News Category: News
Scientists read minds with brain scanner
Thursday, March 12, 2009
CBC News
Scientists have found they can pinpoint the location of a person within a virtual room by reading his mind with a brain imaging device.
“Remarkably … we could tell where they were just by looking at the patterns of activity,” said researcher Eleanor Maguire at a news conference prior to the release of the results Thursday in the latest issue of Current Biology.
The researchers scanned the brains of volunteers using a technique called functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow within the brain, showing which areas are more active.
However, Demis Hassabis, who co-authored the paper with Maguire and several others, said scientists are at least 10 years away from being able to use the technique to determine whether someone is lying about where they have been.
It’s going to require a leap of technology advancement,” he said.
Maguire agreed, noting that the technique relies on the co-operation of the subject to train a computer to get familiar with their brain patterns.
“It’s quite an involved process that’s at a very early stage,” she said. “It’s probably quite … far away from having social and ethical and probably forensic implications.”
The results of the study do open up new avenues for understanding how other memories are coded in the brain, said Maguire, a professor at University College London. In the long term, that could help researchers understand how diseases such as Alzheimer’s erode memory and lead to new ways to help patients, she added.
In the study, Maguire and her colleagues asked four male, right-handed volunteers to navigate as quickly as possible 14 times between four positions in a virtual room while they were monitored with an fMRI scanner.
All subjects showed activity in the same area of the hippocampus, the area of the brain known to encode spatial memory.
Most trials for each location were used to “train” a computer. Based on the training, the computer was able to recognize the pattern for specific locations, allowing the researchers to predict where the volunteer was on the “non-training” runs.
Similar techniques had been used in vision neuroscience before, but not to study memory, Maguire said.
Previously, spatial memory had mostly been studied by looking at just a few neurons at a time in the hippocampi of rats.
Maguire said the fMRI doesn’t have very high spatial resolution, so the fact that it could pick out the patterns for different locations suggests that spatial memory is actually encoded over a far larger area than just a few neurons.
The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust, a medical research funding charity.
What is fMRI?
Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a technique that shows what parts of the brain are active by detecting changes in blood flow and the amount of oxygen consumed in different areas. Areas that are more active use more oxygen and therefore require more blood flow.
The scanner contains a strong magnet that causes particles inside the core atoms to line up in a certain way, producing a signal that is different for different kinds of atoms. In the case of MRI, the signal from hydrogen atoms in water is measured. The signal varies in different parts of the head, so that some parts appear darker than others.
An additional signal is detected in fMRI. Hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood, produces a slightly different signal when it is bound to oxygen, versus when it is not.
Female computing pioneer wins Turing Prize
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
The Associated Press
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. Barbara Liskov has won the $250,000 Turing Award, one of the most prestigious honours in computing, for helping to make computer programs more reliable, secure and easy to use.
Only the second woman to win the prize, Liskov was honoured Tuesday for pioneering new designs in computer languages that gird everyday digital applications.
“Her exceptional achievements have leapt from the halls of academia to transform daily life around the world,” MIT Provost Rafael Reif said.
“Every time you exchange email with a friend, check your bank statement online or run a Google search, you are riding the momentum of her research.”
The Association for Computing Machinery, which awards the Turing, said Liskov revolutionized the programming field after she was the first U.S. woman to be awarded a PhD in computer science, which she earned at Stanford University in 1968.
Liskov has been an MIT professor since 1972.
Liskov’s early work in software design has been incorporated into major programming languages for more than three decades. Her innovations in data abstraction — a way of organizing complex programs — has helped make software easier to write, modify and maintain.
In an interview, Liskov explained that her work “has to do with ‘modularity,’ taking complex systems and breaking them into small pieces to keep them simple.”
The Turing award, to be presented June 27 in San Diego, is named for the late British mathematician Alan Turing. Past winners include internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn.
The prize money comes from Google Inc. and Intel Corp.
In 2007, former IBM computer scientist Frances Allen became the first woman to win the Turing Award. She won for her techniques in optimizing the performance of compilers, the programs that translate one computer language into another.
Memories of fear can be found and erased in mice, researchers show
Friday, March 13, 2009
The Canadian Press
In a scientific development that seems ripped from the script of the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Toronto researchers have shown they can find and selectively erase fear memories from the brains of mice.
The research is notable not just because the team managed to zap fear memories. Locating where the memories were stored in the first place is being hailed as a major accomplishment.
“This really then is a proof of principle that these are really the neurons that are involved in storing this kind of memory,” said Dr. Michael Salter, head of the program in neurosciences and mental health at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, where the research team is based.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, was led by Sheena Josselyn and Paul Frankland, partners in research and in life. The couple just had a baby and were unavailable for interviews, though Josselyn — the senior author — described the work in an interview that was podcast by Science.
She and others were quick to say that it remains to be seen if the mice findings can be translated into therapies for people suffering from crippling fears provoked by traumatic memories or from post traumatic stress disorder.
“Whether it works for other types of memory … or whether it would work in another type of mammal — say a human — we don’t know,” Josselyn said in the Science podcast.
Josselyn and her team had earlier reported that neurons in the lateral amygdala that produce high levels of a protein called CREB seem to be activated when fears triggered by sounds are imprinted on the brains of mice. The amygdala is known to be involved in the processing and storage of emotion memory.
The work was done using a classic training technique in which a mouse in a chamber hears a sound followed by a weak shock that comes through the chamber floor. From then onward, every time the mouse hears the tone, it will assume a crouch position that mice in the wild use to try to hide from predators.
In this study, the scientists identified the neurons that were over-producing CREB when the trained mice heard the tone, and zapped only those neurons using a diphtheria toxin. They then exposed the treated mice to the tone. The mice did not react, suggesting their memory linking it to fear of the shock was erased.
PTSD treatment a possible goal
The scientist whose work in reconsolidating memory — a term which means in essence reworking a memory — inspired Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind said Josselyn’s team has found “one of the Holy Grails” of memory work.
“The elegance in this one, which goes orders of magnitude beyond other studies, is that now they didn’t do something that was global to all neurons in the lateral nucleus,” said Karim Nader, a professor of neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal.
“They can kill only the neurons that they think express the memory. And it leaves all the other neurons intact.”
Nader said the work could eventually help scientists figure out how to assist people in overcoming pathological fears caused by the memory of a traumatic event.
But much remains to be done before that could happen. For instance, the technique Josselyn’s team used worked wonderfully in mice, but couldn’t be used in people.
“In humans, one wouldn’t want to kill these neurons. And certainly it’s not feasible to do it by this technology because you’re not going to inject diphtheria … viruses [into people],” said Salter, who is Josselyn’s department head but who was not involved in her work.
“So as a therapeutic strategy, this isn’t going to be it. But the idea is then to use this as a step forward and then to go on to come up with strategies that could then be used.”
Salter said it is conceivable that the storage system for fear-based memories that’s at work in a mouse brain is similar to the system by which fear memory is stored in human brains.
“Many of these biochemical pathways are conserved all the way from fruit flies up into humans,” he said. “So I think that’s the tack, is to try to find commonalities and take advantage of those commonalities.”
Salter said in building on this and other work, scientists may figure out a way to manipulate fear memories so that excessive fear is toned down, but the memory itself is not erased.
Are men too manly to seek help for their medical problems?
UBC researchers study effects of masculinity on men’s health choices
By Amy O’Brian, Vancouver Sun – March 13, 2009
It’s a well-known fact that men generally don’t like to admit weakness—that they don’t like going to the doctor or asking for help.
Such traits are commonly associated with the constructs of masculinity, which has led a group of researchers at the University of B.C. to examine men’s health within that context.
“We’re looking at men’s health in a new way, by trying to understand some of men’s health behaviour in relation to masculinity,” Joan Bottorff, a professor in UBC’s school of nursing, said Thursday in an interview.
“It provides a different way of looking at men’s health and therefore opens up some new avenues for promoting men’s health.”
Depression, heart health, smoking cessation and sexual health are four areas of research being examined at a forum this evening at Robson Square, as part of UBC’s Celebrate Research Week. The researchers all work at UBC’s school of nursing.
John Oliffe is investigating depression in men and the strategies men use to cope with it.
“The interesting piece around men’s depression is that men are diagnosed at half the rate of women,” Oliffe said. “But their suicide rate is four times that of women.”
Men tend to “self-manage” their depression with alcohol, drugs or violence, which is sometimes directed at their partner or spouse. Oliffe says many men are unwilling to take antidepressants, but there is an increasing willingness to talk about their depression.
“That’s new,” Oliffe says. “There seems to be an emerging interest, particularly among younger and middle-aged men, to be involved in talk therapy.
“We’re finding that there’s a real willingness to either talk with peers—other men who might be having issues—or professional counsellors.”
Bottorff has been studying smoking cessation among men, particularly those with infants or young children.
Part of the reason for the study is that 70 per cent of women who quit smoking while pregnant return to the bad habit within six months of giving birth. A key risk factor for those women is having a partner who smokes.
Bottorff says quitting cold turkey is one of the most popular smoking cessation methods among men, even though it has proven to be one of the most unsuccessful. Using a nicotine replacement such as the patch is proven to have a higher success rate, but Bottorff says men would rather focus on willpower and strength than relying on an “aid.”
Bottorff has no data regarding the most successful method of quitting, but says fathers who become heavily involved in caring for a baby are more likely to quit.
Other studies being pursued in the area of men’s health include an examination of how Punjabi men approach rehabilitation after having a heart attack, and another examining sexual health among men. Some of the studies are still recruiting subjects.
Background Tree Mortality Rates Increase in Old Forests
Lori Daniels, Ph.D., R.P.Bio.
Department of Geography, UBC-Vancouver
Tree death rates have more than doubled over the last few decades in old-growth forests of the western United States and southwestern British Columbia, and the most probable cause of the worrisome
trend is regional warming, according to a study published in Science on January 23, 2009.
Our study compares population changes in forests in southern British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Colorado and Arizona. For the last 15 to 50 years my colleagues and I have monitored 76 permanent plots that include more than 58,736 trees. During that time,11,095 trees died and tree mortality rates have more than doubled in recent decades.
Tree death is a natural part of old-growth forest dynamics. Each year we expect a small number of trees to die. But our long-term monitoring of many types of old forests shows that tree mortality has
been increasing, but the establishment and growth of replacement trees has not. As a result, the forests are losing trees faster than they are gaining them.
Mortality rates, the rate at which trees die, have increased from just under 1% to almost 2% per year. These numbers may seem small, but tree death rates are like interest on a bank account – the
effects compound over time. So, a doubling of death rates eventually could reduce average tree age in a forest by half, thus reducing average tree size.
The increase in dying trees has been pervasive. Tree death rates have increased across a wide variety of forest types, at all elevations, in trees of all sizes, and in pines, firs, hemlocks, and other genera.
Ultimately increased mortality rates could lead to substantial changes in western forests. As trees die, they change the composition and structure of the forest, which can have cascading effects, such
as altering habitat for wildlife species. Additionally, increasing tree mortality rates mean that western forests could become net sources of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, further speeding up the pace of global warming.
Our study ruled out a number of possible sources of the increasing tree deaths, including air pollution, long-term effects of fire suppression, and forest dynamics associated with stand development such as self-thinning of even-aged stands. In contrast, increasing regional temperature was correlated with tree deaths.
Average temperature in western North America rose by over 1.0° C over the last few decades. While this change may sound modest, it was enough to reduce winter snowpack, cause earlier snowmelt, and lengthen the summer drought.
Changes in length of summer drought could be stressing trees, leading to higher death rates. Warmer temperatures also might favor insects and diseases that attack trees. For example the recent
outbreak of mountain pine beetle in British Columbia has already been linked to warming temperatures.
In some cases, increasing tree deaths could indicate forests vulnerable to sudden, extensive die-back, similar to forest die-back seen over the last few years in parts of the southwestern states, Colorado, and British Columbia. This is a major concern – the trend increased death rates indicate our forests are stressed and may be susceptible to bigger, more abrupt changes.
Complete findings appear in the article, Widespread increase of tree mortality rates in the western United States, by Phillip J. van Mantgem (USGS), Nathan L. Stephenson (USGS), John C. Byrne
(U.S. Forest Service), Lori D. Daniels (University of British Columbia), Jerry F. Franklin (University of Washington), Peter Z. Fulé (Northern Arizona University), Mark E. Harmon (Oregon State University), Andrew J. Larson (University of Washington), Jeremy M. Smith (University of Colorado), Alan H. Taylor (Pennsylvania State University), and Thomas T. Veblen (University of Colorado), published in Science (Volume 323: 521-524; DOI: 10.1126/science.1165000)
Association of Professional Biologists of British Columbia BIONews volume 19 number 1 pp 7-8
Commitment to science questioned
Critics say Ottawa offers inadequate vision, funding
By Mohammed Adam, Canwest News Service March 7, 2009
From their high perches in the world of Canadian research, former national science adviser Arthur Carty and McGill University neuroscientist David Colman see Canada at a crossroads in research and development.
Despite the energy, tremendous potential and growing cachet of Canadian research scientists, experts believe the country is drifting, both for lack of adequate funding and a coherent vision from the government.
Studies have shown that scientific research is much more than an academic exercise.
It is critical to a country’s economic well-being and that’s why many governments focus on it. Results of a 1999 study estimated that through its contribution to increased productivity, the benefits of university R&D amount to $15 billion, or about two per cent of Canada’s annual GDP. This translates into between 150,000 and 200,000 jobs—but today, the benefits could be higher.
Spending less
Yet Canada is now spending less and putting scientists out of work. This year, the three granting councils that fund the bulk of research in universities—the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research—received no extra money from the government, even in the recent big-spending stimulus budget.
Worse, under the guise of “strategic review,” the three councils have been asked to cut about $148 million over three years from their budgets—while similar bodies in the U.S. are getting billions from President Barack Obama’s massive stimulus package.
Today, “well below 20 per cent of grant applications” for academic research can be funded, says Jim Turk, who represents 65,000 academics and other staff in more than 120 colleges and universities across the country.
In comparison, Obama has made what New Scientist magazine calls “the biggest bet on science and technology in history,” putting about $25 billion into basic research. Billions of dollars more are going into energy renewal, new electricity grids, space projects and numerous other ventures.
Following Obama’s lead, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown is vowing to “entrench investment in science as a national priority,” recession or no.
But in Canada, experts say the government appears hesitant and uncertain.
“A country as strong and sophisticated as Canada should have a direct and clear understanding of where it has to go to lead the world in terms of science. You have to look forward with vision,” says Colman, director of the Montreal Neurological Institute.
“The United States has a long-range plan and it never lets funding for the National Institutes of Health or National Science Foundation drop terribly. But here the [grants] agency funding is flat or worse. The priorities change and change dramatically every budget year. If, with every budget, you are going to change your view, you are not giving your country a chance to be the best in the world.”
Money into infrastructure
Carty, a former president of the National Research Council and national science adviser under prime ministers Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, agrees. He says the Conservative government has put a lot of money into science infrastructure but its overall approach to research is something of “a puzzle.”
“Things have not gone dramatically bad under the Conservative government, but there is a lack of understanding of how scientific research works,” says Carty, now the director of the Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Waterloo, in southern Ontario. “We are getting mixed messages. On the one hand, the government is investing in infrastructure.
On the other hand, they are not investing in the research that people have to carry out in the labs … What message is the scientific community to take from that?”
Money for research
Gary Goodyear, the federal minister of state for science and technology, says the critics are wrong. He says the Conservative government has supported scientific research like no other. It has spent a lot of money on infrastructure for which it is very proud, he says, but it has also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into numerous research projects.
Under a 2007 blueprint, the government has not only supported the granting councils, it has given more money to the likes of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Automotive Innovation Fund and the centres of excellence for the commercialization of research, and has established scholarships to attract new talent to Canada.
At the Base of the Lightening Rod
Uncovering the mysteries of female sexuality puts Queen’s researcher on the fast track to scientific star status
By Janice Kennedy, Canwest News Service March 7, 2009
Searching online recently for a used piano, Meredith Chivers found what looked like a good prospect, e-mailed the seller and was taken aback by his response. Meredith Chivers? he asked. That Meredith Chivers?
The man had seen the Jan. 25 cover story of The New York Times Magazine. Titled “What Do Women Want?” it featured extensive coverage of the groundbreaking work being done by sex researcher Meredith Chivers, a scientist who is carving out an international reputation as an expert in the field of female sexuality. And yes. The piano buyer was that Meredith Chivers.
Chivers, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., laughs as she recounts the tales of people’s reactions to her line of work. Travelling by plane to international conferences on sexuality, she used to share that information in conversations with curious seatmates.
“But it was like opening a Pandora’s box. Now I just tell people I study cognitive science. They go, ‘Ooh, sounds really interesting,’ and that’s the end of it.”
It wouldn’t be, if they knew who she really was. The fact is Chivers, 36, is on the fast track to international star status—at least, from a scientific perspective—in female sexuality studies, a fairly uncrowded field despite Freud’s famously articulated bafflement more than 80 years ago.
What do women want? Chivers and a small group of other female researchers around the world are finally reconsidering the question, suggesting possible answers. Their work is attracting attention, and sometimes controversy, wherever it appears, and Chivers has become one of the field’s go-to experts.
“It’s been weird,” says Chivers. “To have this kind of recognition so young is odd, I think.”
Research into female sexuality, she says, “is a lightning rod. It attracts all kinds of attention from all kinds of different spheres. And I’ve been getting results that are completely counterintuitive.”
Small wonder she finds herself at the base of the lightning rod. The Ottawa native, who is attractive and personable and nothing at all like the “science geek” she often calls herself, is newly installed at Queen’s, where in April she will assume the prestigious position of Queen’s National Scholar.
Her resume features master’s and doctoral degrees from Chicago’s Northwestern University, research and clinical experience in Chicago and at Toronto’s renowned Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and an eye-popping array of academic honours and awards. She sits on the editorial boards of three respected journals, including Archives of Sexual Behavior, the world’s leading publication in the field. And her impressive body of published papers stretches back to 1996, just a year after her graduation (with a bachelor of science degree in honours psychology) from the University of Guelph. Chivers has also spoken and delivered papers across Canada and the United States, in Europe, and as far afield as Egypt.
Even without reference to the content of her work, she is undeniably hot stuff. And the fallout from January’s New York Times Magazine feature has only turned up the heat. “It was overwhelming,” she says. “I had more than 200 e-mails in response to the article.”
Many were from women who wanted to express gratitude to Chivers for her work, which they felt validated their experiences. But many were also from documentary filmmakers, literary agents and publishers, though she is putting them off for the time being.
Married to psychologist Michael Seto (a professor, pedophilia expert and forensic consultant at the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group’s Brockville site), she has a young son at home, 18-month-old Oliver.
“Any extra time I have I want to spend with him. I don’t want to spend it writing books. But I will. I have a couple I want to write.”
Chivers conducts her experiments—testing volunteer subjects’ degrees of arousal to visual and auditory sexual stimuli—in a small, dimly lit room that locks from the inside. If the test subjects are women (she has also studied male sexuality), they are asked to undress from the waist down and insert a wired measuring device resembling a tampon. Then they relax on a reclining chair to watch movies or images on a monitor in front of them.
“People kind of get this Stanley Kubrick idea from A Clockwork Orange,” Chivers says, “but it’s not like that at all.”
The arousal measuring machine is called a plethysmograph, relatively recently adapted for women, though a male version—employing a device like a rubber band—has been around for decades.
Chivers’s subjects record their own conscious reactions by means of a lever or keypad, and the devices record physiological reactions by measuring the increase in genital blood flow (or, for men, the girth of the penis).
Thanks to the volunteer subjects she has tested over the past decade, and the data she has pored over scrupulously, she has come up with some interesting hypotheses.
In Chicago, she worked with Northwestern University professor Michael Bailey, former chairman of the psychology department, looking, among other things, at the question of bisexuality and co-authoring a paper on arousal patterns in bisexual men. The findings sparked controversy, since they were presented in media reports to suggest that bisexual men were really homosexual. (Proclaimed the 2005 New York Times headline, “Straight, Gay or Lying.”)
Chivers, who has grown wary of the media, says the reports were reductionistic and sensationalist. Sexual orientation, she says, is a complex motivational force that consists of far more than a collection of arousal responses. But she does think there is far more true bisexuality among women, where “there’s a lot more blurring of the lines.” In fact, Chivers believes that exclusively lesbian women may be fairly rare, and that many lesbians still find themselves attracted to men as well as women.
Such observations are what have been grabbing the spotlight for her.
Bailey, who was Chivers’s mentor during her graduate and postgraduate studies, calls her “a bold thinker—not constrained by what others thought.”
For instance, she believes that, contrary to cultural stereotype, women generally are aroused by any portrayal of sexual activity—heterosexual, homosexual, even non-human (she has shown images of mating apes)—no matter what their orientation, even though they don’t always admit to it. Men, on the other hand, tend to be aroused by images that address their specific orientation.
But she refines that further. While previous research had suggested there were no differences in arousal patterns between lesbian and heterosexual women, Chivers discovered that there were. When sexual activity involving couples was portrayed, arousal patterns were similar. But when solitary sexual activity was shown—individuals masturbating, for instance—lesbian women responded more to images of individual women than to the images of individual men.
From this, Chivers draws the preliminary conclusion that, as the level of portrayed sexual activity increases, it trumps personal orientation. Furthermore, it might suggest that lesbian women, to some degree, have a response pattern more typical of men, whose arousal patterns reflect their orientation.
“My hope in doing this work,” she says, “is that I can educate women about their sexuality, and that I can figure out some of the tougher questions.”
She has various lines of research she’s pursuing at the moment. Among them are studies analyzing the conscious and unconscious disconnect she’s observed in women’s arousal responses, sexuality in postpartum women and in cancer survivors, and a question so immense it might intimidate less scientific minds.
She wants to understand nothing less than “what it is that makes people sexual.”
“I never felt uncomfortable talking about sex,” Chivers cheerfully admits. She recalls the favour she did for male classmates at her Catholic high school in Trenton, Ont., where her military father was posted. The guys were desperate for information, so she drew them diagrams of the female anatomy, specifically the location of the clitoris.
In a Catholic school? “Yeah,” she laughs. “But it’s even worse. It was during religion class.”
During an undergraduate course in human sexuality at the University of Guelph, she had to conduct an hour-long seminar on female sexual problems.
“I’ve never been a really comfortable public speaker, but I felt really good about what I was doing.
“Afterward, I remember thinking, ‘If I could do this for the rest of my life, I’d be a pretty happy person’.”
SCWIST President Dr. Elana Brief featured in JADE newsletter
SCWIST President Dr. Elana Brief’s article Dancing Equations in Uppsala is featured in the February 2009 JADE Newsletter. You can read the article here.
SCWIST gratefully acknowledges it has been the recipient of JADE Project funding over the past 3 years. To learn more about the JADE Project, visit http://www.jadeproject.ca.
Johanna Schuetz receives 2008 Lionel E. McLeod Health Research Scholarship
The Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (AHFMR) has awarded a 2008 Lionel E. McLeod Health Research Scholarship to Johanna Schuetz. The award honours Dr. Lionel McLeod, the founding president of AHFMR.
Ms. Schuetz is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Medical Genetics, Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. She has received numerous awards and scholarships during her academic career., from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and the University of British Columbia. Ms. Schuetz’s research focuses on the genetics of susceptibility to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer with the fifth highest incidence in Canada. More knowledge in this area could help better predict and treat this deadly cancer.
The Lionel E. McLeod Health Research Scholarship is given annually to an outstanding student at the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, or University of British Columbia for research related to human health. Congratulations Johanna!
Post-doc opportunities at Centre for Drug Research and Development
The Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD; http://www.cdrd.ca) is a non-profit organization designed to accelerate the commercialization of promising life science discoveries from British Columbia’s universities and academic research institutions. CDRD currently has a number of exciting Post-Doc positions in the health sciences designed to provide critical experience and training related to the commercialization of drug discovery. CDRD offers the unique opportunity to post-doc’s in that it provides an environment in which they can learn to operate at industry standards while at the same time still providing the opportunity to interface with Academic Investigators. CDRD currently has a total of 5 Post-Docs working in the divisions of Target Identification, Screening, Drug Evaluation and Design & Synthesis.
Canada’s Best Diversity Employers 2009
Launched in 2008, Canada’s Best Diversity Employers is a competition that recognizes employers that have exceptional workplace diversity and inclusiveness programs. Congratulations to all winners including:
Canadian Pacific Railway – Calgary, AB
Created an engineering services women’s forum to develop outreach and recruitment initiatives for women jobseekers
Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Co. – Mississauga, ON
Have recognized the importance of diversity and inclusiveness inteh workplace for more than 20 years – employee groups for visible minorities and women were established in the 1980s
Intuit Canada Limited – Edmonton, AB
Operates a women’s network to provide peer mentoring, skills development and feedback opportunities to women employees
Telus Corporation – Vancouver, BC
Manages a netwroking group for women employees to provide leadership and career development opprtunities, netowrking events and a monthly newsletter for women employees
Breaking new ground
Women thriving in diverse working environments
By Ann Gibbon, Special to the Vancouver Sun February 21, 2009
Maureen Daschuk vividly remembers the rainy spring day in Vancouver when, as director of Telus’s construction team for B.C. and Alberta, she received a call that a cable line had been accidentally severed in the city.
A nearby hospital and some businesses were affected. As the head of the team that builds the telecommunications company’s infrastructure, she had to inspect and work on the situation at once.
There was just one problem, she recalls. She had just flown in from a business meeting in Edmonton, dressed in skirt and high heels. She had no steel-toed boots, hard hat or other field gear with her. Not that she let it stop her: she simply stomped through the mud to inspect the cable—in her heels.
Her field staff, all men, thought it a sight to behold. “They were laughing and joking in a good-spirited way,” she says. “They were saying, ‘I never expected I’d live long enough to see the day my boss would show up in high heels.’”
While she had to discard the muddied shoes, Daschuk, 46, has retained the incident as a reminder of how times have changed at Telus. She heads a 175-member team that has been traditionally male-dominated. “So I’m breaking new ground,” she says.
Today, 40 per cent of Telus’s staff is female and 25 per cent of its most senior executive positions are held by women. The company has been selected as one of Canada’s Best Diversity Employers in 2009 in rankings by Mediacorp.
With programs such as networking, mentoring, telecommuting, topped-up maternity benefits and a lump sum of $500 for employees to spend to achieve more work-life balance, Telus has created an environment that helps women advance and work in different areas of the company, says Daschuk, who moved to her current position from a financial position at Telus.
At Canadian Pacific Railway, Cathy Moher, yard manager in Sudbury, Ont., has found similar opportunities. “There is no end to the possibilities you can achieve with CP,” says the mother of two. With a father who was a CP railway conductor, and a grandfather who was a dispatcher/telegrapher—he’d relay messages to train crews telling them where to clear opposing trains—“I knew the railway.” What she didn’t know two decades ago was the range of opportunities she would experience with the company.
She began as an operator—a liaison between rail-traffic controllers/dispatchers and conductors and engineers, ensuring train documents were delivered—in Schreiber, Ont., in 1989. She has been in her current job for almost three years overseeing six managers, 38 train-crew employees and 15 mechanical employees. Prior to that, the 45-year-old worked in various jobs, including six years as a terminal co-ordinator in Saratoga, New York, overseeing mostly male workers older than herself. She was initially viewed with suspicion, but over time her staff got used to the idea of a female boss.
Now at CP, cited for 2009 as one of Canada’s Best Diversity Employers, 10 per cent of the 16,000-strong workforce (including its U.S. operations) is female. Of the 1,200 women working at CP in Canada, 200 are in field operations. And in the executive ranks, 50 per cent are women, far ahead of the national average.
CP offers $1,000 scholarships (totalling $10,000 a year) to women pursuing a career as a railway conductor at partner colleges.
In 2007, some CP women employees launched a networking program called Women on Track. The program facilitates mentoring, communication, learning and connecting with women across the railway’s network, along with and charitable community work.
Research has demonstrated a strong business case for gender diversity and for programs that permit women to get ahead—particularly in leadership positions. Catalyst, a U.S.-based organization that researches women’s advancement in the workplace, has done numerous studies that point to a strong correlation between gender diversity at an organization and its financial performance.
A 2004 Catalyst study of Fortune 500 companies found those with the highest representation of women in top management positions performed better financially than those with the lowest women’s representation. Return on equity (ROE), was 35 per cent higher and total return to shareholders (defined as capital gains plus dividends) was one third higher.
Deborah Gillis, who leads the Canadian office of Catalyst, says when organizations promote a diverse working environment, “the research shows employees report stronger career satisfaction. They believe they have a stronger chance to advance and feel they can fully contribute.” That means better staff retention and more productivity and profitability within an organization, which is particularly important in these times of economic hardship, she says.
Constable Judith Russell, of the Toronto Police Service, which ranks among Mediacorp’s Best Diversity Employers, says the TPS has plenty of programs to encourage diversity in the workplace. But it’s an ongoing challenge, she admits. “As women, we face the expectation all the time that you’re expected to keep up with men, and sometimes if they feel you can’t, you may feel a bit isolated.”
Russell, 35, who works in the Employment Unit Recruiting Section (having moved over from front-line policing) would always like to see more women in the service, but says strides have been made. One of four deputy police chiefs is female, and that position ranks second only to the chief of police.
In 2006, almost half of new hires by the service were identified as members of “diversity” groups, including women.
It’s just common sense to have women in the workplace, whether out in the field, on the front lines, or, significantly, in decision-making positions, says Gillis. Women represent half the Canadian labour force and control 80 cents of every consumer dollar. So why not give them that kind of say in the workplace?
“If you want to serve the market,” she says, “you want to hire the market.”
Wed Feb 01
