are new admits,” with the other four or five hundred being previously registered students who still have first-year status this term. The actual figure she’s calculating, with “an accuracy of about 1%”, is 6,169, compared to the target first-year enrolment of 5,911. “This would put us at 104% of our target . . . about 116 over last fall’s November 1 registered students of 6,053. All Faculties are close to or above their targets; the Faculties vary from 99% of target for Engineering to 116% for Mathematics. Domestic students are at 105% of target and international high-fee paying students are at 101% of target.” Inevitably there are footnotes and caveats about who’s included and who’s not; for example, 218 students in the mathematics and English Language for Academic Success don’t get counted. One note that’s new this time round: “Excludes 22 new admits registered in the Engineering UAE program.”

"Have you ever continued to snack when you were full . . . felt guilty when you ate certain foods?" The people who can say yes are the people who need "Mindful Eating", says Beth Bower of UW's Counselling Services. She's launching a seven-session workshop under that title, aimed specifically at staff members "who struggle with emotional eating and weight management". Says a flyer: “In the group you will learn and practice lasting changes to how you eat; strategies to manage stress and emotional eating; cultivation of self-acceptance and body acceptance; mindfulness skills including mindful eating, body scan, walking & sitting meditation, and gentle stretching.” The program runs in weekly sessions starting October 20 (4 to 6 p.m.) and the total fee is $10. Registration is at counselling services in Needles Hall, phone ext. 32655.

Over 35? You may be having some trouble seeing up close — squinting at the computer screen or holding your book further and further away. “This condition is called presbyopia,” Alisa Sivak of the UW school of optometry reminds us. “Unlike myopia (near-sightedness) and hyperopia (far-sightedness), which affect only some people and can develop at any age, presbyopia affects everyone once they hit middle age.” The Centre for Contact Lens Research has two studies under way, one for people who have never had problems with their vision (“particularly distance vision”) and one for those who have worn contact lenses some time in the past ten years but gave them up when presbyopia surfaced. “You found – and rightly so! – that contact lenses helped with your distance vision but made your near vision worse.” The new option: “Multifocal contact lenses allow you to see both distance and near without having to cart reading glasses around with you. You may be a little bit apprehensive about putting a contact lens on your eye, but you wouldn’t mind giving them a try if someone could walk you through the process. We can do that. We’ll teach you how to insert the lenses and sit with you while you try it for yourself. You get to wear the lenses for a week at a time, just enough time to get a taste for how they compare to your ‘readers’.” Potential research subjects can get more information: e-mail research@ optometry.uwaterloo.ca.

Fans can get the year's first look at the Warrior men's basketball team tonight, as they'll play an exhibition game against an alumni team starting at 7:00 in the Physical Activities Complex main gym. • The Student Life Centre announced on its Facebook fan page this week that "GO buses start running from campus on Saturday, October 31." • Thanksgiving dinner will be served tonight at Mudie's cafeteria in Village I (or, for those who don't like turkey, there are "spicy chicken parathas").

Some 23,300 undergraduate students had e-mail from the registrar's office yesterday inviting them to answer a survey about service at the registrar's and accounts offices in Needles Hall, and offering the chance to win a bookstore gift certificate. • Campbell McKay, an information systems specialist in UW's IST department, officially retired as of July 1 this year (sorry to be late in reporting this transition). • If anybody is wondering about the length of the overpass that will connect Engineering 5 above the ring road to Engineering 3, here's the answer: 76 meters, or about 250 feet.

CAR

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