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| First Nations and business leaders meet. |
Connecting
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal business leaders are being paired in a unique SFU program that puts senior executive officers at meetings on Aboriginal reserves and First Nations chiefs into executive suites. The Leadership Exchange Program, created by SFU’s Learning Strategies Group, allows the leaders to experience each other’s work and cultural environments. The first participants were from Kinder Morgan Canada, Tsawwassen First Nation, Plutonic Power Corporation, Chehalis First Nation, Coldwater Indian Band, and Coast Hotels and Resorts.
Eating Out
Buyatab.com is a new venture that allows one to go online,
click, and “pick up the tab” for friends and relatives dining out. It is the brainchild of SFU student Matias Marquez and BCIT student Ross St. George, and they have already signed up some high-profile restaurants, including Monk McQueens, LIFT, and Wild Rice. Buyatabs are good to go immediately and the developers plan to expand their restaurant list across Canada and into the U.S.
 Running I
Sprinters may gain speed from a combination of long toes and a unique ankle structure.
A new study by SFU post-doctoral fellow Sabrina Lee (above) and colleague Stephen Piazza at Pennsylvania State University finds that the distance between the tendon and the centre of rotation in sprinters is shorter and the toes are longer.
Down from the
Mountain
SFU wins a prestigious gold medal from the
Institute of Public Administration and Deloitte. The medal for innovation and leadership in the public education
sector recognizes the university’s work with municipalities, urban planners, and the private sector in revitalizing Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Surrey’s core area.
 Outer Space
SFU physicist Barbara Frisken isn’t kidding
when she says she gets messages from the cosmos. The messages were from Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk calling from the International Space Station to discuss BCAT-5, an on-board experiment for which Frisken is the principal investigator. Friskin and her team are working with NASA through the Canadian Space Agency on a project to investigate the behaviour in zero gravity of particle suspensions known as colloids.
Winning Ways
The Clan women’s basketball team defeat the University of Windsor Lancers 77-56 to win their second Canadian Interuniversity Championship in a row. It is the team’s fifth win in nine years. SFU’s Robyn Buna is named player of the year, while SFU’s Laurelle Weigl is named player of the game.
 Green, Green
SFU is one of the first university business schools in Canada to appoint a sustainability-entrepreneur-in-residence. Boyd Cohen got considerable publicity last year for his contest to find the greenest person in the world. He has his own sustainability business, 3rdWhaleMobile.
Green thumbs UP
SFU students are helping Portland Hotel Society
to build and maintain a vegetable garden on a vacant lot in the Downtown Eastside. The Hastings Folk Garden on Hastings near Columbia not only supplies fresh food to people in need, but has become a haven for many in the area, according to garden coordinator Peter LeGrand.
 Biz Whizzes
Benjamin Brown-Bentley (top), Ammar Sultan (middle), and Milun Tesovic (base) are recognized for their innovative business ventures. Brown-Bentley, an engineering sciences student who runs the popular Vancouver events-production company Adrenaline, is named SFU’s student entrepreneur of the year. Economics student Sultan wins SFU’s best new student entrepreneur of the year for his start-up company, International Student Connections. Tesovic, co-founder of song lyrics website metrolyrics.com, beats out students from 18 other countries to be named global
student entrepreneur of the year.
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| Melania Alvarez (centre) playing math games in the free mentorship program. |
Mentorship Magic
Math is making more sense to a group of Aboriginal children in the Downtown Eastside as a result of a free mentorship program. Melania Alvarez, a doctoral student in education at SFU and the B.C. education coordinator for the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, created the program now offered at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre.
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| Jay Solman,far right, and his teammates Mark Bremner (left) and Lara Rantoul (middle) survived a gruelling 250-km race across the Sahara. |
Running II
Ultramarathoner Jay Solman, who is also SFU’s ombudsperson, completes the gruelling Sahara Race in Egypt. The six-day, 250-kilometre race is part of the RacingThePlanet 4 Deserts series, considered to be one of the world’s toughest endurance races. Solman is looking forward to his next big race in Nepal in 2011. For more information on the race go to <www.trailwinders.com>; for a race video recap go to
<www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEpy351-IMA>.
 |
| Fiona Brinkman presenting
at a research social. |
Powerful
SFU microbiologist Fiona Brinkman is named one of the top 100 most powerful women in Canada. The Women’s Executive Network chose Brinkman in its Trailblazers and Trendsetters’ category. Brinkman is a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and is a pioneer in the emerging field of pathogen bioinformatics – the use of powerful computers to study DNA and protein sequences in bacteria that cause disease.She is the research director, bioinformatics of the Genome Canada Pathogenomics Project, and she is co-lead of the Bioinformatics for Combating Infectious Diseases (BCID) project.
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| President Michael Stevenson greets Prince Charles at the Morris J Wosk Centre for Dialogue last fall. |
Hight Society
Prince Charles visits SFU to confirm a partnership between the university and the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. SFU Urban Studies and the foundation will work together to develop a curriculum for advanced education in sustainable urbanism. Anthony Perl, director of the Urban Studies program, says it is the foundation’s first partnership outside the U.K. The other academic partner is Oxford University.
 Stressed
As many as 20 percent of our children are
suffering from anxiety disorders according to Charlotte Waddell, director of SFU’s Children’s Health Policy Centre. It’s the leading health problem children face after infancy, and, unlike many other problems, anxiety disorders often go unnoticed by parents and teachers.
What Will Help the Homeless?
That’s the question Julian Somers, an SFU drug- addiction specialist, himself the son of a homeless man, is asking. He is the lead investigator for the Vancouver site of a $110-million, five-city national research project on housing interventions. The Vancouver team is recruiting 500 mentally ill and currently homeless participants for the four-year study.
Real or
Virtual?
Computer gamers are being recruited for a series of online and face-to-face studies to see how they see themselves and their avatars (virtual identities). Education professor Suzanne de Castell is working with SRI International, a non-profit research and development organization, and researchers at York University in Toronto and the Nottingham University Business School in the U.K. Three new games recently completed by de Castell and her team are Contagion, which teaches young people how to stay healthy in the face of contagious diseases (http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca), Epidemic: Self-Care for Crisis (http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/epidemic-dev), and a baroque music game (http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/tafelmusik/).
 We’re #1 Again!
SFU is still the top comprehensive university
in Canada, according to Maclean’s magazine. It’s the second year in a row the university has led the category (last year it tied with the University of Victoria). The magazine congratulated the university on an outstanding showing in winning student and faculty awards, as well as research grants. SFU also scored high on library spending.
SFU’s Surrey Campus Grows
A $10-million expansion of the Surrey campus is
under way that will add 5,000 square metres of space for the university and 300 square metres for the retail complex. The new space will result in enhanced research capacity in health promotion and prevention of chronic diseases. The expansion is funded by the provincial and federal governments.
 Lighting the W
The iconic Woodward’s W shines again over
the redeveloped site that houses SFU’s new 125,000-square-foot home of the School for the Contemporary Arts. The complex includes unique dance, film, music, visual arts, and theatre training programs and adds stunning new cultural facilities on Hastings Street in downtown Vancouver.
Peak Performers
The band Bend Sinister, with Dan Moxon (BFA’04) of the Learning and Instructional Development Centre, takes home $50,000 and a third-place finish in a music competition sponsored by Music BC and radio station 100.5 The Peak. The band was one of hundreds that participated, went to a rock “boot camp” to learn the business side of music, and then played a sold-out show at the Commodore.
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| Michael Volker outside the
Wosk Centre for Dialogue. |
An Angel at Your Shoulder
Mike Volker, executive director of SFU’s University/Industry Liaison Office (UILO), is named Canadian Angel of the Year by the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO). NACO is the industry association for “angel investors,” those who invest their own funds in promising business start-ups in exchange for a stake in the enterprise. Since it began UILO has spun off
75 companies and holds equity in more than 30 of the 40 companies still active.
Improving Literacy
A two-year program called Literacy Lives will help improve literacy and essential skills in inner-city environments. The program, run by SFU’s community education program through the Continuing Studies Community Engagement Division, will take a grassroots approach through the creation of learning opportunities.
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| Left to right: Mindy Ogden, Jamie Mulholland, Matthew DeVos
(centre , in PJs), and Veselin Jungic. |
Help For Math Woes
An interactive online version of
Math 150 – Calculus 1 with Review – will help students with this challenging course. The version was developed by senior math lecturer Veselin Jungic (PhD’99) and lecturer Jamie Mulholland (BSc’00). See videos promoting the course and featuring assistant math professor Matthew DeVos at
i.sfu.ca/TkgtIN.
Column Art by: Connectiong photo: courtesy SFU News/PAMR, Running I photo: Marianne Meadahl, photo Outer Sapce: www.randolphcollege.edu, Boyd Cohen photo: Carol Thorbes, Biz Whizzes, Mentorpship Magic and Running II photos: courtesy SFU News/PAMR,
Fiona Brinkman and Hicgh Society photos: Greg Ehlers/ LIDC, Stressed Illustration: iStock.com, Michael Volker Photo: Stuart Colcleugh, Math Woes Photo: Diane Luckow, We're #1 illustration: Fotolia.com, Lighting the W: Gordon Price
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