UBC Reports | Vol. 49 | No. 7 | Jul. 3, 2003

In the News

Highlights of UBC Media Coverage in June 2003.

Compiled by Cristina Calboreanu

UBC Receives Major Donation

William Sauder, the 77-year-old chairman of International Forest Products Ltd. and Sauder Industries Ltd., has given $20 million to the University of British Columbia in the largest single private donation ever made to a Canadian business school. “I have been inordinately lucky and I wanted to give something back to this country,” he said.

UBC president Martha Piper said the donation “will help UBC move into the first rank of business education and research in North America.” Proceeds of the endowment will be used to create 125 new student spaces, add more faculty and boost the scope of the research at what is already one of Canada’s largest business schools.

The UBC Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration was renamed the Sauder School of Business.

The story ran in The Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun and The Vancouver Province, as well as on BC CTV.

Canadian Astronomers Find Jupiter’s New Moon

Brett Gladman, UBC associate professor of physics and astronomy, together with his graduate student Lynne Allen and J. J. Kavelaars of the National Research Council have found Jupiter’s 61st moon. Prof. Gladman told The Globe and Mail that new light-sensitive cameras (mounted on telescopes situated on the top of Mount Mauna Kea in Hawaii) and computer algorithms to process the data helped them “wallpaper the sky around the planet three times in three consecutive months so [they] were sure [they] would find everything.”

A new TRIUMF for Science and Health Care

A new $27.5-million research facility opened at TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics on the UBC campus. The B.C. government contributed $8.7 million for a massive building that houses an expansion of an isotope separator and accelerator (ISAC) built in the mid-1990s to produce exotic atoms that can be used for everything from emulating stars to treating eye cancer.

“ISAC is the best facility in the world to do nuclear astrophysics,” TRIUMF’s science director Jean-Michel Poutissou told The Ottawa Citizen. TRIUMF experiments involve chemists, physicists, computer scientists, chemical engineers and technologists.

‘Humble’ Telescope to Seek New Planets

Canadian astronomers hope to get the first good look at planets outside our solar system with a tiny space telescope which rode into orbit on June 30. “If it works, we’ll be the first humans in history to see reflected light from a planet outside our Solar System,” Jaymie Matthews, UBC associate professor of physics & astronomy, told The National Post. The reflected light will reveal the size of the planets and the composition of their atmospheres.

Dubbed the “humble” telescope, in deference to NASA’s Hubble, the MOST telescope (for Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars) is just 60 cm wide and 30 cm deep, which makes it the tiniest space observatory ever built. And at $10 million, it ushers in an era of affordable space exploration.

The Bacteria Hunter

In its Canada’s Best series, TIME profiled Brett Finlay, the UBC professor of microbiology and biochemistry who is leading the charge to decipher and disarm the weaponry that harmful bacteria use to cause illnesses. According to TIME, in two decades, Prof. Finlay has pioneered more breakthroughs in microbial pathogenesis than most microbiologists will in a lifetime. One of his most astounding discoveries was defining how the crafty E. coli 0157:H7 bacterium, which causes bloody diarrhea and kidney failure in children, binds to its host. Finlay’s discovery has prompted other scientists to identify different bacterial pathogens that bind to host cells by a similar mechanism.