News Category: News
SCWIST Newsletter - January 2012 
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Professor calls for holistic approach to managing watersheds
By Gordon Hoekstra, Vancouver Sun, December 28, 2011, p. A6
Decades of logging and ranching had stripped Murray Creek’s banks of any vegetation and plugged it full of silt, leaving it uninhabitable for fish.
It had been 20 years since anybody had a drink of water from the creek, located in the Nechako Valley, near Vander-hoof in northern B.C.
But thanks to a local rehabilitation effort, the creek is being restored to its original state.
The change has caught the attention of University of Northern B.C. health scientist Dr. Margot Parkes, whose work focuses on the importance of managing water for the health of people, as well as for a healthy environment.
Her research is aimed at an emerging area of science that says it is important to man-age ecosystems – the complex relationship between plants, animals, land, water and people – at the watershed level. Watersheds are the drainage areas of rivers.
The New Zealander likes to use a metaphor to describe the idea: As blood is to the human body, water is to the land and the people.
While it may seem straightforward – that water and health are connected, and should be managed as such – often people do not make that connection, says Parkes, a Canada Research chair at UNBC.
“The problem we face with watersheds is they are both complicated and complex. It’s not just water coming out of a tap, or the water flowing in rivers,” said Parkes.
“Whether it’s drinking, farming, mining development, pollution, forestry, sediments, the spawning pulse of salmon – you cannot avoid water flows and their effects.”
It’s why it makes sense to take a broader, connected management approach at the water-shed level, she said.
The problem is that this hardly ever takes place, says Parkes, who was a medical doctor before she pursued her postgraduate studies.
Instead, when health is examined or imagined, it takes place at the family, neighbourhood, city, regional, provincial or national level and it’s disconnected from the fact the drivers of health, and the very places people live, are in the natural world, noted Parkes.
You wouldn’t think of blood as separate from the health of a human body – separate from the oxygen it provides, for example – but that’s how water is viewed. “It’s absurd,” said Parkes.
The underpinning to the use of water as an overarching management tool is its scarcity.
While it is common for people to imagine Canada as a place that is water rich, that notion needs to be put into proper context, says Parkes.
There is an important distinction between water stocks and water supply. Water stocks are the fresh water in lakes, which is not the same as the flows of renewable water each year known as water supply.
While Canada has 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water stocks in its lakes, it has only 6.5 per cent of the world’s renewable water supply.
Where water flows is also important to how much is avail-able for people to use.
In Canada, 60 per cent of the country’s fresh water flows to the Arctic. It means less fresh water is available for use in densely populated southern Canada.
Despite the obvious importance that water plays in people’s lives and the emerging idea that it makes sense to incorporate watersheds in planning healthy communities, it is difficult to get water onto the planning radar screen, said Parkes.
That is, in part, because governments or agencies work separately and do not communicate with each other. Health authorities, provincial departments and regulators, federal agencies and communities all have different pieces of the responsibility for health, water and development, noted Parkes.
But the rehabilitation of Murray Creek is a good example of the potential in managing watersheds from a broader perspective, she said.
The Murray Creek effort was started by the Vanderhoof Fish and Game Club, but it has grown to include cooperation from provincial and federal agencies, the municipality of Vanderhoof, companies such as Rio Tinto Alcan and groups such as the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation. More recently the Northern Health Authority has become involved.
Critical vegetation areas were restored along the creek, and fencing was put up to keep cattle out. The aim is to restore populations of rainbow trout and coho salmon. Chinook salmon, which appear to be using the stream as a rearing environment, have already been found in the creek.
At some point, the water may be safe for drinking again.
Parkes’s outlook has already inspired Wayne Salewski, who headed up the Murray Creek rehabilitation effort.
The project is now being scaled up to encompass 32 creeks and streams that flow into the Nechako River.
The hope is to market cattle from the region as salmon-safe or salmon-friendly, per-haps charging a premium, says Salewski, a longtime resident of the logging and forestry com-munity of Vanderhoof.
The end result of the environmental effort is expected to not only create cleaner streams that support fish, but provide economic benefits that will create a healthier community, said Salewski.
Journal names colourful UBC professor science newsmaker of the year
Rosie Redfield challenged results of NASA study
By Margaret Munro, Vancouver Sun, December 22, 2011, p. A13
A critical thinker in Vancouver has been named one of the top science newsmakers of the year.
“She appeared like a shot out of the blogosphere: a wild-haired Canadian microbiologist with a propensity to say what was on her mind,” the leading research journal Nature says of Rosie Redfield, a professor at the University of B.C.
The journal editors say Redfield is one of 10 individuals who “had an impact, good or bad, on the world of science” in 2011. She was chosen for her “critical” inquiry and “remarkable experiment in open science” that challenged a now-infamous “arsenic life” study funded by NASA.
The Top 10 list also includes: Essam Sharaf, an engineer who was vaulted from demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Egypt’s parliament where he fought to rebuild science; astronomer Sara Seager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is narrowing the search for other Earth-like worlds; and biologist Tatsuhiko Kodama, who criticized the Japanese government’s handling of the fallout from the Fukushima nuclear accident.
Diederik Stapel, a prolific Dutch psychologist who admitted to scientific fraud on a “spectacular” scale, also made the list. He didn’t just fudge data, the journal says, “he fabricated entire experiments.”
Reached at UBC, Redfield said “it’s really nice to be formally acknowledged.”
She chuckled about Nature’s reference to her hair, which has been pink and is currently lilac. “It changes all the time,” she said, explaining that she buys the dye at “the stores that sell black T-shirts and tattoos.”
Redfield created a firestorm of controversy after a U.S. team, funded by NASA, claimed a year ago that it had found bacteria that used arsenic in its DNA.
Like many scientists, Redfield was taken aback. If true, the finding meant a radically different type of biochemistry could fuel life.
An avid blogger, Redfield posted a scathing critique of the U.S. study, which had been published with much fanfare by the journal Science. “Basically, it doesn’t present any convincing evidence that arsenic has been incorporated into DNA,” she said.
Then Redfield decided to see if it would be possible to replicate the U.S. findings in her UBC lab. She has been documenting her progress on her blog, rrresearch.fieldofscience.com. It has become a “virtual lab meeting,” Nature says, in which scientists from around the world help troubleshoot her attempts to grow and study the bacteria.
At first, Redfield could not get the bacteria to grow on a medium containing arsenic. Then the bacteria took off and she has now shipped samples off to Princeton University where colleagues plan to test the microbes’ DNA over the holidays.
Redfield says she does not expect them to find any arsenic in the bacteria’s genetic material. Like many scientists, she believes the microbes can live in the presence of arsenic and suspects the U.S. DNA experiments were contaminated. The problem was then compounded when the results were rushed into print with the help of the promotional offices at NASA and Science.
Ford Doolittle, a Dalhousie University biochemist who hired Redfield for her first faculty job, told Nature that she has shown how science is sup-posed to work.
“Science is way too uncritical of itself,” Doolittle said. “We need more Rosies out there.”
Dogs domesticated ‘naturally’
Humans had little to do with it, study co-authored by B.C. researcher says
By Randy Boswell, Vancouver Sun, December 19, 2011, p. B2
A B.C. researcher who specializes in the biology of ancient dogs co-authored one of the most significant studies of the year in canine science: a paper detailing the world’s earliest evidence of an animal in transition from wild wolf to domesticated dog.
The “extraordinary preservation” of the creature’s 33,000-year-old skull – found in a cave in southern Siberia – has helped show that dog domestication “was, in most cases, entirely natural” and not really a “human accomplishment,” says evolutionary biologist Susan Crockford.
She was part of a six-member team of researchers from Russia, Britain, the U.S. and the Netherlands that turned the clock back on wolf-dog trans-formations by thousands of years and showed that the phenomenon probably happened many times in many places around the globe.
Crockford, co-author of the study published recently in the journal PLoS One and an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, said the process of domestication began when wild packs of wolves – or even just a few individuals – began living at the fringes of human encampments and scavenging meals from piles of the discarded bones of human-hunted game.
She said lead researcher Nikolai Ovodov of the Russian Academy of Science “was immediately suspicious that there was something different” about the canine skull found in the Siberia’s Altai Mountains.
He turned to Crockford, an expert in dog domestication among aboriginal nations in North America, for help in analyzing the specimen and com-paring it with other early cases of canine evolution.
“It doesn’t meet all of the criteria for what we consider to be a fully domesticated dog,” she told Postmedia News. “It’s got some evidence that it is part-way through the process. That’s why we talk about an ‘incipient’ dog, because it’s smaller than a wolf but it still has wolf-sized teeth.”
Traits typical of canines trans-formed by generations of inter-action with human communities include a smaller, wider skull, shortened snout and smaller, more crowded teeth.
It’s believed the wolf-dog lineage seen in the Altai Mountains specimen did not continue through the Ice Age that took hold of the region beginning some 25,000 years ago.
The team’s research has added important new information to a lively debate among scientists over where, when and how dogs evolved from wolves. Some researchers have presented genetic evidence suggesting all dog lineages emerged following a particular domestication event in ancient China, though other studies point to dog origins in the Middle East.
Crockford said that from the Siberian case and other examples of partial domestication “it seems pretty clear that if it can get started and stop that it could have happened in any number of places” at different times around the world.
Significantly, she noted, a consensus has emerged among experts refuting the traditional theory that humans orchestrated the domestication of dogs to gain companionship or worker animals.
“Traditional anthropological definitions of domestication consider the process to be a deliberate act of selection by humans,” the published study states. “However, this view has been challenged in recent years by the hypothesis that animals colonized anthropogenic environments of their own volition and evolved into new [‘domes-tic’] species via natural evolutionary processes. ... After initial changes occurred, the resulting new species were modified during their association with people via natural adaptation, human selection, and genetic drift.”
UBC BrownBag Meeting - Facilitators & Speakers for 2012 Sessions Needed
The BrownBag Lunch Meeting series is a monthly event organized by the Society of Canadian Women in Science and Technology (SCWIST) whose purpose is to provide a place for learning and discussion of topics to help women in STEM fields advance their careers.
We meet every last Wednesday of the month at the Biodiversity Research Centre on UBC’s Point Grey Campus. Our audience at these meetings is a lively mix of undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs and professors at UBC who can openly speak their mind and discuss burning issues related to their career in a safe, including environment.
The participation of professional women in STEM is at the core of this program. Your experience and advice will enrich the outcome of these meetings and inspire the audience to be self-confident, and to set their goals high and reach them. Depending on the topic, these monthly meetings are either held in the format of a round table discussion with invited guests and an invited facilitator, or in the format of a workshop with an invited guest speaker giving an interactive presentation followed by open discussion.
For our upcoming meetings in 2012 we would like to invite women working in industry, academia and non-traditional fields related to STEM to join us for a round table discussion of the following topics:
*February 29: Negotiation Skills
*March 28: What is “female” leadership?
If you are interested in participating as a role model or facilitator, please contact the coordinators Carolina Chanis and Katja Dralle .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). For further information on upcoming events, please visit http://www.scwistevents.ca.
Depression drug may help insomniacs
By Charlie Fidelman, Vancouver Sun, December 15, 2011, p. B4
Montreal psychiatrist Gabriella Gobbi was testing a new drug on depression in her laboratory when a curious thing happened. The mice fell asleep.
It wasn’t the kind induced by sleeping pills but the deep, restorative slumber of childhood.
Conducted in collaboration with scientists in Italy, the discovery of a novel drug called UCM765 is expected to pave the way for new treatment for sleep disorders, which afflict millions worldwide.
Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the research on rats and mice found the drug administered under the skin or directly into the brain had two distinct effects on sleep.
Rats fell asleep 60 per cent faster than the control group that did not have the drug, and they slept longer, increasing non-REM sleep, also known as “deep sleep” by 45 per cent, said Gobbi, an associate professor of psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University.
“It was like opening a dark box, a totally unknown world. We found it by serendipity,” said Gobbi, who led a team from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre on a multi-experiment, seven-year study of melatonin receptors.
Gobbi said she often treats people with sleep disorders and depression and the research was driven by her feelings of great sympathy for insomniacs.
Chemists in Italy who developed the drug from the hormone melatonin in 2005 initially had aimed to try to alleviate depression and anxiety.
It also was believed melatonin could alter the circadian rhythm or body clock.
“But its main effect was on sleep,” said Gobbi, whose discovery unveiled the inner workings of melatonin on two receptors in the brain called MT1 and MT2. These are localized in one area of the brain, the reticular thalamic nucleus, which is a “powerhouse of [restorative] sleep,” Gobbi said.
“It was tough because we went against conventional wisdom on melatonin. We thought both receptors would promote sleep and it’s not true; the receptors have opposite roles.”
The team tested the drug on the sleep-wake cycle of rats and mice lacking MT1 or MT2 receptors.
Gobbi’s team induced burst of activity with the drug in MT2 neurons, a key component of deep sleep.
They found that selectively treating one receptor can have therapeutic advantages without the side effects of sleep medication and anti-depressants now marketed for insomnia – for example, drug dependence and cognitive impairment, Gobbi said.
SCWIST GALA 2011 – Expanding Horizons Since 1981 – AWARDS CEREMONY
SCWIST would like to congratulate the winners and all the finalists of our 2011 Awards Ceremony. Each of these women represent a cross section of the personalities and accomplishments that SCWIST is proud to have as a part of its member base and it was our honour to present this years awards to Sandra Eix, Jaya Viswanathan, Rabab Ward and Evelyn Palmer.
Educator
Sandra Eix, Winner of the Educator Award – Sandy has a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Waterloo, a Bachelor of Education from Queen’s, and a Masters of Science and PhD in Physics from SFU. Sandy is Science World’s Science Learning Lead and has been inventing shows, programs, and exhibits to educate kids of all ages for the past 15 years, and for 11 the past years she has coordinated and hosted SCWIST’s flagship XX Evening networking event.
Leslie Johnstone – Leslie has been teaching high school science for 22 years, and spent the last 9 as the head of the Science Department at Point Grey Secondary School. Student evaluations show that Leslie is a kind, knowledgeable, fair and witty teacher who has inspired many students to excel.
Rahael Jalan – Rahael has played a leading role in improving the education of marginalized and less-fortunate students, especially those whose educational needs have traditionally not been recognized or prioritized by governments and teachers. Her initiatives have focused on students of Aboriginal descent across Canada and in townships of South Africa, including working through the Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences to initiate and implement the program “Aboriginal Gifts” to give students a better grasp of basic math principles.
Rising Star
Jaya Viswanathan, Winner of the Rising Star Award – Jaya is pursuing graduate studies in Neuroscience at UBC and is an active committee member for SCWIST’s ms infinity program. Jaya’s volunteer activities extend beyond SCWIST; Jaya is an active member of Let’s Talk Science, Brain Awareness – a UBC program that promotes science in schools. She has also volunteered in India, where she has spent time in orphanages teaching children of all ages basic Math and Science skills.
Anja Lanz – Anja is an Engineering Physics student at UBC, and has been incredibly active with both SCWIST and Women in Engineering Vancouver Region. Anja was the co-chair for the Building Communities Symposium, a grass-roots, first-ever event bringing together 120 women in engineering in British Columbia for networking and professional development workshops.
Sophie Stukas – Sophie Stukas is a PhD candidate in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UBC, focusing on drug development for Alzheimer’s disease, and is a recipient of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for her PhD research. Sophie dedicates significant portions of her time volunteering through the GF Strong Rehabilitation Center, where she runs a women’s outpatient support group for women with neuromusculoskeletal injuries and disorders, and through Let’s Talk Science, where she volunteers in elementary classrooms with a goal of inspiring more girls to pursue careers in science.
Paradigm Shifter
Rabab Ward, Winner of the Paradigm Shifter Award – Rabab Ward is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC. She has published over 350 journal papers and conference articles, holds six patents that have been transferred to industry and has numerous affiliations and awards. Dr Ward’s research in the area of signal, image and video processing have changed the landscape of cable TV, HDTV, medical images, infant cry signals and brain computer interfaces. Her research impacts many of us on a daily basis. In addition to her excellent technical work she is responsible for initiating a new masters program and institute at UBC that focuses on emerging human-centred technology research.
Alexandra Morton – Alexandra has done research on orcas in the Broughton Archipelago in BC for the past 30 years. She has distinguished between populations of resident and transient orcas in their feeding and vocal behaviours as well as Pacific white-sided dolphins. Alexandra has used her research results on the impacts of fish farms on orca populations to challenge the jurisdiction of fish farms and provide recommendations to eradicate sea lice, receiving environmental and conservation awards for her books and campaigns.
Vivian Krause – Vivian has a background in nutrition which has given her experience in programs for food aid planning, management of farmed salmon and fish feed, and the salmon farming controversy. She has been instrumental in “rethink campaigns” around farmed salmon and sea lice, and her presentations convinced the federal government to turn down $8.3 million of spending by a US green trust through questioning foreign-funded campaigns regarding the environment.
Outstanding Volunteer
Evelyn Palmer, Winner of the Outstanding Volunteer Award – Evelyn has been an active promoter and member of SCWIST for the past 30 years. Her support has been as far reaching as participating in Science Weeks, panel discussions and math conferences, to engaging SFU to provide valuable support for SCWIST, and, most recently, spearheading the production of SCWIST’s 30th Anniversary DVD.
Linda Lanyon – Linda served on SCWIST’s Board of Directors for the past several years, only resigning when job opportunities prompted her to move to Sweden this fall. Linda was instrumental in the development of SCWIST’s volunteer programme and her work has resulted in SCWIST being recognized both locally and nationally for its use of highly skilled volunteers. Through Linda’s hard work and dedication to the volunteers programme, SCWIST now averages over 3000 volunteer hours each year.
Shabnam Rostamirad – Shabnam has been volunteering with IWIS for the past several years and has taken on many different responsibilities, from events to volunteer coordination. She has successfully organized and hosted several events for IWIS members and recently was instrumental in procuring a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for a series of events called Café Scientifique. Shabnam is an incredibly enthusiastic and energetic volunteer, who cares deeply about people and the organizations for which she volunteers.
UBC Researcher Finishes 4th in Nikon Photomicrography Competition
Dr. Robin Young a Post Doctoral Fellow in the BioImaging Facility at the University of British Columbia was the top Canadian finisher in this year’s Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, placing fourth with an image of Lepidozia reptans, a liverwort, which is a small primitive plant. See Robin’s image at http://www.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/potd/2011/10/lepidozia-reptans.php
Arctic ozone loss ‘unprecedented,’ scientists say
Environment Canada cuts could disable future Canadian measurements
By Emily Chung, CBC News Oct 4, 2011
Unusual winter weather in the atmosphere high above the Earth’s surface caused an “unprecedented” loss of protective ozone over the Arctic this year, scientists say.
The ozone layer in the stratosphere, located about 15 to 35 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, protects the Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays and harmful effects such as skin cancer. While an ozone hole has formed in the stratosphere over the Antarctic each spring since the mid 1980s, a paper published in Nature on Sunday marks the first time scientists have reported a comparable loss over the Arctic.
“We’ve seen something unprecedented,” said Kaley Walker, a University of Toronto atmospheric scientist, and SCWIST member, who was part of the international team that conducted the study.
“The amount of depletion and how little ozone there was over certain altitudes is something we haven’t seen before.”
The team concluded that the huge amount of ozone loss was linked to a period of extreme cold in the stratosphere that lasted 30 days longer this year than in any previously studied Arctic winter.
Cold weather in the stratosphere does not necessarily reflect cold conditions on the surface, and in fact is often linked to warmer surface temperatures. Average temperatures in the Arctic have warmed significantly faster than in other parts of the world in recent decades.
Climate change a main factor
The scientists said further studies are needed to determine exactly what factors caused the cold period in the stratosphere to last so long. But Walker said possibilities include temperatures, wave activity, and other phenomena linked to the amount of energy in the atmosphere — “all resulting from climate change.”
NASA scientist Gloria Manney, lead author of the study, said in a statement that the findings imply that if winter temperatures in the stratosphere drop slightly in the future as a result of climate change or other factors, “then severe Arctic ozone loss may occur more frequently.”
The scientists first reported in March that ozone loss over the Arctic was set to hit a record. At that time, Walker said, it wasn’t clear whether the ozone depletion met the criteria for a hole — the disappearance of ozone down to zero over a certain altitude range. The depletion continued for another month after that.
“We were able to look at it and establish that it was very similar to what had happened in the Antarctic,” Walker said.
The amount of ozone loss was comparable to what was seen in the Antarctic, even though spring levels of Arctic ozone were ultimately higher than in the Antarctic because the Arctic typically starts off with more ozone.
The scientists based their findings on data from a combination of:
Satellite ozone measurements.
Ground-based ozone measurements, which measure the total amount of ozone from the surface to the top of the atmosphere.
Balloon-based sonde measurements, which allow researchers to compare measurements at different altitudes.
“Being able to put them all together made for the kind of work that we could do to understand in depth what happened this year,” Walker said.
The Canadian data was collected as part of a collaboration between Environment Canada and the University of Toronto, which has been taking extra balloon measurements for two to three weeks each year to validate satellite measurements.
Walker said one more year of the collaboration is planned, and the university is negotiating with the Canadian Space Agency to continue funding them, as the ozone-measuring satellite is still collecting data that needs to be confirmed as reliable.
Environment Canada confirmed in September that its separate ground-based and balloon-based ozone monitoring networks won’t be maintained due to budget cuts, but instead will be “consolidated and streamlined” because the department no longer needs the same level of ozone monitoring.
Walker is hopeful that the infrastructure needed to maintain the collaboration will continue to exist.
“These were really important this year. We hope to continue to work with Environment Canada to continue these valuable measurements,” she said.
“I’m hoping this exciting winter we’ve just had will help make the point that there are no redundancies.”
Liberal environment critic Kirsty Duncan issued a statement Monday calling on the government to reverse the cuts to Environment Canada’s ozone monitoring network in light of the findings about the ozone hole, which she said directly affects Canada.
“It is alarming that cuts are being made at a time when we still do not fully understand the cause of the problem or the future of the ozone layer,” Duncan said.
SCWIST member Elizabeth Croft profiled in Where are all the women engineers? article
Gender equality yet to be achieved despite ‘dramatic’ growth in jobs
By Darah Hansen, Vancouver Sun, August 30, 2011, p. C4-5
It’s been nearly 90 years since Rona Hatt did the unthinkable.
In 1922, at the age of 21, Hatt graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in chemical engineering, the first woman to do so in the province.
The achievement earned her the nickname “lone flower” by her classmates – “a woman in a field of men,” according to the university’s archives. Times have changed, and women, led by pioneers such as Hatt, are no longer such a rarity in engineering classes across the country. UBC, for instance, expects to welcome 234 female students into first-year engineering courses this September at its campuses in Vancouver and Kelowna.
Yet, despite a number of equity and diversity initiatives over the past decade, the number of women entering the profession remains stubbornly – and many would say troublingly – low.
Statistics cited in a 2009 study, Paying Heed to the Canaries in the Coal Mine, found that women continue to be under-represented in engineering and applied science programs in Canada at both the college (less than 10 per cent) and university (17.5 per cent) levels.
More widely, “women comprised 47 per cent of the Canadian workforce in the 2006 census. The participation rate of women in the engineering field averaged 13 per cent,” authors Janice Calnan and Leo Valiquette observed, noting a similar trend in the United States and other Western economies.
The gender disparity has continued, they wrote, “despite the fact that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of new jobs in engineering and technology.”
Elizabeth Croft, a UBC mechanical engineering professor and, since 2010, regional chair for Women in Science and Engineering with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), agreed that engaging women in applied sciences is a serious concern.
“I don’t think we’ve done a particularly good job of communicating that the careers for engineers do not require you to be a man,” she said in a recent interview.
NSERC research indicates the problem starts early on in the schools.
“There is certainly no shortage of 1st graders of either sex who could enter the science and engineering world. But at each step along the supply chain fewer and fewer young people choose to study science or engineering, and the drop-off for women is considerably larger than that for men,” according to a 2010 report, entitled Science and Engineering in Canada.
But leadership and policy development within industry itself – or, rather, a general lack thereof – has also been identified as a major factor in the failure to attract and retain women in greater numbers.
The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia (APEGBC) reported last year that female engineers are paid less than men on average for all responsibility levels, with women accounting for only nine per cent of the country’s total population of registered professional engineers.
Croft said a lack of role models, combined with a “chilly” industry climate towards gender diversity, provides little incentive for all but the most determined women to pursue engineering as a career.
She counts herself among the female engineers on the job who have developed “dragon skin” in order to compete. “We haven’t done enough yet to make them feel invited and comfortable,” she said.
Still, Croft said she is optimistic positive change is taking place – though not at the pace she would like.
“I look at my students and the [boys’ club] attitude has kind of grown up. They don’t even think they have the attitude any more until you call them on it,” she said.
Larger firms are also waking up to the value of encouraging diversity, in its broadest sense, within their ranks.
“That dynamic of diversity – gender diversity, age diversity and ethnic diversity – is actually a great driver of innovation in the way projects are thought about and put together,” said Michael Kennedy, vice-president of the engineering and architectural firm Stantec in Vancouver.
“I would imagine any smart company that is in our sector has to realize there is a problem when you have 80 or 90 per cent of senior leaders who are quite narrowly defined in terms of gender and ethnic diversity,” he said.
Stantec employs about 200 engineers across B.C., of whom an estimated 20 per cent are women.
Kennedy said the company is taking steps to boost those numbers, including launching a “future leaders” program, designed to identify and support promising talent.
The firm is also a lead corporate sponsor of NSERC’s Women in Science and Engineering project, which works to promote awareness and outreach within schools and industry.
“All the challenges of the planet that are happening today need engineers to make this a better world for people,” said Croft. “And the more people, the more diverse the groups that are looking at these problems are, the better solutions.”
ELIZABETH CROFT, P. ENG
PROFESSOR, MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UBC NSERC CHAIR FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING FOR B.C. AND YUKON
T he books that line the shelves of Elizabeth Croft’s UBC office give much away in terms of the intelligence and interests of the occupant.
Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems reads one of the ominous titles. Herbert Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics is another.
“Now those are some sweet books,” Croft said, laughing at her own selfdescribed “geeky” fascination with all things that whirl, spin, click and motor.
Croft, 45, is not just a mechanical engineer. She’s been teaching on the subject at the university for almost two decades, after completing a master’s and PhD.
Robots are her thing. She positively lights up when talking about her research exploring human-robot interaction and the potential for a lifechanging application by medical and support staff working in long-term care homes and hospitals.
It was exactly this kind of left-brain/ right-brain split between creativity and science that drew her to study engineering in the first place.
And while she was certainly aware she was one of only a handful of women in her class (when she graduated in 1988, fewer than eight per cent of the students were women), she was never intimidated.
“I grew up with brothers,” she said. “I very much considered myself to be one of the guys. That was the kind of woman who went into engineering then.”
Times have changed, with participation rates for women in engineering at UBC now hovering around 20 per cent.
Croft, as regional chair for women in science and engineering with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, is pushing to see that number expand much further.
Engineering has plenty to offer women.
“If you are creative. If you love solving problems. If you want to change the future of this planet, then engineering is something that you should seriously consider,” she said.
TYSEER ABOULNASR, P.ENG
PROFESSOR AND DEAN, FACULTY OF APPLIED SCIENCE, UBC
T yseer Aboulnasr never once thought her decision to become an engineer was anything out of the ordinary – until she moved to Canada.
At Cairo University in Egypt, where she received an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in 1976, gender “was never an issue,” she said.
Indeed, both men and women were well represented among the program’s 400-plus students.
It was only when she moved to Ontario in 1978, where she attended Queen’s University in Kingston for both her master’s and PhD, that it began to dawn on her that her career ambitions might be considered unusual for a woman.
A casual conversation with a campus clinic nurse during a routine health checkup drove that point home early in her transition to Canada.
“She asked me what I was studying at Queen’s and I said, ‘Engineering,’ Aboulnasr recalled of the exchange. “She literally took a step back and her response was, ‘Why on earth would you do anything like that?’” For the past three years, Aboulnasr has held the title of dean of the Faculty of Applied Science at UBC. That accomplishment follows an impressive career in academia that involved leading-edge research into digital signal processing, which, among other applications, has been used to clean up sounds received in modern hearing aids.
Her success has not come without personal sacrifice and plenty of hard work – a very real side of her life she fears is sometimes “air-brushed” when she’s held up as a role model to younger women considering a similar path.
Recently, she was asked to participate on a panel exploring women’s rights and gender equality following the brutal attack on UBC graduate student Rumana Monzur by her husband.
The discussion caused her to question anew the internal cost she’s paid as a woman working in what remains a male-dominated profession.
“There is no question in my mind that I have changed because I work consistently with men. If I didn’t tolerate a lot of stuff, I would not have survived,” she said.
“But you choose your battles. You drop some things and you focus on some things. Did I go too far? I am happy to have people remind me where right and wrong is.”
LAUREN KULOKAS
B.A. SC. MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UBC COO, ENERGY AWARE TECHNOLOGY INC.
I t was a high school project that – quite literally – catapulted Lauren Kulokas into her current entrepreneurial venture.
Showing academic strength in math and sciences, the Mississauga, Ont., native was often steered as a teenager towards engineering as a potential field of study by school counsellors and career advisers.
But it wasn’t until a Grade 12 physics course, when she took part in a class challenge constructing a full-on catapult that could launch water balloons, that she found herself sold on the idea.
“That [catapult] was just a really, really fun, hands-on project,” she said.
A decade later, Kulokas said she could not have made a better career decision.
The 29-year-old is now chief operating officer of Energy Aware Technology Inc., a company she co-founded with a group of her mechanical engineering classmates following their graduation from UBC in 2006.
The Gastown-based operation develops products that promote sustainability and encourage energy conservation. The company’s main product, the “Power Tab,” allows users to monitor their energy consumption and associated costs.
Kulokas has no doubts her engineering background has helped her to compete in a tough business world, though, she admitted, the signature iron ring on her little finger, symbolic of the profession, still catches many of her clients and contacts by surprise.
“I do get that reaction quite a bit, that ‘Oh, wow, a mechanical engineer. There aren’t a lot of women in engineering.’ That kind of thing,” she said.
But it doesn’t faze her. She views it as acknowledgment of the risks she’s taken and hard work she’s put in to get where she is today.
“Engineering as a profession comes with some credibility and respect,” she said.
AMANDA LI
4TH YEAR B.A.SC, MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UBC, PRESIDENT – ENGINEERING UNDERGRADUATE SOCIETY
Amanda Li admits she doesn’t know a lot about makeup or the latest fashion trends.
But, as a fourth-year UBC student studying mechanical engineering, what she’s learned about physics and math — and how to apply that knowledge to complex problem-solving — could change the world.
And that’s exactly what she’s planning to do.
“I definitely like clean energy,” she said in a recent interview.
“You see all these issues happening, especially with the environment, and … I want to contribute to this cause.”
Li, 23, can trace her interest in mechanical engineering back to high school at Burnaby North where she excelled in the sciences and wasn’t afraid to challenge herself.
That her career path would land her in a decidedly male-dominated field was not at all off-putting. She is one of 10 women in her year, compared to 120 men.
“I’m a tom-boy,” she said. “I’m pretty used to hanging around with the boys.”
Li said her male peers are supportive of the women students, though she has noted subtle differences in the way she is treated.
Sometimes it comes in the form of an offhand comment or joke that alludes to more traditional gender roles for women or divisions of labour.
More often, it is an unspoken pressure to be better than the men.
“If you screw up, people will think you screwed up because you are a girl,” she said.
“In many ways I don’t think my male colleagues will think that way, and I’m really optimistic, but you definitely feel that way — that I am representing not only myself … but my entire gender.”
JANET CALDER
B.A. SC., METALLURGICAL ENGINEERING, UBC MBA, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO
“Nice girls don’t take physics.”
That was the advice a young Janet Calder was given by a high school counsellor when she first began exploring a career in engineering.
It was the 1960s — a time when professionally minded women were typically steered into nursing, teaching or home economics. If they went to university at all, “let’s face it, the No. 1 career path was the M.R.S.,” Calder said.
Now 60 and retired, Calder has few regrets about bucking traditions of the day.
Her degree in metallurgical engineering from UBC in 1974 (one of just two women in her class), followed by an MBA, laid the foundation for a dynamic work life that took her from a steel mill in Welland, Ont., to the Greater Vancouver Regional District where, among her achievements, she helped to oversee the installation of the 911 emergency system.
“If nothing else, it helped me think better,” Calder said of her education.
It wasn’t easy. Pornographic images of women lining the office walls of a workplace were not unusual.
Open sexism and gender discrimination were often part of the job, particularly in the early years.
“I had employers say to me that it would be really difficult to hire me because they didn’t have any ladies’ bathrooms on site,” she said.
With many of the gender barriers she faced now largely gone, Calder can’t see why more women don’t give engineering a chance.
She’d like to see better support for girls in those impressionable high school years, where encouragement is essential to stick it out through math, science and, yes, even physics.
She recalled a headline-grabbing Barbie doll produced in the early 1990s that uttered a series of controversial phrases at the push of a button, including the memorable, “Math class is tough!”
“Yes, math is hard,” Calder said. “But so what?”
IWIS featured in Radio Canada Podcast
Masala Canada
As a skilled immigrant to Canada, landing a job that takes advantage of those skills can be a daunting challenge. For immigrant women educated in the sciences, the challenge can be insurmountable. Freelance journalist and migration consultant Sacha DeVoretz recounts the frustrations, as told to her by some of those highly-skilled women.
Listen here
‘It changed my life,’ says first Canadian woman in space
Roberta Bondar has used experience to develop better treatment options for Parkinson’s patients
By Max Harrold – Vancouver Sun – July 7, 2011, p. B3
Roberta Bondar vividly recalls being “rattled around as if in a tin can” as she blasted into orbit on the space shuttle, but Canada’s first woman in space has no regrets.
Despite her one “dangerous” ride on the shuttle in 1992, the disorientation she experienced upon entering the weightlessness of space and the surprising amount of readjustment her body and mind required upon returning to gravity on Earth, she would go back to space again if she could.
“It changed my life,” Bondar, one of eight Canadian astronauts to have gone into space on the space shuttle, said in an interview.
The 66-year-old neurologist was able to experience firsthand the debilitating effects of space on the human nervous system. Since then, she has applied that knowledge to her research, devising better diagnostic and treatment options for patients with Parkinson’s disease, among other conditions, she said.
The space shuttle program -with the final flight scheduled for Friday -widened the field for participants compared to previous space programs, Bondar noted.
“It allowed more women and minorities,” she said. “There was more diversity and creativity and it was a better reflection of the western world.”
And although the shuttle served humanity well, it’s time to move on, Bondar added.
“I would go some place different. There’s a lot to discover still on the moon. What are the resources there? How did it form? Do you realize no human being has ever stepped on the far side of the moon?”
Steve MacLean went to space twice aboard the shuttle -in 1992 and in 2006.
On the latter mission, the 56year-old, who is now president of the Canadian Space Agency, helped deliver and install on the International Space Station new truss segments and solar arrays, doubling the power capacity of the orbiting laboratory.
He was also the first Canadian to operate Canadarm 2 in space and the second Canadian to walk in space. On his seven-hour, 10-minute spacewalk he had a long list of well-rehearsed tasks to accomplish. But there were always moments when things don’t work as planned, he said.
“I was working with [U.S. astronaut] Dan Burbank and I was struggling to replace this bolt in a solar array,” MacLean recounted.
Their work in the bulky spacesuits was taxing and both men had to take breaks, on orders from those watching from inside and from mission control back on Earth. “There was the blackness of space on one side and the Earth on the other,” MacLean said. “It took about 30 minutes, but we fixed the bolt.”
By 2007, Dave Williams conducted three spacewalks -the most by a Canadian on a single mission -as the shuttle crew added a truss segment, a new gyroscope and an external stowage platform to the station.
Williams, 57, added he had some big Canadian pride on at least one of his spacewalks.
“We were replacing the gyroscope on the station and I saw the Canadarm, the Canadarm 2 and the maple leaf on the space shuttle extension boom,” Williams said. “It was an amazing moment. I realized they [NASA] had relied on us to deliver. We could not have done all that construction without Canada’s robotics.”
All eight Canadian astronauts have flown to orbit on the space shuttle. (Canadian space tourist and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte flew on a Russian Soyuz rocket.)
Marc Garneau was the first Canadian in space, flying on the shuttle Challenger from Oct. 5 to 13, 1984. He flew again, on Endeavour, from May 19 to May 29, 1996. His last flight was aboard Endeavour, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, 2000.
Roberta Bondar was the second Canadian, and the first Canadian woman, in orbit. She flew on shuttle Discovery from Jan. 22 to 30, 1992, where she performed experiments in the Spacelab and on the middeck.
Steve MacLean flew aboard shuttle Columbia from Oct. 22 to Nov. 1, 1992 and on the Atlantis from Sept. 9 to 21, 2006. MacLean became the first Canadian to operate Canadarm 2 in space and the second Canadian to perform a spacewalk.
Bjarni Tryggvason flew on shuttle Discovery Aug. 7 to Aug. 19, 1997, performing fluid science experiments designed to examine sensitivity to spacecraft vibrations before the construction of the International Space Station.
Bob Thirsk flew on the Columbia June 20 to July 7, 1996, performing experiments on plants, animals, and humans. From May to December 2009, Thirsk was the first Canadian long-term resident of the International Space Station, living there for six months. His transport that time was not the space shuttle, but a Russian Soyuz rocket.
Chris Hadfield flew on the Atlantis Nov. 12 to 20, 1995, becoming the only Canadian to board the Russian space station Mir and the first Canadian to operate the Canadarm in orbit. From April 19 to May 1, 2001 he flew on Endeavour and was the first Canadian to spacewalk, conducting two outings on that mission.
Julie Payette flew on the shuttle Discovery from May 27 to June 6, 1999. And she was flight engineer on the Endeavour July 15 to 31, 2009. Her second mission was also the first time two Canadians – Payette and Bob Thirsk, a resident on the space station, where the shuttle was docked -were in space at the same time.
Dave Williams flew on the Columbia April 17 to May 3, 1998 and aboard the Endeavour from Aug. 8 to 21, 2007. He set Canadian records on that last flight by spending more than 17 hours and 47 minutes outside the space station during three scheduled spacewalks.
Wed Feb 01
