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Olympic Rower Melanie Kok to Kick-Off Engineering & Science Competition
Almost 1,000 students from nearly 50 Ontario high schools will test their engineering and science knowledge and abilities at the 20th Annual Engineering and Science Olympics on Thursday, October 15 at McMaster University.
Canadian rower Melanie Kok, bronze medalist at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, will help kick the day off with a welcome at 9:00 a.m. Melanie is a graduate student in the MiNDS neuroscience program at McMaster.
A new event this year is Build Your Own Robot. Other competitions include: egg high jump, physics paper triathlon, chemical forensics, civil Canada arm, photonic puzzles, a mechanical transporter competition, and mathematical mental gymnastics.
The students will be competing for more than $20,000 in McMaster tuition entrance prizes awarded to teams winning the day’s competitions.
When: Thursday, October 15, 2009
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Welcome ceremony at 9:00. Awards announced at 3:45 p.m.Where: Main tent outside of John Hodgins Engineering Building
Various locations for competitions (maps available at main tent).Students will also be able to learn more about engineering and science through an Open House featuring departmental displays and demonstrations organized through Let’s Talk Science, VidaLAB, W.C. McCallion Planetarium, and McMaster Museum of Art. Engineering student Kyla Fisher will speak about her summer work experience in Ghana with Engineering Without Borders.
High school teachers will also be put to the challenge in a lunch-hour competition where they can win up to $1,500 in tuition prizes for their students.
More information at: http://olympics.eng.mcmaster.ca
Three Share Nobel Prize for Chemistry
Israeli, two Americans explained how the body’s cells create all-important proteins
Vancouver Sun – October 8, 2009 p. B3
Two Americans and an Israeli who used X-ray crystallography to map the precise structure of the ribosome, the cell’s crucial protein-making factory, won the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday.
Their independent work, published in 2000, provides fundamental information about the workings of the cellular machinery at the atomic level and is already being exploited by pharmaceutical companies working to make new, more effective antibiotics.
The $1.4-million prize will be shared equally by Thomas A Steitz of Yale University; Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, who was born in India but is now a U.S. citizen; and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
Yonath is the first woman to win the chemistry Nobel since Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received the 1964 prize, 1 and who was also honoured for her contributions to X-ray crystallography. Yonath is also the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel.
“Its true that a woman hasn’t won since 1964,” she told Israeli radio. “But I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that I’m the best woman since then? I don’t think gender played a role here.”
X-ray crystallography is a time-consuming and tedious science that requires excruciating patience and care to produce crystals of cellular proteins and then sophisticated mathematics to analyse the X-ray patterns that arise when an X-ray beam is focused on such crystals. This is a difficult process with small proteins from cells, and many researchers thought it would be impossible with the ribosome, which is one of the largest proteins in living organisms.
The ribosome translates the cell’s genetic information into the proteins that actually make the cell function.
After 20 years of work, it became apparent that Yonath could finally produce such crystals, and other researchers such as Seitz and Ramakrishnan joined the race to complete the work.
Steitz’s contribution was to determine how the ribosomes oriented within the crystal. That, combined with the information from heavy metals, finally made it possible to determine phase angles and, in 1998, Steitz published the first crude crystal structure of the ribosome’s large subunit.
In 2000, Steitz published the refined structure of the large subunit of the ribosome and Yonath and Ramakrishnan independently published the structure of the small subunits.
Many antibiotics work by blocking the activity of ribosomes in bacteria without affecting those in human cells, but bacteria have grown resistant to most of them. Using the new ribosome images, pharmaceutical companies have been able to determine how the antibiotics actually function and to design new molecules that will circumvent resistance.
Scientists around the world are using the winners’ research to develop new antibiotics that can be used in the ongoing battle against antibiotic-resistant bacteria that cause so much illness, suffering and death,” said Thomas H. Lane, president of the American Chemical Society.
Thomas H. Maugh II Los Angeles Times
Salary Negotiation Workshop - October 22, 2009
Salary Negotiation Workshop: Getting Past the No
WIE – Women in Engineering (Vancouver Region) in collaboration with SCWIST invites you to a workshop on salary negotiation for women presented by Carrie Gallant.
October 22, 2009
6:30-9:30 pm
YWCA Welch Room
535 Hornby St. – 4th floor
Vancouver
Advance Registration: $8 available here.
Carrie Gallant specializes in helping women leaders and professionals to imagine and achieve extraordinary outcomes. A former practising lawyer who has also held a number of key leadership positions, Carrie has unique insight and understanding of the challenges facing women leaders. Her expertise in negotiation, mediation, conflict resolution, and career management provides a rich foundation to her passion for helping others to uncover what really matters and to solve problems creatively.
A complete biography for Carrie is available at http://www.wievr.ca/nextevent.html
Sandwiches, snacks, and hot and cold beverages will be provided
For more information visit http://www.wievr.ca or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Dr. Judith Hall awarded UBC Outstanding Faculty Community Service Award
Judith Hall is a leading pediatrician and clinical geneticist who has focused her research on disorders of growth, such as dwarfism, and birth defects, such as spina bifida and congenital contractures. She is driven by curiosity, sees her field as an art as much as a science, and enjoys her work so much she tends to take little time off. The results have been prolific. During more than 30 years of clinical research Dr. Hall has identified many new syndromes (two bear her name) and documented the natural history of many others. She has also discovered the mechanisms behind many disorders and developed new ways to classify them. She has published more than 290 original articles – some considered classics – and 10 books, two of them award-winning. Her Handbook of Normal Physical Measurements is essential for physicians specializing in growth disturbances in children.
Dr. Hall was educated and spent her early career in the US, where she studied under Victor McKusick, widely regarded as the founder of modern medical genetics. She moved to Vancouver in 1981, becoming a UBC professor of Medical Genetics and director of Genetic Services for BC and, later, Head of the Department of Pediatrics at UBC and BC Children’s Hospital. Now a professor emerita, she is based at the Children’s and Women’s Health Centre of British Columbia.
Although Dr. Hall is a world authority in her field, her biggest motivation has been translating discovery into clinical care and improved treatments. To this end she has devoted countless volunteer hours driving professional standards, providing advice to patients and caregivers, and developing links with lay support groups.
She has served on parent support boards, written newsletter articles in layperson’s language and been instrumental in developing the resources, services and care guidelines so vital for coping with genetic illnesses. She also advocates for research into rare disorders. Dr. Hall has been honoured with life membership in Little People of America.
Dr. Hall has also done much to set high standards for her profession. She has held many senior roles in major national and international science and medicine organizations, helping them to reshape priorities and commitments. Her volunteering includes board work for the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, the International Pediatric Association, the Vancouver Foundation, the Medical Research Foundation of Canada, the US and Canadian Children’s Miracle Networks, Genome Canada, and the Canadian Council of Academies. She has received many prestigious awards including a Senior Killam Prize for Research and the Ross Award from the Canadian Pediatric Society. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Parisa Bastani awarded UBC Outstanding Future Alumnus Award
Not many people can claim to have driven a race car, and hardly anyone can say they headed a team to design, build and compete in one, but for recent engineering grad Parisa Bastani this experience was just one of several highlights to mark her jam-packed years at UBC. Her student record is notable not only for outstanding academic achievement, but also for extensive involvement outside the classroom and a willingness to serve the student population as a leader, mentor and representative.
Ms Bastani’s brush with race cars came as captain of UBC’s Formula Society of Automotive Engineers, which designs and builds a new race car each year to compete against 140 other universities and colleges worldwide in an annual race in California. She was the first female to captain and technically lead a Formula SAE team in North America competitions and during her time at UBC has been a mentor to more than 100 students in automotive engineering design and manufacture.
But the Formula Society was not the only team she was involved with. As chair of the Engineering Student Team Council (ESTC) she provided leadership to hundreds of fellow students working in 12 teams on challenging projects to design and/or build submarines, robots, space shuttles, rockets, concrete toboggans, helicopters and fuel-efficient green cars. She not only provided technical expertise, but also encouraged collaboration among departments and facilitated fundraising.
She has mentored many junior students in their career planning and academic needs, helped international students settle into new surroundings and advised on effective leadership in multi-cultural teams. She has been a speaker for various leadership, engineering, and international events, and has served on several committees and councils within the faculty of Applied Science.
Academically, Ms Bastani is outstanding. She was a permanent fixture on the Dean’s Honour list since her first year at UBC and in 2009 was named a Wesbrook scholar, UBC’s most prestigious student designation. She has also been noticed by professional organizations and the corporate sector, and was granted an award for Best Engineering Paper on suspension design from GM in a competition that included faculty as well as students. She recently accepted full graduate scholarships for Oxford and Cambridge universities.
Although she will be in demand from industry, automotive engineering isn’t necessarily her future. Her graduate work will be in technology management and policy. She is driven by humanitarian considerations and how technological advances can be optimized and regulated for the well-being of all segments of society.
Humans causing erosion comparable to world’s largest rivers and glaciers
A new study finds that large-scale farming projects can erode the Earth’s surface at rates comparable to those of the world’s largest rivers and glaciers.
Published online in the journal Nature Geosciences, the research offers stark evidence of how humans are reshaping the planet. It also finds that – contrary to previous scholarship – rivers are as powerful as glaciers at eroding landscapes.
“Our initial goal was to investigate the scientific claim that rivers are less erosive than glaciers,” says Michele Koppes, a professor of geography at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and lead author of the study.
“But while exploring that, we found that many of the areas currently experiencing the highest rates of erosion are being caused by climate change and human activity such as modern agriculture,” says Koppes, who conducted the study with David Montgomery of the University of Washington.
In some cases, the researchers found large-scale farming eroded lowland agricultural fields at rates comparable to glaciers and rivers in the most tectonically active mountain belts.
“This study shows that humans are playing a significant role in speeding erosion in low lying areas,” says Koppes. “These low-altitude areas do not have the same rate of tectonic uplift, so the land is being denuded at an unsustainable rate.”
Koppes says other significant causes of low-altitude erosion include glacier melting caused by climate change and volcanic eruptions.
The highest erosion rates have typically been seen at high altitudes where tectonic forces pit rising rock against rivers and glaciers, says Koppes, who with Montgomery created with an updated database of erosion rates for more than 900 rivers and glaciers worldwide, documented over the past decade with new geologic measuring techniques.
Contrary to previous scholarship, they found that rivers and glaciers in active mountain ranges are both capable of eroding landscapes by more than one centimetre per year. Studies had previously indicated that glaciers could erode landscapes as much as 10 times faster than rivers, Koppes says.
View the study at: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo616.html
Getting into the game: Blame culture. Or genes. Or Dilbert. In engineering, it’s a man’s world-
for now
by Julien Russell Brunet on Thursday, September 17, 2009 9:58am
The Eurythmics had it only partly right. Back in 1985, the British pop duo of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart recorded Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves with the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. A modern feminist anthem, the song makes this interesting observation: “The inferior sex has got a new exterior. We got doctors, lawyers, politicians too.” Indeed, much of that has come true. At several Canadian medical and law schools, women now outnumber men. But there’s one traditionally male-dominated field where men are still a clear majority—and where women’s representation has even declined in the past few years: engineering.
According to Engineers Canada, the number of women enrolled in engineering programs was on the rise for a full decade before plateauing in 2001, when 20.6 per cent of students were women. But since then, as more and more men have taken engineering, the number of women has remained flat. Since 2001, the proportion of female engineering students has dropped nearly every year, to just 17.3 per cent in 2007, and a mere 17.1 per cent in 2008. At the University of Toronto, for one, women comprised 26.6 per cent of engineering students in 2001, but just 21.4 per cent in 2008. And the phenomenon is not confined to Canadian universities: female enrolment in engineering has plateaued across North America.
The reasons are the subject of a heated debate in and outside of the academy. “Certainly, it is not due to a lack of effort to encourage women to go into engineering,” says Judy Myers, the past president of the Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science, Trades and Technology (CCWESTT). Indeed, universities have embarked on a number of initiatives to attract women to the field, and the deans of some of the country’s top engineering schools are female. Yet the male-female gap continues to grow, confounding professors and university administrators. And before they can address the phenomenon, they must first figure out why it exists.
One hypothesis, endorsed by CCWESTT, suggests that women aren’t turning away from engineering so much as they’re turning toward other sciences that seem to offer not only challenging career opportunities but also the chance to make a difference. As Elizabeth Cannon, dean of the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary, explains, there are now many science disciplines that fit the bill, and so women might enrol in health or environmental sciences instead of biomedical or environmental engineering. “With so many doors open,” says Cannon, “you get a little bit of a dilution across all of these areas where women can be successful.”
Others suggest the field may still have an image problem—engineers as out-of-touch geeks or nerds. As Tyseer Aboulnasr, the dean of the faculty of applied science at the University of British Columbia, says, “The perception of engineering as a pure-technology field that doesn’t really connect with society is certainly an issue.” A recent study supported by Engineers Canada found that young women tend to “equate engineering and technology . . . with construction work, outdoor work, working in a cubicle, and relating primarily to computers and machines, rather than people.” Says Kathleen Sendall, an engineer and the first woman to chair the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, “Dilbert has contributed to a number of stereotypes about engineers.”
It’s hardly fair: engineering solutions are behind everything from iPods and laptops to roads and bridges, and they will be crucial to addressing worldwide issues like energy, clean water and climate change. But “engineering has not been successful in communicating the fact that engineering careers are, indeed, people-oriented and provide great benefit to society,” says Elizabeth Croft, the associate head of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of British Columbia.
Or maybe it’s just that engineering doesn’t have much of an image at all. As Chantal Guay, the chief executive officer of Engineers Canada, says, “We are the silent or invisible profession.”
Clearly, cultural factors also play a role in how women perceive engineering. It might be seen as a male domain in North America, but that’s not true in much of the rest of the world. UBC’s Aboulnasr and Adel Sedra, dean of the faculty of engineering at the University of Waterloo, are both from Egypt, where Aboulnasr says engineering isn’t considered more appropriate for one gender over the other; it’s simply seen as a prestigious field, along with medicine, dentistry and pharmaceutical science. (By contrast, law is “at the absolute bottom,” she adds.) In Egypt, adds Sedra, engineering is perceived as “desirable because it leads to high-paying jobs and is important for the country and society.” It’s much the same in Southeast Asia, eastern Europe and South America, says Cristina Amon, the dean of the faculty of applied science and engineering at U of T, who’s from Uruguay. “In South America, engineering gives you prestige that you can contribute in a meaningful way to society.”
Some observers suggest—controversially—that men are simply better at engineering and science because of differences in the way men and women think. Perhaps most famously, in 2005, Harvard University president Lawrence Summers—now President Barack Obama’s special economic adviser—made some provocative comments about “intrinsic aptitude” in science and engineering, the career pressures women face and discrimination within universities. Speaking at the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, Summers wondered aloud whether innate differences between the sexes may help explain why fewer women succeed in science and why men dominate the top ranks of research. Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, subsequently provided support for Summers’s remarks, citing evidence that biological sex differences—male superiority in mental object rotation and problem solving, for example—play a role in establishing and maintaining cognitive sex differences.
Others suggest the field may still have an image problem—engineers as out-of-touch geeks or nerds. As Tyseer Aboulnasr, the dean of the faculty of applied science at the University of British Columbia, says, “The perception of engineering as a pure-technology field that doesn’t really connect with society is certainly an issue.” A recent study supported by Engineers Canada found that young women tend to “equate engineering and technology . . . with construction work, outdoor work, working in a cubicle, and relating primarily to computers and machines, rather than people.” Says Kathleen Sendall, an engineer and the first woman to chair the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, “Dilbert has contributed to a number of stereotypes about engineers.”
It’s hardly fair: engineering solutions are behind everything from iPods and laptops to roads and bridges, and they will be crucial to addressing worldwide issues like energy, clean water and climate change. But “engineering has not been successful in communicating the fact that engineering careers are, indeed, people-oriented and provide great benefit to society,” says Elizabeth Croft, the associate head of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of British Columbia.
Or maybe it’s just that engineering doesn’t have much of an image at all. As Chantal Guay, the chief executive officer of Engineers Canada, says, “We are the silent or invisible profession.”
Clearly, cultural factors also play a role in how women perceive engineering. It might be seen as a male domain in North America, but that’s not true in much of the rest of the world. UBC’s Aboulnasr and Adel Sedra, dean of the faculty of engineering at the University of Waterloo, are both from Egypt, where Aboulnasr says engineering isn’t considered more appropriate for one gender over the other; it’s simply seen as a prestigious field, along with medicine, dentistry and pharmaceutical science. (By contrast, law is “at the absolute bottom,” she adds.) In Egypt, adds Sedra, engineering is perceived as “desirable because it leads to high-paying jobs and is important for the country and society.” It’s much the same in Southeast Asia, eastern Europe and South America, says Cristina Amon, the dean of the faculty of applied science and engineering at U of T, who’s from Uruguay. “In South America, engineering gives you prestige that you can contribute in a meaningful way to society.”
Some observers suggest—controversially—that men are simply better at engineering and science because of differences in the way men and women think. Perhaps most famously, in 2005, Harvard University president Lawrence Summers—now President Barack Obama’s special economic adviser—made some provocative comments about “intrinsic aptitude” in science and engineering, the career pressures women face and discrimination within universities. Speaking at the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, Summers wondered aloud whether innate differences between the sexes may help explain why fewer women succeed in science and why men dominate the top ranks of research. Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, subsequently provided support for Summers’s remarks, citing evidence that biological sex differences—male superiority in mental object rotation and problem solving, for example—play a role in establishing and maintaining cognitive sex differences.
So how are universities trying to encourage women to go into engineering? Part of the effort has been to address the image problem. In particular, schools have attempted to redefine engineering as a helping profession. “At UBC,” says Aboulnasr, “we are taking engineering back to what it was supposed to be about, which is service to society and making people’s lives better.”
Schools have sought to recruit more women faculty—a move that might well help to attract more female students, research suggests. In a recent study, researchers at the University of California-Davis and the United States Air Force Academy, for example, found that while professor gender has little impact on male students, “it has a powerful effect on female students’ performance in math and science classes, their likelihood of taking future math and science courses, and their likelihood of graduating with a science, technology, engineering, or math degree.” As CAPP’s Sendall explains, “All of us have an easier time imagining ourselves in careers where there are other people like us.” Ania Kroman, a civil engineering student at the Schulich school currently on her internship year, agrees, noting that “it is encouraging to see women who are leading a field that has a low percentage of women.”
Several Canadian universities have also embarked on a number of initiatives to attract female students to the field at a young age—“when they form views and interests,” says U of W’s Sedra—and to better support women in their university. The Skule Sisters program at U of T, for example, pairs second-year female engineering students with Grade 10 students in Toronto for a three-year mentorship; since its inception in 2007, enrolment in the program has more than doubled, to 63, during the 2008-’09 academic year. At the University of Calgary, the student organization Women in Science and Engineering offers educational tutorials, guest lecturers, field trips and scholarships; WISE has grown from 125 members in 1990 to more than 1,000 members in 2004.
While such initiatives might have results in the short term, it’s clear that changing the social and cultural perceptions that might be discouraging women from becoming engineers will require a long and concerted effort. But there’s good reason to believe the profession will figure out a solution. “This is a complex and challenging problem, and one that requires a multidisciplinary, team-based approach,” says Croft. “Perfect for engineers.”
Profile: Marisol Valerio
Driven by passion in her pursuit of higher education and musical inspirations
Passion underscores everything Marisol Valerio does, be it collecting soil samples by helicopter in the Northwest Territories or playing the violin while dressed as her alter ego, medieval fantasy warrior Violet Sin.
The Costa Rican transplant was attracted to B.C. for its natural beauty and diverse culture, and she got everything she had hoped for — on top of an education she says would be “difficult to find elsewhere” in the faculties of Science and Applied Science.
“Geological engineering combines my love of math and physics with my passion for the outdoors,” says Valerio, who graduated this spring with a Bachelor of Applied Science degree. “People in my field get into it because they enjoy the work. It’s definitely not your average nine-to-five desk job.”
Va!erio says the mentors and colleagues she’s met over the past five years are serving society by providing something it needs. “And we’re coming up with knowledge and skills to bring the industry beyond complying with existing regulations but doing what’s best for the environment—because for many of us, our love of nature is why we got into the field in the first place.”
While her studies and Co-op placements have taken her from diamond mines in Canada’s Northwest Territories to uranium explorations in Australia, her musical talents have taken her back in time in a variety of genres. Valerlo has served as orchestra conductor and
performed in four student-opera productions and also plays the violin in three bands spanning country, Latin and “folk metal” genres.
On stage, Valerio (a.k.a Violet Sin, her folk-metal persona) is joined by fellow UBC students and Scythia band members—Thorgen Hellhammer, Helmut Doomfist, Lady Thundertroll, Savage Tombfiller and the Souleater—as she unleashes the “angel’s harp,” or violin. Their original “battle songs” tell stories of wizards and goblins. To hear Scythia performances, visit the band’s MySpace profile at www.myspace.com/scythiavancouver.
“I’ve been playing the violin since I was four but it wasn’t until I came to UBC that I realized there were so many different ways of expressing myself musically,” says Valerio. “In a way, it sums up my experience here in Vancouver, where you can hear five different languages just while sitting on the bus.
“The opportunity to immerse myself in a variety of opinions and traditions and learn from students and teachers from around the world has really broadened my horizon,” she adds. “As an international student, it’s reassuring to see people embracing diversity—I never felt like an outsider.”
With a full-time job already lined up with a Vancouver-based consulting firm, Valerio is looking forward to taking a few days off to visit Hawaii. “Compared with my native Costa Rica, the pace is so much faster here and people are a more efficient,” she says. “Managing time well and keeping a good work-life balance is another valuable skill I’ve learned during my time at UBC.”
Ingenuity Summer 2009 p. 19
Study blames boys’ bad marks for female, male imbalance in Canadian universities
By Joanne Laucius, Vancouver Sun – September 21, 2009
For more than a decade, universities have been puzzling over where the boys are as the ratio of female to male students keeps on climbing.
About 56 per cent of Canadian undergraduates in 2006 were women, according to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, a significant change from the early 1970s, when more than two-thirds of university graduates in their mid-20s were men.
In a paper to be released today, an economist who has analysed the demographic data from a sweeping study of Canadian youth suggests some boys are staying away from campuses because their marks aren’t high enough to meet admission standards—and even hard work won’t bring them to the level of their female counterparts.
“We may have to start thinking of men as a disadvantaged group when it comes to post-secondary education,” said Torben Drewes, an economist at Trent University, where more than 60 per cent of students are female.
It is already known that high school boys aren’t trying as hard as girls to get good marks. One of the reasons boys aren’t producing the effort is because they don’t want to go to university, said Drewes.
He looked at data from the Youth in Transition Survey of behaviours among Canadian high school students, and the Program for International Student Assessment, a study of 15-year-olds in industrialized countries conducted annually by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Youth in Transition found that about 32 per cent of high school boys had an average of more than 80 per cent compared to more than 46 per cent of girls.
On average, the girls studied 6.4 hours a week, while the boys studied 4.7 hours. About 21 per cent of the boys reported skipping classes at least once a week, compared with 15 per cent of girls.
Drewes created a mathematical model to look at what would happen if boys made the same effort to improve their marks. He concluded that increased effort would close about half of the gap in marks between boys and girls.
The other half couldn’t be explained by effort alone.
“Whatever is going on in the high school system rewards girls more than boys,” said Drewes.
This suggests two policy alternatives if universities want to attract more males: motivate boys to do better early in their school careers and keep up the effort, or lower university admission standards so they can get in.
Drewes said he isn’t in favour of differentiated standards.
“That seems wrong,” he said.
Even if the school system succeeded in increasing the engagement of boys, it would still not be guaranteed that boys would want to go to university, said Drewes.
Despite the fact that more women are now getting university educations, men are still out-earning women on average.
“For some men, not going to university is a rational decision.”
Besides, boys choosing not to go to university is not necessarily a bad thing, said Drewes, who wrote his paper for a four-year Canada-wide project looking at the effectiveness of student aid, conducted by the Educational Policy Institute and the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University.
“That they’re not going isn’t a serious indication that there’s something wrong,” he said.
“It is, if they are unable to go.”
The shifting male-to-female ratio has all kinds of ramifications on a societal level. Women with degrees want to marry men who have degrees.
With more women than men in university, demand is clearly outstripping supply.
And it will have an effect on the professions. This year’s first-year medical class at the University of Ottawa has 102 female students and 54 male students.
How Now, Milk Cow?
When dairy cattle are stressed they are more vulnerable to illness and injury, which costs the farmer in terms of decreased milk production and veterinary bills. While the bulk of dairy research is devoted to nutrition and production – input and output – the faculty of Land and Food Systems’ Animal Welfare Program takes a more holistic approach by considering the animal’s psychological state.
Whether the motivation is animal welfare or milk production, establishing the animal’s likes and dislikes in terms of surroundings and other conditions can only be to the benefit of both cattle and industry.
UBC’s Agassiz-based Dairy Education and Research Centre (DERC) has the capacity for observing more than 300 cattle. “How dairy cattle eat, sleep, rest and interact speaks volumes about their preferences,” says associate professor Marina von Keyserlingk. “By analyzing their behaviour, we can help producers avoid costly problems such as lameness and other common illnesses.” Food and water intake is automatically monitored for each animal and their movements and choices are closely recorded. Sophisticated software is then used to analyse the data. The researchers are particularly interested in key phases of the life cycle when the animals are most susceptible to illness, such as the start of lactation, the end of lactation and the weaning process for calves.
To support their research, von Keyserlingk and her colleagues, professors Dan Weary and David Fraser, received a $1 million Industrial Research Chair joint award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and eight Canadian dairy farming organizations.
The faculty has an international reputation for this approach to dairy research, which is concerned with animal welfare but accompanied by recommendations and solutions that make sense for industry. This expertise has been sought out by industrial partners in Brazil, Chile, Germany and other counties.
Andreia Vieira, a Brazilian veterinarian sponsored by her government to study at UBC, is a PhD student in the faculty. She is concentrating on the social enrichment and cognitive
development of weaning calves. Today’s practices involve removing a calf from its mother shortly after birth and rearing it in isolation. Her research shows that stress at weaning is greatly reduced if the calves are reared in pairs. “Brazil has major beef and poultry industries and there’s a huge interest in what UBC is doing in this relatively new science of combining animal psychology and production,” she says.
In Canada, a new code of recommended practice for the care and handling of dairy cattle, published in March by the Dairy Farmers of Canada, drew heavily on DERC findings, such as pain control methods during dehorning, improved calf housing, feeding practices and lameness prevention.
“We have the strongest group of cattle welfare researchers in the world,” says Weary. “A long history of collaboration with the dairy industry also keeps our research current. The
changes we suggest are grounded in the constraints of modern dairy farming while still improving the lives of animals.”
Trek UBC’s Alumni magazine Summer 2009 p. 11
Dream On
Daydreaming is often associated with idleness: a wandering mind failing to concentrate on the task at hand, the lazy sprawl of an undisciplined brain. However, a UBC study
shows that daydreaming causes increased activity in certain areas of the brain, including those associated with complex problem solving. “This study shows our brains are very active when we daydream, much more active than when we focus on routine tasks,” says psychology professor Kalina Christoff, lead author.
Researchers used a functional Medical Resonance Image scanner to monitor subjects’ brain activity as they performed a very simple task, then measured their level of attentiveness
using the scans to track performance on the task, and recording subjects’ reported experience.
The study results also challenge the popularly held idea that certain areas of the brain aren’t active at the same time. The brain’s default network is associated with routine,
straightforward thinking, and its executive network with more complex thought processes. The study showed both networks were active when subjects were daydreaming. “This is a
surprising finding,” says Christoff. “Until now, we thought they operated on an either-or basis; when one was activated the other was thought to be dormant.” The less aware a subject was of his or her mind wandering, the more active were both brain networks.
The study results, and the fact that the average person daydreams about a third of their waking life, suggest that daydreaming may play an important function. “When you
daydream, you may not be achieving your immediate goal – say reading a book or paying attention in class – but your mind may be taking that time to address more important
questions in your life, such as advancing your career or personal relationships,” says Christoff.
Trek UBC’s Alumni magazine Summer 2009 p. 5
Profile: Dr. Elizabeth Simpson
Of Mice and Men
You could call it a “happy” accident. In 2001, when Dr. Elizabeth Simpson was attempting to delete a specific gene in a mouse, she unintentionally recovered a second deletion.
The resulting impact on mouse behaviour was astonishing. Instead of displaying the usual meek behaviour, mice born without the second gene exhibited off-the-scale aggression. Dubbed “fierce” mice, they attacked each other and laboratory handlers without the slightest provocation.
Even more remarkable, when Dr. Simpson and her team later added the gene’s human counterpart to a strain of fierce mice, they found that their brains developed normally. The human gene appeared to
“correct” the fierce mouse’s pathological aggression.
“It was revolutionary. We had no idea that changing a single gene could have such a dramatic effect on behaviour,” says Dr. Simpson, a senior research scientist at UBC’s Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics and Canada Research Chair in Genetics and Behaviour.
The surprise findings propelled Dr. Simpson’s exploration of gene expression in mouse models into new areas, including a large-scale project funded by Genome BC and Genome Canada to develop genomic resources advancing therapies for brain disorders.
Led by Dr. Simpson, the international Pleiades Promoter Project team has spent the past four years building “MiniPromoters,” a set of genomics tools enabling the delivery of molecules to specific areas of the brain. By developing mouse models, it’s hoped these tools will eventually enable gene therapy for a host of brain disorders, including severe depression, multiple sclerosis, ADHD, and Huntington disease.
“The way gene therapy works right now, you can’t tweak one cell type of the
brain without hitting everything else. That’s what I want to change. What we’re
doing is creating switches, so that a therapy can be ‘turned on’ in only the cells
you want to target.”
So far, the team has built close to 140 new MiniPromoters for use in academic
and preclinical research, and is on track to meet its initial target of 200. One notable breakthrough has been the creation of a MiniPromoter that could be
used to allow certain therapeutics to temporarily cross the blood-brain barrier, which has historically presented a tremendous obstacle to drug companies developing treatments for brain disorders. “We’re really excited about this one.”
This past year, Dr. Simpson was awarded funding through Genome BC’s Science Opportunities Fund to make it easier for researchers and clinicians to use the tools they’ve developed, and to help the team to potentially join an international initiative using Brain MiniPromoters.
But it’s not all work and no play for Dr. Simpson. On most evenings and weekends, you’ll find her enjoying walks with her yellow labrador retriever, Taffy, and, in the winter, skiing at Whistler. She also shares season’s tickets for the Vancouver Canucks with a group of investigators, which guarantees tickets to about six games a year. But her true passion is running her lab.
“The brain is a special place and right now we’re not able to cure most brain disorders. Making gene therapy safe and effective will have a huge impact in the therapeutic realm.”
Genome BC’s Signals Summer 2009
Wed Feb 01
