Tuesday, April 14, 2015

No matter where you go, there you are

Welcome to the new Daily Bulletin! If everything has gone well this morning, the Bulletin will be published in the Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) and have a look and feel that should be similar to other Waterloo websites. As stated in previous Bulletins, not too much has changed, save for the ability to jump to individual articles on the page by using anchor tags.

The Daily Bulletin's archives, featuring more than 5,500 issues going back to 1993, have also been given a bit of a makeover, with new accessible expanding and collapsing tables.

Please send me an email if you encounter any difficulties with the new sites, or just to send your feedback on the new look. 

Board approves staff salary settlement

Acting on the advice of the Provost's Advisory Committee on Staff Compensation (PACSC), the University's Board of Governors has approved the three-year staff salary recommendation, which goes into effect May 1.

In summary: the three-year agreement recommends an increase to the salary ranges for University Support Group (USG) staff in each fiscal year as follows: increase of 1.95 per cent in 2015/2016, 1.95 per cent in 2016/2017, and 1.5 per cent in 2017/2018. In addition, the board voted to approve the application of the normal merit program for regular USG staff members in each year, with the merit funds distributed based on staff members' performance and position in the range according to the stated performance goals of the salary program.

The salary recommendations are the "result of detailed discussions and with consideration of information from a combination of sources (including Mercer compensation data, the Hay Group compensation trends, annual Consumer Price Index for 2014, and comparative data from employers and universities in Ontario) and in accordance with Policy 5, Salary Administration, University Support Staff."

Additionally, Board approved PACSC's recommendations to maintain the Staff Excellence Fund (SEF) and conduct a total compensation review in the 2015/2016 fiscal year in collaboration with the University of Waterloo Staff Association (UWSA). The board also voted to keep the Salary Increase in Lieu of Vacation, which provides staff with the option to exchange one week of vacation for a one-time 2 per cent salary increase within three years of retirement, in place.

The Board of Governors met on Tuesday, April 7.

National Volunteer Week Profile - Yanish Jutton

This story is part of the #UWCommunity National Volunteer week series, profiling University of Waterloo members who give their time and talent by volunteering in our community.

Yanish Jutton loves to help people solve problems.

A current University of Waterloo undergraduate student who recently made the switch from Systems Design Engineering to Knowledge Integration, Yanish has discovered that he’s especially passionate about different forms of learning and leadership, and regularly volunteers his time and knowledge in order to help people and teams grow:

“Volunteering also helps me develop personally because I find out so much more about what I do like and what I don’t like.”

Yanish merges his strong background in user-experience design and his desire to help people with an overarching goal of integrating new kinds of leadership styles and problem solving into the workplace. He is particularly intrigued by the increasing necessity for more concrete collaborative efforts between technological advancement and creative practice, which is why he didn’t hesitate when asked to be a mentor with The Business & Education Partnership (BEP): a local organization dedicated to providing youth the spark needed to ignite better career choices.

BEP leads the way in career exploration for youth in Waterloo Region by connecting students, educators, and employers to promote student success and community prosperity. They host programs for students in grades 7 to 12 that bridge the gap between school and work to help students explore careers, gain meaningful professional connections, and learn valuable job skills. Yanish worked specifically with their Apps4Learning program, coaching a group of high school students from St. David Catholic Secondary School through the various development phases of an app project: brainstorming, storyboarding, and the technicalities of the final product.

“One of the biggest reasons why I volunteered for this program was because I wanted to give back to the community somehow. Week by week, seeing them grow, it was really nice.”

Allison Mitchell, Program Director at BEP, sees the value of utilizing exceptional volunteers in our community to further the mandate of her organization: 

“The Business & Education Partnership would not be successful without all of the amazing volunteers that we having working with us. Our hundreds of volunteers generously share their time and their expertise so that students learn about different career options, which helps them make more informed decisions about their career paths. We deeply appreciate the passion that our volunteers have for helping the BEP lead the way in career exploration for youth.”

Yanish spent 6 months with this group of students, in the classroom every week, once a week, and saw it as a unique opportunity to share his knowledge and skills around app development and user-experience design with a group he doesn’t often get to connect with on a regular basis.

“Volunteering helps me round myself out a little bit more, because it forces me to hang out with a different crowd than I usually do. High school students do and use things differently, and they’re one of the biggest markets out there for apps, phones, products, and content; being able to be around them helped me get in their heads a little more and honed in my leadership skills.”

Allison Mitchell and the rest of the BEP team is thrilled to have him on board:

“We are so fortunate to have Yanish as one of our volunteers. For an entire semester, Yanish regularly went to the high school class to guide the students through technical challenges that they faced, as well as share his own academic and career paths. Yanish has participated in one of our ZOOM Career Days focused on ICT, where he delivered a hands-on workshop for high school students. He is also part of our Speakers Bureau and has shared his career path with students in grades 7 & 8.”

This experience helped Yanish expand his network, as he now has contacts at BEP and our local school boards. It also showed him what other people value and why, and how volunteering and giving back to our community can lead to gaining those further insights. Yanish also spends his spare time volunteering at special events for Communitech, like the Tech Leadership Conference, Techoberfest, and the Fluxible conference, and aspires to be on the board of directors for a nonprofit organization one day.

“It was so rewarding seeing them go from point A to point Z with the app. And they were really happy about it too. They had learned things and I could definitely see how much they grew. I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

CERC meeting focuses on new members

by Victoria Van Cappellen.

The University of Waterloo welcomed the Canada Excellence Research Chairholders (CERC) for the first day of their Fifth Annual CERC meeting, chaired by Earth and Environmental Science’s Philippe Van Cappellen, CERC in Ecohydrology.

The three newest CERC chairholders, Dr. Steven Bryant, CERC in Materials Engineering for Unconventional Oil Reservoirs at the University of Calgary, Dr. Giles Gerbier, CERC in Particle Astrophysics, Queen’s University, and Dr. Robin Rogers, CERC in Green Chemistry and Green Chemicals at McGill University, presented their research in depth this morning to University of Waterloo researchers and conference attendees. 

After lunch Michèle Boutin gave a talk about the history of research funding in Canada and the development of the CERC program.

To conclude the day, Terry McMahon, Dean of Science hosted a reception and research poster presentation where students, researchers and administrators from Waterloo and CERC mingled and discussed their latest findings.

The two-day meeting continues today in QNC and EIT with three parallel sessions in Environment, Health and Quantum information, all open to the public. Waterloo researchers interested in these areas are encouraged to attend.

These short research talks will highlight current research from the CERC labs. Environmental topics will feature global issues such as the impact of dams, cars of the future and Arctic ecosystems.

Health talks include “Progress towards time-resolved Structural Neurobiology”, “Discovery of biomarkers associated with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”, and “A proteome-scale map of the human protein interaction network”. A 45-minutes lunch and roundtable discussion will follow the presentations.

For a detailed program, please visit the CERC meeting website.

Staff to elect representative to Board of Governors

Voting will begin on Friday, April 24 as full-time staff members elect a representative to the Board of Governors. Brief campaign statements are available online for the five candidates contesting the position:

• Tom Dean, Department of Chemical Engineering;
• Brendan Lowther, Federation of Students;
• Trenny McGinnis, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering;
• Jeremy Steffler, Co-operative Education & Career Action;
• Glen Weppler, Housing & Residences.

All regular full-time staff and all union full-time staff as defined in University of Waterloo Policy 54 may vote.

In keeping with the Board of Governors' Staff Election Guidelines, the campaign period runs from Tuesday, April 14 to Thursday, April 23. The voting period for regular full-time staff is Friday, April 24 to Thursday, April 30 by electronic ballot. The voting period for union full-time staff is Friday, April 24 to Thursday, May 7 by paper ballot.

Full-time regular staff will receive an e-mail prompt to vote electronically and ballots will be mailed to full-time union staff members.