Members of the Garbage Committee set off Friday afternoon to clear the campus of litter in a One-Hour Garbage Pick-up. Starting inside the Student Life Centre, the volunteers worked their way around campus, clearing litter inside buildings and along pathways. "The Garbage Committee’s mandate is to encourage the UW community to respect our campus and keep it clean," says Johnny Trinh of the student life office, sending thanks to participants, as well as Retail Services, Plant Operations, Food Services, the SLC, Housing, and the UW Sustainability Project who assisted. Look for more opportunities next term, he says, to join in trashy activities — hmm, maybe there's a different way I could phrase that.

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'Transfer agreement' for cells, chemicals

a news release from the C4 consortium

Would kids still trade baseball cards if each swap required a ten page legal agreement?

The legal requirements surrounding the exchange of research materials can feel onerous, but a newly developed template agreement should help researchers rekindle their excitement.

Today members of C4, the technology transfer consortium that links universities across Southwest Ontario, are releasing a jointly developed Material Transfer Agreement. The new MTA will be used at McMaster, Guelph, Waterloo, Western, Windsor, and Wilfrid Laurier universities. Other universities are free to adopt this template agreement.

Legal contracts, MTAs cover the exchange of tangible research materials between organizations and researchers, when the receiver intends to use the material for research purposes. The MTA describes the rights of the provider and the receiver to both the original material and any derivatives. The most commonly transferred materials are biologicals, such as cell lines, but MTAs may also be required for other substances, including chemical compounds and novel materials.

The new C4 MTA has two variants, one for biological materials and one for non-biologicals. It is based on the Uniform Biological Material Transfer Agreement, which is the de facto standard for MTAs in the United States. A C4 working group adapted this agreement to suit Canadian requirements.

“The adopted C4 MTA should streamline doing business for industry partners who have research relationships with the C4 universities is Southwest Ontario. Industry partners who deal with any one of the C4 universities now know with certainty what terms and conditions they can expect from any of the other partner universities. This is a good example of the C4 attempting to adopt common practices in order to increase the accessibility of research opportunities by industry collaborators,” says Scott Inwood, director of commercialization at UW ’s Intellectual Property Management Group.

The new MTA realizes C4’s joint goals of sharing best practices between institutions and reducing the barriers for others who work with C4 members. It also eases the flow of materials between C4 institutions.

Previously, each university technology transfer office had a different MTA and institutions that wanted to collaborate with multiple C4 institutions would be faced with reviewing several MTAs. Now a business that has collaborated with, for example, the University of Guelph will already be familiar with McMaster University’s MTA.

The C4 is now working on a common Inter-Institutional Agreement for C4 universities. It hopes to release that agreement this winter. The template NDAs are available on the C4 website.

C4 (“Coordinating, Cooperating, and Collaborating to Commercialize Technology”) fosters innovation in Southwest Ontario by promoting technology transfer and commercialization. the C4 members — ten universities and research institutions — coordinate their resources, cooperate with governmental and industrial bodies, collaborate in multi-disciplinary research to solve real world problems, and commercialize the results of their research.

C4’s members are McMaster, Guelph, Waterloo, Western, Windsor, and Wilfrid Laurier universities, and Robarts Research Institute, the Lawson Health Research Institute, Hamilton Health Sciences, and St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. This diverse group of universities and research institutions generates hundreds of new discoveries each year. It is C4’s mission to help its members transfer these discoveries to society.

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Payday's coming, and so's Christmas

If you’ve been relying on that black-and-gold cardboard calendar issued by the Keystone Campaign to tell you when payday is coming next month — well, don’t. “The Keystone calendar has an incorrect date,” says Sandie Hurlburt, assistant director of human resources. Seems it identifies Friday, December 19, as payday for faculty and most staff. In fact, December’s payday will be Tuesday the 23rd, the last working day of 2008. Also: the eagle generally screams (as the soldiers used to say) on the last Friday of each month, but Hurlburt notes that payday will arrive a week early in January, on Friday the 23rd. Meanwhile, the biweekly payroll dates are December 5 and 19, January 2 and 16.

While we're at it, here for easy reference are some important dates that lie just ahead:

• Last day of fall term classes is Monday, December 1.
• Exams run December 5 through 19 (including distance education exams December 5-6).
• Last business day of 2008 is Tuesday, December 23.
• First business day of 2009 is Monday, January 5.

The Balsillie School of International Affairs, a joint project of UW, Wilfrid Laurier University and the Centre for International Governance Innovation, will take a big step forward today. At a launch event and reception at CIGI, 57 Erb Street West, the school will announce the architect selected to design its new building on 3.5 acres of city land at the site of the former Seagram distillery, next to CIGI, located between Caroline and Erb Streets. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2009 with completion in 2010. The announcement starts at 5:30 pm with CIGI executive director John English, of UW’s history department, serving as master of ceremonies, followed by short presentations by John Milloy, Ontario's minister of training, colleges and universities; Brenda Halloran, mayor of the City of Waterloo; Jim Balsillie, founder of the Balsillie School and co-CEO of Research In Motion; and the architect from the selected firm.

Usually the Arriscraft Lectures in UW’s school of architecture present noted or interesting practitioners from outside, but tonight’s speaker is home-grown. He’s faculty member Geoffrey Thün, whose talk, “Matters of Concern”, starts at 8:00 tonight in the Architecture lecture hall in Cambridge. Thün, who’s also a visiting professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, founded the architectural firm of RVTR in 2006 with partners Colin Ripley, Kathy Velikov and Paul Raff. Velikov and Thün were recipients of a 2008 Young Architects Forum Award for their portfolio of design from the Architecture League of New York. The lecture, a blurb explains, “will unpack the firm’s work structured around three primary themes: Future Ecologies, Situated Infrastructures and Emerging Inhabitations. Work presented will include a discussion of the Post Carbon Highway that examines the future of mobility on the busiest transport corridor within the Great Lakes Megaregion, and the North House Project, a major five- year research program that includes the development of an 800sf prototype shortlisted to compete in the US Department of Energy’s 2009 Solar Decathlon.” Along with the lecture comes first solo exhibit of design and research work at the Cambridge Gallery outpost just steps away from the lecture hall. It runs until January 4 and includes projects being undertaken with other Waterloo engineering faculty, researchers and graduate students.

This weekend is the time, Toronto’s Westin Harbour Castle Hotel is the place, and the sponsor is the Impact Entrepreneurship Group, which started at UW five years ago and is now a national player. The event: Impact’s annual two-day conference for some 500 students from high schools and universities, gathering “to learn more about entrepreneurship and hone their leadership skills”, explains second-year mechanical engineering student Xiaoxian Zhou. “This will be a great opportunity to learn more about entrepreneurship, practice real-life business skills and interact with speakers, companies and industry guests while building their network.” Speakers include Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat Linux; Leonard Brody, venture capitalist and best-selling author; and Rebecca Macdonald, founder of Energy Savings Fund. At a sponsor exhibition, participants can meet business partners, learn about the finer points of particular industries, and find “amazing job opportunities, potential future clients, legal partners, venture capitalists and mentors”. The conference is also scheduled to include an 800 person gala, workshops, “and much more”.

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Universities 'major players' in research

a news release from the Ottawa office of AUCC

The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada has launched a report on the state of Canadian research and development, with a particular emphasis on university research, at an event that included partners from government, the private sector and the not-for-profit sector.

The report, entitled Momentum: The 2008 report on university research and knowledge mobilization, shows universities are major players in R&D in Canada, performing more than one-third of the country’s research and contributing at least $60 billion to the economy in 2007. However, analysts agree that the world competition for talent, knowledge and innovation is fierce and Canada cannot be complacent with its accomplishments.

“The rest of the world is not standing still and the global race for research talent is becoming more and more intense,” says AUCC chair Tom Traves, president of Dalhousie University. “We expect this report to stimulate public debate on the required level and mix of support for university research in Canada.”

“This is a time when we cannot afford to cut back on public investment, but should instead see the potential for stimulating economic growth at the local and the national level by investing in people and knowledge. Having a highly skilled labour force is undeniably a major asset for any country,” notes AUCC president Claire Morris. “In these uncertain economic times, Canada must continue to improve its innovative capacity to ensure long-term prosperity,” she adds.

Momentum 2008 focuses on the importance of partnerships in university research and looks at the variety of forms collaboration takes — from university partnerships with private companies to research projects with governments, communities, the not-for-profit sector and international partners. It provides a comprehensive account of Canadian R&D, particularly the activities of the university sector and the resulting progress achieved. It also presents detailed research and analysis of national and international trends that will drive changes in university research and the Canadian R&D landscape in the future.

Momentum 2008 documents the wide range of benefits to Canadians such as new products, services, processes, policies and new ways of understanding society. The report is available online.

CAR

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