PSAE winners are (L-R) Douglas Quinville, Anne Stanton, Dorota Bartnik-Kapsa, Brian Lee and Catherine Alkenbrack (missing from photo) - photo by Martin Dee

UBC Reports | Vol. 52 | No. 5 | May 4, 2006

Staff Members Receive President’s Service Award for Excellence

By Basil Waugh

Five members of the university community are being recognized for their outstanding contributions to campus life as recipients of this year’s President’s Service Award for Excellence.

Each recipient will receive a gold medal and $5,000 in a presentation during Spring Congregation ceremonies.

Anne Stanton has worked as a building service worker since 1978, and for the past 28 years has approached her responsibilities for cleaning and maintaining such facilities as the Life Sciences Centre and Memorial Gym with an unwavering dedication to health and safety.

Stanton holds the distinction of being the first Land and Building Services employee to volunteer for First Aid training. As a longstanding member of the Custodial Health and Safety committee, she initiated numerous safety programs and seminars. Stanton serves as a Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) shop steward, and often provides training and advocacy on her own time. Stanton participates in the annual Breast Cancer Research Walk for a Cure and volunteers for the United Way.

As the manager responsible for WebCT, the course management system developed at UBC and used around the world, 17-year employee Douglas Quinville supervises an IT Services team entrusted with the reliability and availability of one of the university’s most-used student services. Outside of his formal duties, Quinville is best known for his leadership in the annual UBC Faculty and Staff Golf Tournament.

Quinville was the driving force behind the tournament’s transformation from a modest, purely social event to a fundraiser for the Walter Gage Memorial Fund that attracts sell-out participation and has raised $50,000 over the past five years for student initiatives. Since stepping down as tournament chair in 2003, the former UBC varsity athlete has served two terms as chair of the Walter Gage Memorial Fund. Quinville coaches his teenage daughters’ soccer team, coordinates door-to-door canvassers for the Heart and Stroke Fund, and captains his neighborhood Block Watch Program in West Vancouver.

Dorota Bartnik-Kapsa is Senior Early Childhood Educator with UBC Child Care Services and has been caring for the children and families of the faculty, staff, students and residents at the Summer of ’73 Daycare since 1988.

Bartnik-Kapsa champions programs that stimulate children intellectually, socially, physically and emotionally. Parents, colleagues, and students have described her as an inspiration and role model for quality childcare, education, and community building. One former Summer of ’73 parent says Bartnik-Kapsa cares for not only the children, but a child’s entire family, adding that children under her care grow to be confident, happy individuals, ready to contribute in kindergarten and in the greater community. Bartnik-Kapsa’s commitment to her field is demonstrated by her participation in volunteer committees focused on the development of best practices in early child education at UBC Child Care Services, which often take place outside of hours of work.

For the last 16 years, Brian Lee has dedicated his career to the financial health of the university — the past nine years as director of Finance in the Faculty of Arts, UBC’s largest faculty with a budget of around $60 million and 21 departments, schools and museums.

Lee, a UBC alumnus, is best known for decentralizing the Faculty’s budget, a two-year project that resulted in greater departmental flexibility, smaller classes, and more full-time positions. A past co-chair of the Committee of Faculty Business Administrators, he is also responsible for the faculty’s five-year comprehensive financial plan, which provided a balanced fiscal outlook using various economic scenarios and enrollment projections. Lee is a member of the Killarney Secondary School Parent Advisory Committee and the Certified General Accountant’s organization, where he marks student exams on a volunteer basis.

Catherine Alkenbrack, associate director of Facilities and Capital Planning, is the first point of contact when administrators, faculty, staff and students think about physical space on campus. Over the course of her 14 years of employment, a period of unprecedented growth at UBC, she has become known as the campus’s space planning “conscience.”

Alkenbrack manages over 250 annual requests for space or planning assistance. She has created space plans, budgets, and re-use scenarios for nearly 150 additional major projects, including UBC Okanagan and the Kuwait Institute of Business and Technology. When required, she is known to work late into the night to ensure major projects remain on deadline. A graduate of the UBC School of Architecture, Alkenbrack is author of the UBC Core Density Study, a key roadmap for campus growth. She was also instrumental in the creation of the recently completed Swing Space Building, used as temporary space for units whose facilities are being renovated. As a member of UBC’s Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) team, Alkenbrack’s ability to project and cost the physical implications of research proposals is seen as critical to the quality of the university’s applications, which generated $200 million in funding in the program’s first year alone.