Colin Jones

Wishes:

Dear Thelma, Warmest Congratulations on your 100th birthday. A very special day for a quite remarkable person! When SFU opened its doors in 1965, the faculty were an exceptionally young bunch. All the founding heads in Science were under 40 and the youngest was Rudi Herring, Head of Physics, who was only 33. Seventy percent of the faculty were under the age of 30. All this changed in 1967 with the appointment of the Pest Management group from the |griculture Canada Research Institute in Belleville Ontario. This exceptionally strong group of senior, internationally recognised scientists, of which you were a key member, transformed the Department of Biosciences and the Faculty of Science. The wealth of experience which this group brought, both in research and in broader matters relevant to university policy, were quite invaluable. During the 1970's ways of increasing the number of women faculty appointments at SFU were under active discussion. I recall that you took the very principled stand that well-qualified women could more than hold their own in an academic research environment and that you were opposed to quotas and other similar tools favoring the hiring of women. At the same time, you were strongly supportive of measures to encourage and support young women in the pursuit of careers in science. In 1991, long after your retirement , you kindly agreed to update the Faculty of Science Who's Who, a detailed handbook describing the accomplishments of each and every faculty member in the Faculty. This was brought further up to date in 1995 with a supplement describing the 30 or so new faculty hired in the previous four years. This handbook was an invaluable tool for informing faculty in depth about their colleagues and as a recruitment tool in hiring. Your contribution here as in all things was impeccable. Your extensive role after retirement in counselling and advising many, many students over many years was of inordinate value to those students and the university. Thelma, you have earned an enormous debt of gratitude from the the University as a whole and from your many colleagues across Science who have had the privilege of knowing and working with you. May you enjoy many birthday celebrations still to come. Very best wishes Colin Jones Professor Emeritus Chemistry Dean of Science 1988-99