UBC This Week | Dec. 21, 2006

UBC This Week is a weekly summary of UBC people in the news, recent media releases and upcoming event highlights. UBC This Week past issues are also available on-line.

Sign up for UBC This Week and other UBC Public Affairs e-mail services at www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/eservices.

Recent UBC Media Releases

• Dec. 21: UBC, Musqueam sign Memorandum of Affiliation
• Dec. 20: UBC International Students Get a Taste of Home at Annual Holiday Dinner
• Dec. 19: The Next Big Thing in 2007, and Beyond; 2nd Annual Survey of Experts

Upcoming Event Highlights

• Dec. 24: Christmas Eve family mass
• Dec. 27 - Jan. 4: World Universities Debating Championships
• Dec 29: Women's basketball v. Brock

Find out what else is happening at UBC this week. For sports events, visit the UBC Athletics site at www.gothunderbirds.ca/schedule.asp.

UBC People

• $50 million boost for research in western Canada
• UBC hosts World Universities Debating Championships
• Anthropological Professor Emerita wins book awards
• UBC to co-host International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference

UBC People

$50 million boost for research in western Canada

A groundbreaking $88 million federal investment in national high performance computing (HPC) resources will improve the ability of more than 350 UBC researchers to address some of the most complex and socially relevant research problems in the world today.

UBC is a partner in WestGrid, one of Canada’s seven major HPC consortia that together are creating a pan-Canadian network of HPC facilities. The National Platforms Fund (NPF), built on $78 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and $10 million from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), was announced Dec 21, 2006 in support of this unified HPC strategy. Matching funds from provincial and industry sources will bring total NPF funding to almost $180 million.

This investment marks the first time CFI has identified a specific research infrastructure of strategic priority for the country and brought together all stakeholders — universities, provincial and federal funding agencies — to collaborate on the development of a purposefully shared pan-Canadian resource. UBC is one of more than 60 partners across Canada.

WestGrid (Western Canada Research Grid) operates HPC, collaboration and visualization infrastructure across western Canada. With 14 partner institutions across four provinces, WestGrid is Canada’s largest HPC consortium. Its partners include all universities in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba as well as the Banff Centre.

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UBC hosts World Universities Debating Championships

The UBC Debating Society will be hosting the 27th annual World Universities Debating Championships between December 27 and January 4, 2007. Welcoming more than 1,000 students from 150 universities, the 100-member UBC Debating Society will be adjudicating and thus will not be taking part in the tournaments. Instead, they will be listening and selecting winners among those who can best put a strong argument forward through logic, persuasion and eloquence.

The UBC Debating Society is a student club of the UBC Alma Mater Society. Members currently meet regularly to learn and practice in both Canadian and British parliamentary styles.

For more information, visit: www.ubcworlds2007.com.

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Anthropological Proessor Emerita wins book awards

Prof. Emerita Julie Cruikshank's book Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination has received the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing (from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology) and the Julian Steward Award (from the AAA Anthropology and Environment Section).

Both awards were presented at the American Anthropological Association Meetings in San Jose. Cruikshank is Professor Emerita with the Department of Anthropology, UBC Faculty of Arts.

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UBC to co-host International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference

Dean Isaacson and the UBC Faculty of Applied Science has invited the world's top offshore and polar engineers to Vancouver for the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE) 18th annual conference July 6-11, 2008. Delegates from more than 45 countries are expected.

Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science, Michael Isaacson, is a world-renowned coastal engineer, successfully co-founded ISOPE in 1989 and the first ISOPE-91 Edinburgh Conference. Since then, ISOPE has held 36 successful international conferences and symposia.

For more information: www.isope.org.

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