Friday, September 9, 2016

Three professors join Royal Society of Canada

Three professors from the University of Waterloo are among the new fellows of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC).

The fellowship of the RSC consists of individuals who have made outstanding contributions in the arts, the humanities, science, and Canadian public life.

The University's newest RSC fellows are:

Jennifer Clapp, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability, Faculty of Environment

• Jennifer Clapp’s research has focuses on the global governance of problems that arise at the intersection of the global economy, the environment, and food security. In particular, her research has centred on questions of how international economic policies can better foster food security and environmental sustainability goals on a global scale. Professor Clapp holds a Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability.

Colin MacLeod, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts

• Colin MacLeod’s research has emphasized the broad domain of human cognition, with particular interest in learning and memory. Initially, Professor MacLeod’s work was in the area of verbal learning and memory, with emphasis on long-term memory structure and process, and especially in intentional forgetting. In recent years, his memory research has focused on the roles of consciousness, context, and inhibition in memory.

Tamer Özsu, Cheriton School of Computer Science, Faculty of Mathematics

• Tamer Özsu is a world leader and pioneer in distributed data management – a field he helped shape and on which he wrote a widely referenced textbook. His research focuses on the efficient management of increasing volumes of Resource Description Framework (RDF) data distributed across the web.

"Waterloo is home to top teaching and research talent representing a vast array of disciplines, as indicated by the selection of these three accomplished professors as fellows of the Royal Society of Canada," said Feridun Hamdullahpur. "Their important work influences our daily lives and will help Waterloo achieve its goal of becoming one of the top innovation universities in the world. The University congratulates them on this deserved recognition."

The RSC elected 89 new fellows this year. The induction ceremony will take place on Friday, November 18 in Kingston, Ontario.

The primary objective of the RSC is to promote learning and research in the arts, the humanities and the natural and social sciences.

Start your term off on the right beat! Get Portal.

A message from the Student Success Office.

Personalized and just-in-time information to help you succeed.

Books to buy, clubs to join, places to eat, places to be. Life as a University of Waterloo student is as large as the campus itself.

To keep it sorted and running smoothly, use UWaterloo Portal – available online, or as an App on iTunes and Google Play.

Among the advantages of using Portal are:

• The sheer scope of information: One widget even provides students with real-time, crowd-sourced details about line-ups at campus food outlets and other venues;
• Customization: Students tailor the portal to reflect their academic and free-time interests, and the connections they want to make with others;
• Adaptability and agility: Updates run about every three weeks to work in new ideas, many of which flow from students.

Win prizes

To help celebrate the start of term, we’re having a contest where students can enter to win Beats headphones and other cool prizes. Get the app, and submit codes found around campus for chances to win.

Learn more about the Portal and the contest.

IDEAS summer experience creates unforgettable memories

A message from Marketing & Undergraduate Recruitment.

Two weeks, 34 big ideas, and countless memories – meet the students who attended the IDEAS Summer Experience 2016 enrichment program.

During mid-July, Marketing & Undergraduate Recruitment hosted 34 international high school students at our annual IDEAS Summer Experience. Students from 14 countries used their “big ideas” to try and solve some of the world's most serious challenges. These students looked at global problems in new ways and participated in hands-on activities to develop research, communication, and problem solving skills. They also experienced Waterloo student life, lived in residence at St. Paul’s, and explored some of Canada’s greatest landmarks.

For Xueqing ‘Snowy’ Zhou, IDEAS 2016 made her appreciate people's differences and how those differences can enrich a person's life. She was so inspired by the experience and the people she met that she painted a collage of participants and leaders.

"Drawing a picture has been a habit for me to record an unforgettable memory, and IDEAS is undoubtedly worth it," she explains.

IDEAS Summer Experience Co-ordinator Sanaya Mistry found the experience equally memorable. "IDEAS was an incredible success,” said Sanaya. “The students arrived on their first day, nervous and excited to meet new people and gain new experiences. By the end of the program the bond each participant had with one another was truly amazing and unique in its own way." 

Our IDEAS summer experience would not be possible without the support of our faculty and staff – inspiring lectures and activities were presented by Ron McCarville, Larry Smith, Mike Miniou, Jordan Mandel, Linda Carson, Martin LaForest, Andrew Houston Bev Raimbault, Mike Marsh, Laura Van Dyke, Heather Neufeld, Jennifer Lyons, Andrew Trivett, Ben Norris, and more.

Cold as ice: frozen molecules lead to new model for glasslike materials

An illustration of dynamical clusters in spin slush.

by Victoria Van Cappellen

Waterloo physicist Michel Gingras and post-doctoral fellow Jeffrey Rau have succeeded in describing the mixed frozen and dynamical behaviour of glasses by adapting a theoretical model originally designed to study a class of magnetic materials called spin ices.

The results of their investigation were recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

While condensed matter physicists have understood the behaviour of ideal gases and crystalline structures for nearly 100 years, they continue to struggle with the heterogeneous nature of glasses, which exhibit both frozen solid and dynamic liquid behaviour at the molecular level.

“Spin ices” were serendipitously discovered in the late 1990s as a result of seemingly unrelated condensed matter research. This new class of magnetic materials was found to display exotic properties closely mimicking some of common water ice.

As water molecules freeze into a solid at 0°C, the oxygen atoms spatially organize perfectly periodically and thus form a regular crystalline structure. Water’s hydrogen atoms, on the other hand, have numerous ways to position themselves to hold the water molecules together in an ice solid.

In spin ice materials, the configuration of the atomic magnetic moments, or spins, mimic (“map”) the hydrogen atom positions in water ice. Spin ices have attracted much attention from physicists because they provide a much simpler platform than water ice to study experimentally and theoretically materials with a vast number of configurations - in this case, the positions of hydrogen atoms - that can have an identical minimum energy.

By slightly increasing the complexity of the current spin ice model, Gingras and Rau found a way to endow spin ice with a sort of slushy magnetic state – a mixed magnetic phase akin to the slushy drink containing both solid and liquid.

So in their model, spin slush behaves like a “glass,” with predominant regions of “stiff” magnetic moments that are “frozen”, surrounded by dynamic “liquid” regions where the magnetic moments fluctuate very rapidly.

“We study magnetism as a way to address broad and fundamental questions about how collective behaviour happens in nature,” says Gingras. “Simplified models of magnetic systems may ultimately prove an exquisite way to study and unravel the fundamental aspects of the heterogeneous dynamics of glasses. Such research may, perhaps eventually, inspire the chemical synthesis of novel glasslike materials of significant potential for applications or devices.”

Michel Gingras is the Canada Research Chair in Condensed Matter Theory and Statistical Mechanics and a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.