Midwives to offer services on campus

Health Services has established a partnership with St. Jacob’s Midwives to provide on-campus care for pregnant women through their pregnancy and delivery, and for both mom and newborn during the six weeks following delivery.

Students, university employees and their spouses now have the opportunity to take advantage of the care available through the midwifery service at Health Services rather than travelling to the service’s headquarters in St. Jacob’s.

“The midwives have contracted with an additional midwife to ensure adequate professional staff,” says Barb Schumacher, director of Health Services. “They will be working with us, seeing patients in our clinic, as independent professionals.”   

Midwifery services are paid by the province’s Ministry of Health for all Ontario residents, so there is no impact on supplementary health insurance.

Midwives work collaboratively with primary care providers (doctors or nurse practitioners) and transfer the care of mother and newborn to the family physician or nurse practitioner at six week postpartum or earlier if necessary.

A family clinic will be part of the renovated and reopened original Health Services building once work has completed.

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Creating Canadian cultural connections

by Ainsley Munro, Student Success Office.

The International Student Experience team in the Student Success Office has created Canadian Culture Connection, a new program for students from abroad.

The program holds weekly sessions for international students to meet and share their stories and experiences of living in a new culture.

“Students arriving from other countries have told us that culture is one of the most difficult things to understand and adjust to when they move to Canada,” says Stefanie Campbell, International Education and Immigration Advisor. “The food can be very different, it can take time to understand sarcasm and humour here in Canada, and laws can vary from country to country. This program allows our international students to get to know one another while learning about the cultural norms in Canada.”

Students meet once a week and talk about various topics in a small-group format led by other international students. Guest speakers will join students throughout spring term to talk about healthy eating, managing stress, and volunteering in Canada.

To get involved, drop by the Student Success Office on the second floor of South Campus Hall on Tuesdays at 2:30 p.m. for casual conversation and discussion groups. No registration is required to participate.

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Awards, appointments, and all that

Civil Engineering graduate Musa Chunge was recently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, one of the most prestigious international scholarships available these days, according to a congratulatory announcement from Civil & Environmental Engineering.

Chunge was one of 51 recipients out of more than 3,500 applicants who were evaluated on criteria such as outstanding intellectual ability, leadership potential, commitment to improving the lives of others, and a good fit between the applicant's qualifications and aspirations and the postgraduate programme at Cambridge for which they applied.

Chunge’s research interests are the advancement of construction technology and the concept of morphing structures or structural muscles. He will be pursuing an MPhil in Engineering at Cambridge.

The scholarship program was established in 2000 when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $210M to the University of Cambridge.

St. Jerome's University has announced that Frank Clifford is the recipient of the 2013 Chancellor John Sweeney Award for Catholic Leadership. The award, named for John Sweeney, the first lay Chancellor of St. Jerome's, "recognizes the ongoing need for a Catholic presence and voice in shaping future leaders and engaging in the challenging issues facing the world today" and is given to "someone who has made a contribution to Catholic education, has a continued commitment to Catholic Leadership and publicly lives out the gospel values in a distinguished life."

Clifford, a leader in Catholic education in Ontario, received an honorary degree from the University of Waterloo in 2002. "Frank was instrumental in securing full government funding to Catholic schools in Ontario when he was appointed to a provincial government committee by then-premier Bill Davis in the early 1980s," reads a statement from St. Jerome's.

The presentation of the award will take place at the annual St. Jerome's Feast event on Friday, September 27.

Recent management engineering graduates Hardeep Chagger, Scott Easton, Megan Maguire and Mark Santos were named first place winners in the International Conference for Upcoming Engineers (ICUE) 2013 design competition. The group successfully competed against 14 other student teams, most of them from the University of Toronto and Ryerson University. This is the same crew that also took first prize in the MGTE Design Symposium Awards last April. Their design project, entitled "Project Broadcast," was supervised by Professor Mark Hancock.

Professor Bovas Abraham, Professor Emeritus in the department of statistics and actuarial science, has been awarded Honorary Membership in the Statistical Society of Canada. The award is intended "to honour an individual who has made exceptional contributions to the development of the statistical sciences in Canada and whose work has had a major impact in this country."

According to the citation, Abraham was given the award "for his fundamental contributions to the statistical sciences, advances in time series analysis, statistical methods for quality improvement, and industrial statistics, for dissemination of statistical methodology through authorship of textbooks, and for his service as founding president of the Business and Industrial Statistics Section and President of the Statistical Society of Canada.”

Abraham received his award at the University of Alberta, where the 41st Annual Meeting of the Statistical Society of Canada was taking place.

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