By Christine Hearn
Photography by Raeff Miles

An innovative program brings together First Nations communities, school districts, and the university.

For Mark Fettes, his first doctoral course in education was “like a homecoming.” With two and a half degrees in biochemistry, that sounds like an odd statement. But Fettes had decided not to be a lab scientist, quit his PhD program, gone to work for an NGO in Europe (where his work language was Esperanto and he also learned Dutch), and returned to Canada to work for the Assembly of First Nations researching community-based language problems in aboriginal communities.

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Health and Education Research Bonanza

By Christine Hearn

$11 million for the social sciences and humanities.

Mark Fettes’ project is one of five SFU projects to receive Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grants. In total, the university was awarded three of the seven projects funded nation-wide through the Initiative on the New Economy (INE); each project gets $3 million over the next four years. Two other projects funded through SSHRC’s Community-University Research Alliances (CURA) funding program get $1 million each. The total is more than any other Canadian university and is nearly double the annual research grant funding the university has received from SSHRC recently..

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Using Computers to Fight Disease

By Sharon J. Proctor
Photography by Greg Ehlers, LIDC

Microbiologist and computer scientist Fiona Brinkman is a leader in the study of infectious diseases.

Dr. Fiona Brinkman’s campus office is nearly empty! There are virtually no journals, reports, or other papers on her shelves. Her desktop is clean, holding only framed family photos. Yet she teaches, does research, oversees graduate students, heads up projects, reads scientific articles, and has a family. What gives?

She points to her PC. “I prefer receiving everything online.” An appropriate answer – as Brinkman is one of North America’s top young researchers in the field of bioinformatics (the use of computers to solve biological problems). She uses a powerful PC, linked to a network of other computers, to study DNA and protein sequences in bacteria that cause disease.

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History Online

By Kim Minkus

The Canadian Multicultural Heritage Project helps history live – in all its diverse languages.

In this yellowing photograph dated 1911, a serious group of Chinese businessmen are grouped around a central figure. The figure, a man wearing a black bowler hat and a fur-trimmed overcoat, is staring straight into the camera. He possesses both an air of authority and something else that, today, we might call “class.”

That figure was Dr. Sun Yat-Sen on one of three visits that he made to Canada; on this particular visit to Vancouver in 1911 he was photographed with the Chinese Freemasons Society. In the same year that this photo was taken, he was to play a key role in the revolution in China that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. His visits to Canada had two purposes: to raise support for his democratic vision of China and to raise funds.

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