UBC Reports | Vol. 49 | No. 3 | Mar. 6, 2003

Kudos

UBC has gained two honours in BC Biotech’s 2003 Biotechnology Awards.

Brett Finlay, UBC Peter Wall Distinguished Professor, was recognized with an Innovation and Achievement Award. It honours an individual whose pioneering work has led to important applications in the field of biotechnology. A professor at UBC’s Biotechnology Laboratory and co-founder of Inimex Pharmaceuticals, Finlay’s research in bacterial disease has led to the near-completion of a cattle vaccine to combat E. coli.

UBC’s University-Industry Liaison Office was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The office, led by Angus Livingstone, has been instrumental in the creation of the majority of B.C.’s biotechnology companies. Started in 1984, it provides services such as technology screening and assessment, prototype development, technology commercialization and intellectual property protection.

Education Prof. Margaret Early and a team of researchers at five Canadian universities have received a $750,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to make literacy education more relevant to the Internet age. Early and researchers will partner with three school boards and a teachers’ union to determine exactly what kinds of skills students will need and how best to teach those skills.

The team will study innovative teaching practices that expand students’ literacy skills by exploring a variety of media, including photography, video, art, music, drama and the Internet. The project will also allow teachers to learn from each other as they integrate multimedia resources and their students’ cultural diversity into the curriculum.

The findings will form the basis of a Literacy Framework for the New Economy, designed to establish Canadian schools as leaders in literacy education, and give teachers tools to make technological, as well as cultural and linguistic skill development, a key component of all classroom activities.

Visual Art Prof. Ken Lum is this year’s recipient of the Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance and Development in the Visual and Creative Arts.

Lum joined the Dept. of Fine Arts in 1990 and has an outstanding record of teaching, scholarship, artistic production, criticism and publication.

His work has been exhibited around the world and been included in the Carnegie International, the Sáo Paulo Bienal, The Venice Biennale and the Johannesburg Biennale. He currently edits the critically acclaimed journal YISHU: The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

Since his arrival at UBC, Lum has also taught two years as Invited Professor at L’ école Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris as well as a full term in the same capacity with the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Munich. More recently, he has worked on a number of public art commissions for the cities of Vienna, Austria and Leiden, the Netherlands and another for the State of Sienna in Italy.

Education Assoc. Prof. Peter Gouzouasis has been awarded the Sam Black Award for Education and Development in the Visual and Performing Arts.

Gouzouasis has launched several successful initiatives that have dramatically changed programs in the faculty. Gouzouasis created the Fine Arts and Multi-Media in Education cohort of student teachers being trained to teach in elementary schools. He also established the MUSES lab, a multimedia learning space for visual arts and music education and a precursor to the FAME cohort model.

Gouzouasis is western Canada’s only authorized trainer for Macromedia Director, the most powerful multimedia scripting tool for Macintosh, PC, and 3DO platforms, and has completed a working interface of Interactive Wes, an interactive ethnographic piece on the life of jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery.

Geography Prof. David Ley is one of four Canadian academics named to the Trudeau Foundation Fellowships to pursue research on public policy issues.

The awards are the first made by the Foundation, which was established to help foster the critical thinking championed by Pierre Trudeau and endowed with a $125 million contribution by the Government of Canada last year.

Ley, the Canada Research Chair in Geography, studies how immigrant communities integrate into urban environments and how loss of identity in urban environments is resisted.