Wednesday, January 4, 2023

This program supports faculty, (student) associations, and research groups in writing and multimodal practices in their respective virtual and/or classroom learning environment by focusing on creating autonomy/agency in student writing, providing opportunity and resources for writing support , and by building rhetorical distance to check assumptions.

Support for Classes | Writing and Communication Centre (uwaterloo.ca)

Introducing the Douglas Wright Engineer-in-Residence for 2023

A message from the Faculty of Engineering.

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is pleased to welcome Kelly Scherr, P. Eng., MBA, FEC, as the 2023 Douglas Wright Engineer-in-Residence.

Kelly is a proven executive leader in municipal infrastructure who is committed to building resilient, inclusive and effective teams to deliver and manage great assets for cities.  As the Deputy City Manager of Environment & Infrastructure with the City of London, she currently leads a team of over 800 who deliver a full suite of water, wastewater, drainage, solid waste, environmental, transportation, construction administration, infrastructure operations, rapid transit, major projects, forestry and fleet services to a city of over 430,000 people.   

As the Chief Administrative Officer for the Elgin and Lake Huron Area Primary Water Supply Systems, Kelly also leads the provision of safe, reliable and affordable drinking water to over a half-million Ontarians in fifteen member municipalities.

Kelly has over 20 years experience delivering plans, projects, programs and policies in water, wastewater, stormwater, and transportation.  Prior to joining the City of London in 2016, Kelly spent 14 years in a variety of roles at the City of Regina, where she led the on-time and on-budget construction of a new P3 wastewater treatment plant and CFL stadium, the planning of 37.5 acres of inner city revitalization, and the creation of a new corporate centre of excellence in project management. She also held leadership roles in urban planning, development management, construction administration, and municipal enforcement, including zoning, building standards, bylaw enforcement and parking.   

Kelly attended the University of Regina, where she received her degree in Regional Environmental Systems Engineering.  Kelly also has a Master of Business Administration, a Graduate Certificate in Leadership and is a Fellow of Engineers Canada. 

Kelly is a die-hard Saskatchewan Roughriders fan.  In addition to spending weekends at their “affordable cottage alternative” near Lake Huron, Kelly and her husband enjoy hiking, cooking, gardening, live theatre and sports, and exploring the great local craft beer and food scene in London and Southwest Ontario.

The Douglas Wright Engineer-in-Residence program

The Douglas Wright Engineer-in-Residence (EIR) program is a new initiative in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, which falls within the mandate of the Turkstra Chair in Urban Engineering, who would lead the selection and oversight of the Douglas Wright Engineer-in-Residence. Accredited undergraduate programs often engage with senior professionals to serve in multiple capacities as a resource for faculty and students. Under the Turkstra Chair’s direction, the Department would invite a practicing engineer who serves in a leadership role in industry to fill this position. Engaging EIRs is one way that the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering fosters a diversity of perspectives in the education of future and current graduate engineers.

The Douglas Wright Engineer-in-Residence program is very fittingly named after the first Dean of Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Douglas Wright. Students and faculty of the University of Waterloo know that the DWE building is the Douglas Wright Engineering (DWE) building, which was the first engineering building on campus.  

The EIR program more broadly is an avenue for mutually beneficial engagement between the academic community and the engineering practice community. The Turkstra Chair’s activities are grounded in educational collaboration with the practice community, where the EIR is selected to foster and develop industry-academic engagements as they promote leadership among engineering students for the betterment of our cities now and into the future.

An Indigenous sense of place

By Heather Bean. This article was originally published in the Fall 2022 issue of Waterloo Magazine.

Dr. David Fortin shared that Indigenous design is finally receiving the recognition it deserves.  

Public and private institutions alike are looking for designers to include Indigenous “elements” in the design of buildings and landscapes. But Fortin, a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario, cautions that Indigeneity isn’t an aesthetic.

Honouring an Indigenous relationship to land requires a lot more than eco-friendly building materials, says Fortin, a professor in Waterloo’s School of Architecture.  

“An Indigenous sense of place would be one where there is reciprocity with land; where we aren’t just taking from land but adding back to it in a way that benefits all of the life forms around us,” Fortin said. “I don’t want to just call it ‘sustainability.’ It’s a reverence for all life. Design should reflect relations that go beyond humans, to include animals and plants and water. All that stuff is sacred. That’s at the core of Indigenous design. There’s a spirituality to it.”  

Fortin and Adrian Blackwell (BES ’89, BArch ’91), a fellow Waterloo architecture professor, are members of Architects Against Housing Alienation: a collective of six Canadian architects, artists and academics who will represent Canada at the 2023 Venice Biennale, the international expo of the world’s architectural innovations and achievements.  

Raising awareness about Canada's housing crisis

Fortin and his curatorial team will be including Indigenous knowledge and perspectives in Canada’s pavilion, which the group hopes to transform into a campaign headquarters to raise awareness about, and offer solutions to, Canada’s housing crisis.   

“A housing crisis is not something the international community necessarily associates with Canada,” Fortin said. “The fact that we have the level of problems that we do is something the world should know about.”  

According to the National Bank of Canada’s housing report, an average-income household now pays more than half of its income towards a mortgage for a house in Canada’s cities. At the same time, Canadian renters have been caught up in the financialization trend as large investors have begun to buy rental properties as investments — and raise rents, often dramatically. 

It's more than just "looking" more Indigenous

“If our cities ‘look’ more Indigenous, but we still have economic disparity, more violence, more divisiveness and we’re still destroying the planet, I’m concerned that we are disrespecting the teachings,” Fortin said. “This is not a style. It’s a way of being in the world. We need a bigger societal shift in the way we inhabit the world.”  About 235,000 Canadians experienced homelessness in 2021. 

“Our focus is on those who have been totally punted out of the system. And that number is growing very quickly,” Fortin said. “Young graduates with university degrees who should have wonderful futures ahead of them are full of trepidation right now.”  

This isn’t Fortin’s first Biennale. Along with Plains Cree Professor and Canada Research Chair, Gerald McMaster, he was co-curator of Canada’s 2018 entry: Unceded: Voices of the Land, presented by internationally acclaimed Métis and Blackfoot architect Douglas Cardinal.   

Growing up in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, “a city kid,” Fortin said he “really loved calculus and statistics, and then also really loved to blast music and just draw.” He found his way to architecture when an undergraduate professor mentioned Italian architect Paolo Solari’s concept of archeology — a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology.” “I looked that up and saw these incredible drawings,” Fortin recalls. 

“I’ve always been a science fiction fanatic, and here were these visionary, futuristic worlds.” Architecture school in Calgary opened his mind to even more possibilities: “You see things you never would have imagined. And there’s a tremendous value to that.”  

At the same time, he notes, architectural education in the 1990s instilled a Eurocentric and individualistic definition of excellence.  

“Architecture was being taught through a highly theoretical lens. There was a major emphasis on producing stuff that looked cool.” The result was often awe-inspiring buildings that lacked a relationship to their environments or the people who would live and work in them. “Even if you’re working in Saskatoon or Brooks, Alberta, you’re studying these multimillion-dollar projects in major urban centres, and that’s the architecture you’re taught you should reproduce.”   

Read the rest of the article in Waterloo magazine.

Participants needed for weight-loss study

A message from the Metabolism, Exercise Training and Sex Differences (METS) lab.

Researchers from the Metabolism, Exercise Training and Sex Differences (METS) lab in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Sciences are seeking sedentary, overweight males and females aged 18-45 years for a research study investigating whether the addition of two nutritional supplements to an exercise regime can improve the effects of exercise training on ‘high-quality weight loss’. ‘High-quality weight loss’ is weight loss where you lose the most amount of body fat while maintaining muscle mass. It is important to induce ‘high-quality weight loss’ because maintaining muscle mass during weight loss can help prevent weight regain. We will also determine if these supplements induce greater gains in muscle strength, aerobic fitness, and insulin sensitivity compared with exercise training alone. We are recruiting both males and females for this study because there is evidence that females have a harder time losing weight and that insulin sensitivity doesn’t improve as much in females in response to exercise training, so by recruiting both males and females we can determine the effectiveness of the intervention in both males and females.

If you choose to take part in this trial you will be asked to participate in a series of preliminary testing (4 visits), followed by a series of training sessions (36 visits), then post-testing visits (3 visits) and have blood samples, ultrasound measurements, and a body composition scan taken prior to, and after the training and supplementation period. Training will take place three times a week and will consist of 30 minutes of aerobic exercise and 30 minutes of resistance exercise. Aside from the potential for weight loss, there are many benefits to participating in this study including: 1) getting information about your aerobic fitness, strength and body composition and seeing how these outcomes improve with training, 2) receiving a personalized training regime that is tailored to your fitness level and that will be adjusted throughout the 12-week program based on your progress, and 3) receiving supervised training from qualified personnel so that you learn proper exercise and lifting techniques. In addition, participants will receive a $100 gift card upon completion of the study. 

If you are interested in participating in this study or have any questions, please contact Jennifer Wilkinson, Department of Kinesiology at 905-414-7897 or j7wilkin@uwaterloo.ca. We encourage all members of the community to participate, so please tell your family and friends as well.