Monday, November 22, 2021

John Dick named Director of the Velocity Campus

A message from Concept by Velocity.

John Dick has been appointed Director of Velocity Campus, which oversees the Concept, Problem Lab and Zero extracurricular programs. John was no stranger to UWaterloo’s entrepreneurship programming prior to joining Concept as Interim Director in February 2021. In 2012, John co-founded Nicoya, one of UWaterloo’s most notable health tech start-up successes and an original member of the Velocity Science program hosted at ESC.

Velocity created Concept in 2019 to support students interested in building a company, acquiring new skills, and joining a community of peers with similar interests while the Velocity Incubator focused on entrepreneurs ready to commercialize and scale.

“As Interim Director, John successfully oversaw the expansion of Velocity’s campus presence to also support the Problem Lab and Zero programs earlier this year," said Adrien Côté, Velocity's Executive Director. "Concept also added several programs to prepare students to start careers in entrepreneurship upon graduation. Combined, these programs grew to support 5,000 meaningful interactions with over 2000 individual students last year. John’s experience and vision will be an asset to Waterloo as we inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators."

The new Velocity Campus direction supports a broader view of innovation and entrepreneurship, one that benefits students pursuing any career.

“We believe all students can benefit from developing an innovative mindset which will help them build a great career," says Dick. "Employers need people who can identify problems, propose solutions, and implement their ideas. These steps in innovation apply equally well to the employees of an organization as they do to its founders. When someone tells you to work smarter, not harder, this is what they are talking about."

To support students with diverse goals, backgrounds, experiences and needs, we are focused on designing new programs, many in collaboration with campus partners," Dick continues. "With a full return to campus just around the corner, we look forward to reconnecting in-person communities where students with shared interests can make friends, utilize their skills, and learn from each other.”

Under a mission to work collaboratively and reach more students, the Velocity Campus teams already forged ahead with new programs and powerful collaborations:

• In addition to the popular $5K Pitch Competition, last year Concept added several new programs, including the Cornerstone Bootcamp designed to find early customers and the Translation program for graduate students and their research groups looking to commercialize their work.
• The Zero program, buoyed by the success of the Zero Experience, piloted a new 2-day workshop, Zero Work, in collaboration with the Centre for Career Action designed to help students score their next co-op position. Students can already sign up for next term.
• The Problem Lab held weekly events on Problem Analysis and other engaging topics like, how to conduct an interview, how to start a sustainable organization, and how storytelling can be used to create connections with audiences for any topic. View upcoming events.
• Next term, Concept in collaboration with Co-operative Education will run the Concept Innovation Stream, a program for co-op credit that helps first-year students gain skills in innovative thinking through content provided by industry partners and team-based project experiences.

With John as director of Velocity Campus, The University of Waterloo will continue to foster a strong and collaborative approach to inspire and support innovative students and their ideas. Learn more about Concept, Problem Lab, and Zero.

Tre Ford: MVP, quarterback, and trailblazer

This is an excerpt of an article originally published on the Athletics and Recreation website.

Tre Ford is not an athlete.

He's a lot of other things – he's the greatest quarterback in UWaterloo football history, the most unstoppable force in U SPORTS, and one of the most eye-popping talents ever to be seen on a university football field in this country. As of this week, he's also a two-time OUA MVP, as Ford claimed his second career most valuable player award for his incredible 2021 season. In six games this year, he led the league in passing yards (1465) and touchdowns (10), while also finishing third in rushing yards (629) and tied for fourth in rushing touchdowns (3).

The numbers don't begin to tell Ford's story, though. Even words in the English language seem insufficient; sportswriter superlatives like incredible, or awesome, or dominant have long been replaced with guffaws, or silent dropped jaws, or just plain manic giggling. Tre Ford is a true renaissance man: he's a magician when he's eluding or hurdling tackles, he's an artist when he's reading and then freezing both linebackers on an option play before running to the house, and he's a surgeon when he's pulling a defender on a pump fake before hitting a game-winning bomb against a crosstown rival.

But Tre Ford is not an athlete.

Not in football jargon, anyway. In football, the word athlete is often applied to an explosive player who might not have a traditional position. And far too often, the athlete tag is applied to Black quarterbacks like Tre Ford.

The language is coded, but virtually every Black quarterback hears the questions from coaches, recruiters, and scouts: Can he read defenses? Can he make all the throws, or will he just rely on his feet? Can he command leadership in the huddle? The historical reality is that these answers are already predetermined before a snap is ever taken – a pair of 2017 studies from the University of Colorado concluded that racial stereotyping in quarterbacks is as pervasive as ever. "A lot of times," said coach Darrell Adams, Waterloo's defensive and recruiting coordinator, "Black quarterbacks aren't given the chance to play the position at all."

It happens time and time again: a promising young Black quarterback has his career trajectory altered by the label of athlete or mobile quarterback or some other negative deviation from the norm. In football circles, the word athlete is a tag, often used to exploit ability and deny opportunity.

So when he and his superstar twin brother Tyrell were being recruited out of A.N. Myer secondary school in Niagara Falls, that's all Tre wanted: an opportunity to play quarterback, and to prove that he was more than just an athlete. While some higher-profile programs wanted to convert Tre to a different position, Waterloo head coach Chris Bertoia was ready to provide a chance to lead the offense as a quarterback.

"Not once did we refer to Tre as an athlete," said Bertoia. "We knew he was a quarterback. I told him he would be a quarterback for us, and that he and Tyrell were going to turn our program around."

Despite coming off back-to-back winless seasons, Bertoia landed the Ford brothers in what was considered a masterclass in recruiting. But the pitch was quite straightforward – Waterloo offered an opportunity for the brothers to play together, and an opportunity for Tre to play quarterback.

"It was a big part of my decision," said Ford. "I wanted to play quarterback, and Bert was willing to give me that opportunity."

Read the rest of the article on the Athletics website

School of Optometry and Vision Science ranked 5th in the world

By Elizabeth Kleisath. This article was originally published on Waterloo News.

The University of Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science is amongst the top optometry schools in the world, according to one of the field’s top scientific journals.

These rankings were published in Clinical and Experimental Optometry, naming Waterloo 5^th overall, out of the 245 optometry schools in the world.

The listing also leaves Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science as #1 in Canada, and #3 of optometry schools in North America.

“We are delighted to see the School of Optometry & Vision Science recognized for our passion and innovation in the field,” says Stan Woo, Director of the School of Optometry and Vision Science. “The depth and breadth of work we undertake together continues to uncover new questions and opportunities to make a positive, global impact.”

The main focus of these rankings was on quantifiable research excellence. By comparing the research at each optometry school using both quality and quantity of scientific papers published, each school was ranked by their overall research impact.

The University of Waterloo is proud to be recognized internationally for optometry and vision science research particularly as we commit to innovative global partnerships including the Centre for Eye and Vision Research in Hong Kong, the world’s first international research hub for vision science.

The World Health Organization has indicated that eye and vision care is facing a worldwide public health crisis, and Canada is no exception. Waterloo’s vision researchers are committed to working towards solutions for some of the biggest challenges facing people who live with vision loss.

Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science is a global innovator in optometric education, vision research, education, and patient-centred collaborative care. Since 1967, Waterloo has trained the next generation of optometrists at the highest scope of practice in North America for primary and specialty eye and vision care, and work in communities around the world.

W Days are back at W Store

A message from Print + Retail Solutions.

Starting Monday, November 22, W Store will be featuring a week long sale both in-store and online. We are featuring select UWaterloo apparel items for $10, $20 and $30 – while quantities last. Also, all plushies, drinkware, board games and puzzles will be 25% off.

W Days will end on Friday, November 26 at 5:00 pm. Participating locations include W Store, Course Materials + Supplies, W Store, Gifts + Apparel in South Campus Hall and our newly renovated location, W Store Essentials located in the Mathematics and Computer building, room 3009. Hours by location are available at wstore.ca.

Research Talks today and other notes

The fall 2021 Research Talks virtual panel presentation and discussion takes place today from 11:45 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. "The Workplace Revolution: Envisioning the Future of Employment" will feature four panelists, including two University of Waterloo professors, Joel Blit (Economics) and Ellen MacEachen (School of Public Health Sciences), as well as Stephen Harrington (Deloitte) and Rohinton P. Medhora (CIGI).

The Department of Anthropology's 2021 Sally Weaver Award Guest Lecture will be delivered today at 12:30 p.m. by guest speaker Elif Sari, who holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology (Cornell 2021) with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and is the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

“Uncertain Waiting, Uncertain Methodologies: Anthropology of Asylum and Borders" focuses on Middle Eastern LGBTQ refugee resettlement, the prospects for which "has grown increasingly dim since 2015, as the United States and Canada have cut their refugee quotas and tightened their asylum policies. Today, many LGBTQ applicants, stuck in transit countries in the Global South for years, are increasingly reaching out to Canadian queer NGOs and church groups to seek private sponsorship as one of the last few available resettlement paths." 

This event is co-hosted by the Balsillie School of International Affair’s Migration, Mobilities, and Social Politics Research Cluster. Today's event takes place on Zoom and registration is required.  

Sociology and Legal Studies and St. Jerome's University are presenting the Fall 2021 Joint Legal Studies Seminar, which takes place online today at 1:00 p.m. Ariadna Estévez, PhD will be speaking on a chapter from her book Necropower in North America: The Legal Spatialization of Disposability and Lucrative Death.

In her book Estévez argues that the United States and Canada "use legal frameworks to accumulate capital through activities that produce death in specific geographies and spaces along the lines of nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and gender." The chapter she will be speaking about in the seminar calls this “rule of law necropower”, and illustrates it using examples such as mass incarceration, migration, and extractivism on Indigenous lands.

Ariadna Estévez is a tenured research professor at the Centre for Research on North America (CISAN) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations (University of Sussex, UK). Register for the event.