Monday, May 6, 2019

Spring Convocation honorands announced

A Waterloo alumnus with a distinguished career as a civil servant, banking executive, venture capitalist, policy advisor and philanthropist will be among the recipients of honorary doctorates at the University of Waterloo’s upcoming spring convocation ceremonies.

Toby Jenkins, a champion of the knowledge-based economy in the Waterloo region, has served on a number of advisory and governance boards of organizations in higher education, health care, government and media. For more than three decades, she has honed a strong relationship with the University, first as a student in urban planning, as a banker who funded growing technology companies and later as an avid supporter of research in health sciences.

In 2006, Jenkins developed a multi-tenant professional-services building in the David Johnston Research+Technology park. In 2012, she and her husband gifted the building to the University. Since then it has provided much-needed space for the growing Faculty of Applied Health Sciences­, integrating research and community programs in diverse disciplines to develop innovative health interventions. Jenkins will receive an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree at the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences ceremony taking place on Tuesday, June 11 at 10:00 a.m.

The University will award other honorary doctorates at the following ceremonies:

Environment – Tuesday, June 11, 2019 at 2:30 p.m.

Susan Cartwright will receive an honorary Doctor of Environmental Studies. She has had a distinguished 38-year career of public service, in Canada and abroad. Her contributions have been recognized with the Order of Canada, the Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers, the public service Outstanding Achievement Award (the sole recipient in 2012 at the Prime Minister’s request), the Canada 125 Medal, the Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals, alumni achievement awards from the University of Victoria and the University of Waterloo and, from the President of the Republic of Hungary, the Order of Merit of Hungary at the end of her term as Canadian Ambassador to Hungary. 

Arts – Wednesday, June 12, 2019 at 10:00 a.m.

Lee Maracle will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws. She is a member of the Stó:lō Nation, and one of Canada’s most influential and prolific Indigenous authors. Maracle has won numerous awards including The Order of Canada in 2018, the Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in Ontario in 2014, and the Canada Council Mentor Award in 2010.An expert in Indigenous culture and history, Maracle is an advocate dedicated to exposing and eliminating racism, sexism, and economic oppression through a postcolonial lens. She expresses her activism through her writing, most notably through novels, poetry, short story collections, and collaborative anthologies. Maracle’s writing is unique as she uses poetry, fiction, non-fiction, myth, and memoir to convey Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing in a way with which the broader Canadian society can connect. 

Arts – Wednesday, June 12, 2019 at 2:30 p.m.

Antoni Cimolino will receive an honorary Doctor of Letters. He is an internationally renowned Canadian actor and director, and the Artistic Director for the Stratford Festival. Under his leadership, the Stratford Festival has explored innovative ways of presenting and translating the plays of Shakespeare and other notable dramatists, reimagining the Festival in such a way as to engage new audiences and foster a deeper appreciation of the relationship between text, performance, and society. Cimolino has also brought to the Festival a strong and determined commitment to increasing diversity in the casting of major roles. Cimolino’s leadership role within Canada’s theatrical and artistic community was recognized in 2015 when he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada.

Arts – Wednesday, June 12,  2019 at 6:30 p.m.

Kevin Dancey will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws. Dancey is currently the chief executive officer of the International Federation of Accountants. His contribution to the Canadian and global accounting profession resulted from his roles as Canadian Senior Partner and CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Assistant Deputy Minister, Tax Policy with the Department of Finance, President and CEO of the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants and as the first President and CEO of the newly formed Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada.  Most significantly he oversaw the unification of professional accounting in Canada, the most significant event to impact Canadian accounting profession in the last fifty years.

Science – Thursday, June 13, 2019 at 10:00 a.m.

Arokia Nathan will receive an honorary Doctor of Science. Nathan is an Honors graduate of Leeds in Communications Engineering in 1981, and subsequently earned his Masters and Doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alberta in 1984 and 1988, respectively.  From 1989 to 2005 he was a Professor in UW’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he held a Canada Research Chair and was a Steacie Fellow.  In 2005, he was appointed to the Sumitomo Chair for Nanotechnology at the London Center of Nanotechnology at University College London and subsequently was the Chair for Photonic Systems and Displays at Cambridge University in 2011. Currently, he serves as the CTO of Cambridge Touch Technologies.  Arokia is a co-founder of the Giga-to-Nano Lab and of the Nanotechnology Engineering degree program at UW.

George Woo will receive an honorary Doctor of Science. Woo is an international leader in vision science and has had a major impact on eye health around the globe. Woo has made significant contributions as an academic, authoring 184 scientific publications on a wide variety of basic science and clinical topics. These range from fundamental studies of Panum’s fusional area of the retina, to epidemiological work concerning the incidence of amblyopia in Canadian schoolchildren, and further, to studies of the needs of the visually impaired population. He also embodies the spirit of Waterloo’s pragmatic entrepreneurialism, inventing a device which provides an inexpensive, flexible and simple vision assessment solution for developing countries.

Mathematics – Friday, 14 June 2019 at 10:00 a.m.

Shafrira (Shafi) Goldwasser will receive an honorary Doctor of Mathematics. Goldwasser completed her B.S. at Carnegie Mellon University (1979), and her M.S. (1981) and PhD (1984) at University of California, Berkeley. Following her PhD, Goldwasser began her career as a faculty member at MIT. In 1997, she was appointed the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and, since 2018, has served as the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at Berkeley. Since 1993, Goldwasser has simultaneously held a professorship at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Among many honours, Goldwasser was co-recipient of the 2012 Turing Award and won the Gödel Prize in 1993 and 2001.

David Sankoff will receive an honorary Doctor of Mathematics. Sankoff holds the Canada Research Chair in mathematical genomics at the University of Ottawa. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the International Society for Computational Biology and is active in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Throughout his career he has made ground-breaking contributions in bioinformatics, mathematics, linguistics, music analysis and more. A leading Canadian scientist for more than five decades who has been called the “father” of bioinformatics, Sankoff has been a leading researcher consistently innovating at the highest levels of computational biology.

Mathematics – Friday, June 14, 2019 at 2:30 p.m.

Barbara H. Liskov will receive an honorary Doctor of Mathematics. Liskov is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She obtained her BA (1961) in Mathematics from University of California, Berkeley and PhD (1968) in Computer Science from Stanford University. She is best known for her work in software systems design, particularly data abstraction as a key organizational principle in large software systems. Among numerous awards and honours, she is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, charter fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and recipient of the Turing Award.

Engineering – Saturday, June 15, 2019 at 10:00 a.m.

David Tse will receive an honorary Doctor of Engineering. Tse is the Thomas Kailath and Guanghan Xu Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University and a world-renowned researcher in wireless systems and information theory. His research has applications to networking and performance limits of communication systems, and to problems on reconstruction of genomic sequences from partial data. Tse graduated with the highest honours from the Systems Design Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo in 1989. In 2000, he received the Erlang Prize in applied probability for researchers under the age of 35 and in 2009, he received the Frederick Emmons Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education for educators under the age of 40. In 2017, Tse received the highest accolade from the information theory community, the Claude Shannon Award. He was inducted into the US National Academy of Engineering in 2018.

Engineering – Saturday, June 15, 2019 at 2:30 p.m.

H. Vincent Poor will receive an honorary Doctor of Engineering. Poor is the Michael Henry Strater University Professor at Princeton University, from which institution he received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science in 1977. His pioneering contributions to wireless networks, energy systems, and related fields have been published in more than 20 books and 700 journal articles. Professor Poor is a member of the U.S. National Academies of Engineering and Sciences, and is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society. Recent recognition of his work includes the 2017 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal and the 2019 ASEE Benjamin Garver Lamme Award.

A new term means new students at Spring Orientation

More than 100 incoming graduate students, and a handful of exchange students, registered to attend Spring Orientation and prepare for their first term at Waterloo. Sunday’s activities included a campus services presentation, student experience sessions, campus tours, and networking events with other students, faculty members, and staff. With classes beginning today, the new students will come together again on Friday, May 10 for a lunch and the opportunity to talk with each other about their first week at Waterloo. Spring Orientation is a program offered by the Student Success Office in partnership with several campus partners.

Other Student Success Office Spring Term updates

• Students with questions about their study permit, work permit, or visa can now use Portal to book same-day immigration consulting appointments or ask an immigration consultant using the web form.
• Registration is open for Student Leadership Program (SLP) workshops in Portal starting today.
• Peer success coaches are available by appointment or drop-in at the Davis Centre (DC) library on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Meet our coaches for Spring 2019. 
• Study skill workshops help students learn how to take better notes, improve time management skills, or explore new study strategies. The Spring term workshops begin on May 14.

Gender Equity Research Grants and other notes

There's still time to apply for the University of Waterloo Gender Equity Research Grants.

The ongoing HeForShe-related initiative offers grants of up to $10,000 each to support research investigating or addressing gender equity, with preference given to projects that advance Waterloo's three IMPACT 10x10x10 commitments.

For eligibility information and application details check out the Gender Equity Research Grants website.

The application deadline is Friday, June 14.

There is also still time to register for the upcoming Project and Portfolio Management Community of Practice (PPM CoP) Chats.

PPM CoP Chats will be 30-minute sessions where attendees can come together to share experiences, discuss challenges or lessons learned, exchange ideas and tools, and advance your understanding of PPM topics.

There are two sessions available:

• Session one, "Sponsorship and Change Management topics": Wednesday, May 8, 11:00 a.m. to 11;30 a.m., DC 1568; and
• Session two, "Team Building": June 5. 11:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., DC 1568.

No previous experience in project management is required to attend the sessions, and all are welcome.

Anyone with questions is invited to contact Pam Fluttert (fluttert@uwaterloo.ca) or Connie van Oostveen (connie.vanoostveen@uwaterloo.ca).