Monday, June 29, 2015

Shattering the mystery of how glass forms

A Waterloo physicist is among a team of scientists who have described how glasses form at the molecular level and provided a possible solution to a problem that has stumped scientists for decades. Their simple theory is expected to open up the study of glasses to non-experts and undergraduates as well as inspire breakthroughs in novel nanomaterials.

The paper published by physicists from the University of Waterloo, McMaster University, ESPCI ParisTech and Université Paris Diderot appeared in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week.

Glasses are much more than silicon-based materials in bottles and windows. In fact, any solid without an ordered, crystalline structure — metal, plastic, a polymer — that forms a molten liquid when heated above a certain temperature is a glass. Glasses are an essential material in technology, pharmaceuticals, housing, renewable energy and increasingly nano electronics.

“We were surprised — delighted — that the model turned out to be so simple,” said author James Forrest, a University Research Chair and professor in the Faculty of Science. “We were convinced it had already been published.”

The theory relies on two basic concepts: molecular crowding and string-like co-operative movement. Molecular crowding describes how molecules within glasses move like people in a crowded room. As the number of people increase, the amount of free volume decreases and the slower people can move through the crowd. Those people next to the door are able to move more freely, just as the surfaces of glasses never actually stop flowing, even at lower temperatures.

The more crowded the room, the more you rely on the co-operative movement with your neighbours to get where you’re going. Likewise, individual molecules within a glass aren’t able to move totally freely. They move with, yet are confined by, strings of weak molecular bonds with their neighbours.

Theories of crowding and cooperative movement are decades old. This is the first time scientists combined both theories to describe how a liquid turns into a glass.

“Research on glasses is normally reserved for specialists in condensed matter physics,” said Forrest, who is also an associate faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and member of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology. “Now a whole new generation of scientists can study and apply glasses just using first-year calculus.”

Confucius Institute agreement not renewed

The University will not take part in a renewal of the operational agreement among the University of Waterloo, Renison University College and Nanjing University regarding the Confucius Institute at Renison, which expired in March.

The decision followed lengthy consultation across campus in response to discussion arising from the University’s academic governing body, the Senate.

Ian Orchard, vice-president, academic and provost, noted that this will leave Renison University College free to pursue renewal of the Confucius Institute as it sees fit.

Our long-standing and valued relationship with Nanjing University, one of China's top universities, will continue through a variety of academic and research partnerships. 

Reflections on four decades of Waterloo health care

Dr. Barbara Schumacher, the University of Waterloo's medical director at Health Services, retires at the end of June. The Daily Bulletin recently spoke with her about her experiences working at the University.

Daily Bulletin: So, what first brought you to the University of Waterloo?

Dr. Schumacher: I graduated from the University of Toronto’s medical school and moved to the area because I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of practicing medicine in a really urban setting. I settled in Elmira in 1973. I started working in the Region of Waterloo’s public health family planning clinic in 1975. Then the University of Waterloo’s director of health services, Dr. Dan Andrew, called me to see if would like to cover the maternity leave for one of the physicians.

The possibility of working at a university was very attractive to me as a mom with two kids.

Because my brother was studying at the University of Waterloo, I had a sense of Waterloo as an exciting place, from a student’s point of view, and I was interested in working at a place that was on the cutting edge of things. It was attractive to me to be part of that, to feel that I could contribute in some way.

When I started at the University in 1976 I wasn’t sure I’d stay long. I thought it was really important for the campus community to have physicians who themselves were very young, and when I started here I was 25 years old, still a part of the student cohort. So I covered the maternity leave from January to April, and then Dr. Andrew called me back and asked if I’d like to work again that fall. By September I was working three days a week, and gradually picked up more time. In 1983 I did a year as acting medical director, as Dr. Andrew went on sabbatical, and in 1986, when he left, I was asked to fill in and in November 1986 I was hired full-time.

Daily Bulletin: What were your first impressions of the University?

Dr. Schumacher: Early on, the University of Waterloo recognized that campus health promotion was an important part of health services on a post-secondary campus. We recognized that students, coming away from home to a campus community, or living independently out of the shelter and nurture of family, have a unique opportunity for teachable moments that help them establish healthy lifestyle patterns that they can carry with them into adulthood.

Coming from a background in public health, I was very aware of the limitations of the single-patient-in-your-office-one-on-one therapeutic relationship. When you are part of an interconnected community like a university campus, you start to see individual patients with interconnected issues that are not entirely personal. At a university you see academic stressors, challenges associated with living in residence, athletic training and injuries, so you have to think about those things, and as medical director that becomes part of your responsibility – to work with many partners across campus to create a healthy and safe campus environment.

Daily Bulletin – What are the challenges of providing services in such a close-knit community?

Dr. Schumacher – It’s not so much a challenge as it is an opportunity. All of us in this community are working towards a good experience for students. Our focus, across campus, should be to have an environment that promotes success, where people can achieve their academic goals, so we all want to work together.

When I became medical director in the mid-eighties, you’ll recall that it was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and one of my first tasks was to pull together an ad hoc advisory group to talk about how to approach an awareness-raising campaign on campus. So I brought people from all over campus together – the church colleges, the Faculties, student services, and we started putting together plans for informing students.

Daily Bulletin – What shape did those plans take?

Dr. Schumacher – We were trying to be creative. And from that initial discussion came the idea of talks to residence dons about safe sex, and lectures within the faculties, and then Dean of Students Ernie Lucy knocked on my door with an idea he had seen at a conference out in the Maritimes about peer-based education done through drama.

One of our nurses, Denise Angove, was really keen on trying this, because we found that when you give a lecture about safer sex and birth control, even though you might be close in age to the students, you start to see a big gap in culture and jargon, and you realize that you’re boring the student audience and not motivating them.

So Denise worked with the drama department, and that’s how we started Single & Sexy. Essentially it was a play, written by students, based on facts that Health Services provided, like the frequency of sexually transmitted diseases, their prevention, and resources on campus where you can get family planning information and stress relief, etc. They created characters and storylines, and that first year we were really blown away. Every year, the students would bring more relevance to their peer group by doing things like incorporating contemporary music and bold language. For new students seeing the show, the people up on stage are their peers saying “you are coming to campus, this is what life is like and here are some things we want you to think about.” I would always go to the theatre and watch, and then listen to the students as they left talking about what they had just seen and heard.

A major piece of the play’s success for me is that we raise the questions, and give the audience a chance to think about those challenges in a way they maybe haven’t before. It’s an opportunity for young students, without actually being in a risky situation, to talk with friends and form their own opinions.

Daily Bulletin – How have students’ health needs changed over the years?

Dr. Schumacher – Exams always happen, and they are always stressful, and I think that as Waterloo’s reputation became higher and more global and the percentages for admission started to increase, the competitive pressures and stressors for students began mounting. 

Some students are so competitive for top marks and the professional doors those marks open in the future that they risk impeding their achievements through stress. We help students find that sweet spot of competitiveness and stress in the context of an environment where you can respect failure as part of your learning experience.

And as high schools support students with learning disabilities and mental health issues to the point where they have the capacity to successfully the university system, we have an opportunity to find ways we can help accommodate those particular students, to level the playing field. That brings us into a collaborative model of care with our partners in Counselling Services and the Student Success Office so we can make the appropriate assessment and guidance about how a students’ school life can be modified so they can perform at a higher level. These activities must be coordinated across campus.

Internationalization is another new opportunity. We began to see many more international students coming to school with their families. Also at that time, Waterloo Region was underserved with family doctors, so these international students would regularly take their families to the emergency room for care.  Our current Health Services building was bursting at the seams, so we couldn’t open our doors to see the families of our international students, and that started the conversation that led to the proposal to expand our facility. Because of increasing internationalization we needed to offer care to the families and dependents of those people we were inviting to become members of our campus community.

The other major reason for the expansion was the need to integrate our Health Services and Counselling Services to provide a collaborative model of care for mental health, and to provide new space for the numbers of doctors we needed to support our growing campus community. And that story is well documented – how our students supported this decision through a referendum, and the additional funding we received through the Healthy Campus, Healthy Community campaign, and now we have this new, expanded Health Services facility that I’m just over the moon about.

Daily Bulletin – How important is student mental health?

Dr. Schumacher – Very important. Some patients come in with very complex and challenging situations, and if our physicians made a referral to an external psychiatrist, it could take more than a year for them to be seen. So we started expanding our mental health care complement, hiring a clinical psychologist to help make diagnoses, and support personnel to help with academic accommodations in the context of therapy. Our psychiatrist would routinely tell patients to contact their academic advisors or the Office of Persons with Disabilities (now AccessAbility Services) but there would be a core of students who because of their illness didn’t have the energy or motivation to reach out to their advisors without additional support. Our psychiatrist pointed out that in a hospital situation you don’t let patients go back out into their workaday world until they have started on the path to rehabilitation. So we looked for ways to bring allied mental health professionals together with our colleagues in Counselling Services all under one roof, hence the new expanded facility.

Daily Bulletin – With the new Health Services facility as a recent example, what stands out to you as your proudest accomplishments as medical director?

Dr. Schumacher – In 1998 there was a meningococcal meningitis outbreak in Waterloo, and together with our nursing team and physicians we immunized a huge number of people in a very short period of time. A few years later we had the SARS situation, and again working with support from a lot of people – Housing, the Registrar’s Office – we were able to screen people going into residences that Spring term and allay a lot of anxiety and fear from people on campus.

In the early 2000s we were invited by Waterloo Public Health to participate in pandemic planning for Waterloo Region. Representatives from Campus Police, and Martin Van Nierop from Communications and Public Affairs (now Marketing and Strategic Communications and I represented the University in those planning meetings, and we had a plan in place by 2006.

And then in 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus developed. We were actually fortunate in the way it unfolded, because we saw the pandemic’s beginnings in the spring, so we had time to put preparations in place for the fall. We knew we were going to see seasonal influenza as well as this new strain. What we were able to do in our small Health Services space was use the front and rear entrances separately for influenza patients and non-influenza patients, so they wouldn’t interact. During the peak period, we saw up to 1,000 patients a day when normally we would see around 200. We really stretched ourselves to meet the demand, and we had a lot of support from across campus.

So I’m proud of that, being able to lead responses that allowed campus to maintain a sense of normalcy while around us things were happening that potentially could have caused problems.

Daily Bulletin – What’s next for you?

Dr. Schumacher – I’m retiring at the end of June. I have grandchildren I’m going to spend time with over the summer, and I plan to do some travelling. I’ve also got a commitment to myself to walk more, so maybe I’ll join a hiking club.

Daily Bulletin – Are there any particularly fond memories of Waterloo you’ll take with you?

Dr. Schumacher – I have such fond feelings for Waterloo. I think it’s a great place, and I’m most impressed by our students. Being able to transition between four months here and four months on co-op, while studying up to six courses, writing exams and doing job interviews, it’s incredible. That’s what impresses me the most about Waterloo – our students. How year after year we graduate people who have successfully mastered their education, and then they go out into the world and we hear all about how they bring their wonderful innovations and skillsets and leadership to bear in whatever they are doing all over the world. That’s what I’ll take with me. And they’ve kept me young!

Health Services held a retirement reception for Dr. Schumacher on Tuesday, June 23.