Friday, December 2, 2016

Clark Baldwin named Medical Director for Health Services

"I am very pleased to announce that Dr. Clark Baldwin has accepted the position of Medical Director for Health Services at the University of Waterloo," writes Director of Campus Wellness Walter Mittelstaedt. 

Dr. Baldwin obtained his medical degree and family medicine residency from the University of Toronto. He completed undergraduate work and obtained a graduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo. 

He practiced at Student Health Services at the University of Western Ontario from 2007-2010 and in Waterloo's Student Health Services from 2002-2007. In addition to his work with post-secondary students, he has provided medical services in a Community Health Centre, for the Department of National Defense and in a family practice. He also provided Assistant Medical Directorship to the London Life Insurance company.

Since July 2015, Dr. Baldwin has filled the part-time role of Interim Director at Health Services, providing needed stability and leadership to the Student Clinic, the Family Clinic, and Occupational Health. 

"He has been an invaluable contributor to Campus Wellness Senior Management Team as well as to our standing committees," Mittelstaedt writes. "In his role as physician and leader in our system, Dr. Baldwin has demonstrated the knowledge, skill, and compassion that we need to bring Health Services and Campus Wellness into a new era of excellence for the University of Waterloo community."

To allow completion of other professional obligations in the next couple of months, Dr. Baldwin will commence his full-time role at the beginning of January 2017. He will continue in the 3 day/week interim role for the month of December.

Economics team makes finals in Bank of Canada contest

This article was originally published on the Faculty of Arts News site

A Department of Economics team, mentored by Professor Jean-Paul Lam, is among five finalists for the Bank of Canada’s Governor’s Challenge.

The competition challenges students to analyze and forecast Canada’s economy and present a policy recommendation that would keep inflation low and stable. Students are judged on their analysis, presentation and teamwork. More than 140 participants from 25 Canadian universities took part in the competition this year.

The University of Waterloo team, including the presenters Tiago Figueiredo, Saad Khan, Matthew Robert and Eric Tichbourne and George Liu, Emily Li and Stephen Chen, are students in Lam’s ECON 487 class. They have been preparing in and out of class for hours every week (and sometimes weekend) since September.

"We are very happy to make the finals this year even though it was our first time participating,” said Lam. "The students worked extremely hard for this and I am very proud of their achievement."

The competition is a chance for students to work through the problems the Governing Council and staff at the Bank of Canada face every time they have to make a decision regarding the interest rate. Students “got a very good flavor for the type of work an economist would do at the Bank of Canada and in the finance industry,” said Lam. They also developed their analytical and presentation skills and had fun doing it.

The final round of presentations will take place at the end of January at the Bank of Canada’s head office in Ottawa. The University of Waterloo team will be competing against Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Toronto, McGill University and Université de Sherbrooke.

Lam believes his students have done so well because of their natural camaraderie, love of learning and dedication. “Hard work does pay off and they did work extremely hard.”

Design projects aimed at Mending the Periphery

A message from the 2016 Waterloo Rome Program.

Rome’s historic centre with its magnificent ancient remains, medieval churches, renaissance palaces and baroque domes makes up less than 15 percent of the total land area of the city today. The dramatic expansion of Rome over the last century and a half has been fragmentary and largely unplanned. Now Rome, like other large Italian cities, is facing the challenge of temporarily housing and absorbing large refugee and migrant populations. 

In the 2016 Waterloo Architecture Rome Program sixty fourth-year students shifted their collective gaze from the historic centre to the periphery in order to respond to some of the challenges facing the contemporary metropolis. While it is peripheral, the site on which the students worked is not a generic piece of suburbia. This is the Roman periphery, specifically an area known as the Parco degli Acquedotti (Park of the Aqueducts), in which the remains of ancient aqueducts march across the landscape, one of them still carrying water from the mountains. More modern infrastructure runs parallel to the ancient masonry arches; railway lines built over the last two centuries and arterial roads, the preferred transportation system of the 1960s.

Surrounding the open spaces are low-income housing districts, including densely packed mid-rise apartment blocks, public housing projects and even nomadic encampments. There are some institutions, primarily schools and churches, and small industries. This is a terrain that is vague, informal, discontinuous, and full of voids. It is the sort of non-place in which a migrant population appears, but it lacks the mechanisms of haven, support, and integration.

The design work displayed in Mending the Periphery accepts that the urban landscape must remain open and informal, but it must also become less alienating, more coherent and more accommodating. The city must develop new social infrastructures to provide decent lives and comfortable settlement to a population without place, whose members have arrived in Italy, often after harrowing journeys. They come from many different countries, cultures and spiritual backgrounds. They lack material resources, Italian language, and urban experience.

The students’ projects attempt to avoid stigmatizing the newcomers, aiming instead to make them part of the city. The spaces and places must be, in some way, open and connected to the larger city, but they must also provide sanctuary to a migrant population.  In their projects the students have experimented with forms of housing and commerce, public spaces, places of gathering, learning, recreation, meditation and prayer.

All of this takes place in the shadow of the ancient aqueducts, amidst the remains of Roman villas and in an area that harbours the memories of travellers, migrants and invaders who have passed through it for millennia. The contradictions are perplexing, solutions never obvious. This is the struggle of the architect working for social justice and decency in 2016.

The exhibition opens on Friday, December 2 at 6:00 p.m. at the Waterloo Rome Studio in Trastevere, Rome.

Accessibility working group releases new video

Saturday, December 3 is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

To mark the event on campus, the Accessibility Matters at Renison Working Group is marking the event with the public release of the latest video in their series on disabilities produced with the help of Imprint.

International Day of Persons with Disabilities is also being marked locally with a lunch event at the Tannery in Kitchener today that features remarks by Professor Jay Dolmage of the Department of English Language and Literature, hosted by the Independent Living Centre of Waterloo Region. Sponsors include Bingeman's, Communitech, and Renison University College.