Executives named for HR and international

Two of the open positions in UW’s senior administration have been filled, provost Amit Chakma announced in memos issued late Wednesday.

“I am pleased,” he wrote, “to announce the appointment of Janet Passmore as Associate Provost, Human Resources, for a five-year term effective July 1, 2009.

“Ms Passmore (left) is a business leader who comes to Waterloo with 25 years experience in building traditional operations and innovating and implementing new concepts at Clarica and at Cowan Insurance Group where she served in executive roles, including as President and CEO at Cowan. Ms Passmore is an alumna of UW (Honours BSc) and since 2004 has served as an active and engaged Governor, with membership on Audit, Executive, Governance and Pension & Benefits Committees, serving as chair of the latter since early 2009.

“Please join David [Johnston, UW’s president] and me in welcoming Janet to her new role at the University of Waterloo, We look forward to the leadership Janet will bring to the Human Resources portfolio.”

The provost added: “I also want to take this opportunity to thank Catharine Scott for her outstanding service in this portfolio which she assumed in 1996, and for the leadership she has provided to the UW campus for more than three decades.” Scott is scheduled to retire late this year from her position as associate provost (human resources and student services), and there has been no announcement yet on what will become of the student services portfolio.

Then the second announcement: “I am pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Leo Rothenburg (right) as Associate Vice President International for a three year term effective July 1, 2009.”

Bruce Mitchell, associate provost and soon to be interim provost, has been doubling as acting associate VP (international) for the past year. Rothenburg, meanwhile, has been acting dean of engineering, while dean Adel Sedra takes a sabbatical league that’s scheduled to end June 30.

Said the provost’s memo: “Professor Rothenburg has been a long serving faculty member in the Department of Civil Engineering. He served as Chair of the Department and is now completing his term as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Engineering. In recent years, he has been providing important leadership to UW's UAE initiative.

“Please join David and me in welcoming Leo to his new role at the University of Waterloo.
We look forward to the leadership Leo will bring in advancing UW's international goals. I also want to take this opportunity to thank Bruce Mitchell for his outstanding service.”

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Course outlines; Shads arrive; other notes

An e-mail memo went to all faculty members this week from Geoff McBoyle, the associate vice-president (academic), reminding them that “Following approval at Senate May 19, 2009, all undergraduate courses, effective Fall 2009, require a course outline that must include certain basic elements. These elements are listed online. There is also a sample course outline available. In addition, undergraduate course outlines need to be distributed to students electronically or on paper by the end of the first week of classes and every course outline is required to be filed with the departmental Administrative Assistant. If you require further information please do not hesitate to contact me.” The e-mail address: gcmcboyle@ uwaterloo.ca.

Barbados meant work, not a vacation, for two UW graduate students who spent terms there in 2008 under the Students for Development program, funded by the Canadian government through the Canadian International Development Agency. Kyrke Gaudreau, environment and resource studies, served with Native Sun NRG and Counterpart Caribbean. He’s seen (left) working in a small-scale biodiesel plant where waste cooking oil is converted to biodiesel. As an undergrad, Gaudreau had helped set up the plant, and his internship during the fall term gave him the opportunity to see it in action and to evaluate it using a sustainability assessment tool developed by UW professor Bob Gibson. The other participant was Heather Stager, geography, who worked with the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency on a project for the stability of governance bodies throughout the unpredictable hurricane season.

Maggie Xiaohui Liang of Waterloo International reports that the international student office held a “meet and greet” event for its Shadow program on Wednesday. “The Shadow program works,” she explains, “by pairing up a new international student with a student volunteer who is accustomed to the UW campus, services, and local community. Shadows help new international students become more familiar with a new culture and a new academic and social setting.” There’s more about the program online.

The Waterloo Engineering Competition, which has been running all this week, is in high gear today. The finals of the Sandford Fleming Debates, a longstanding event that’s now been folded into the new WEC, are scheduled for noontime (11:30 to 1:30), with the junior and senior “team design” events starting this evening. Senior design presentations will be held Saturday morning and junior presentations Saturday afternoon, and the “consulting engineering” event runs most of the day Saturday. The WEC web site doesn’t actually give locations for these various events, but I’m thinking that anybody interested should start at the Carl Pollock Hall lobby and just follow the vibrations of excitement.

This year's month-long Shad Valley program gets started Sunday afternoon with the arrival of 48 high school students. This year’s group is made up of students representing nine of the ten provinces in Canada, plus one participant from the United States, says Kim Boucher of UW’s Centre for Knowledge Integration, which hosts the Shad program. "Waterloo was the first university campus to host this award-winning program in 1983 and remains the flagship program for the now 10 host university campuses across Canada,” says Ed Jernigan, Shad Waterloo program director and director of the CKI. Shad Valley is an enrichment program for teenagers with strong interests and potential in sciences, technology, engineering and entrepreneurship and involves as many as 600 high school students each summer. The Shads at Waterloo will hold a public open house to show off their achievements on Thursday afternoon, July 23, in the great hall at Conrad Grebel University College, where they'll be staying for the month.

The University Club introduced a new lunch menu last week, including salads, sandwiches (“Tuscan herb thintini”), and such entrees as sweet lemon grass curried chicken and grilled vegetable and ricotta flatbread. • There’s a retirement party today (4:00 at the University Club) for Sergeant Brian Bradley (right), who’s been with the UW police for 32 years. • Orion, the computer network that links Ontario’s universities, will be doing maintenance work overnight tonight, and UW’s Internet connectivity “will fall over to our backup ISP, at reduced bandwidth,” the IST department advises.

The accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP is doing research aimed at “understanding how students are generally feeling about the current state of the economy and how it is affecting their future plans”, and has asked students across Canada to participate in a short online survey. “Only aggregated insights will be made public by PwC in the final report,” promises Carolyn Forest, senior manager of media relations for the firm, in a letter that she’s asking to have widely distributed. It tells students that “you are likely following the current economic situation in Canada and the rest of the world with some interest and possibly a bit of concern,” and it offers a weblink to the survey.

CAR

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