Thursday, April 25, 2024

Global Futures in Focus: Uncovering today's challenges and tomorrow's solutions

In the midst of a rapidly changing world, how can we ensure a prosperous future for humanity and our planet? A new podcast hosted by University of Waterloo chancellor Dominic Barton, called Global Futures in Focus, explores this question and more.  

Each episode examines one of the Global Futures, five interconnected futures the UWaterloo community imagines for humanity and our planet: societal, health, technological, economic and sustainable. These five futures intersect and provide a roadmap for what’s possible, while highlighting how UWaterloo is uniquely positioned to make a difference in the world.  

Listeners will hear perspectives from students, faculty members and alumni — each sharing insights on the transformational forces that are fundamentally changing the way we live and work, including geopolitical strife, climate change and technological advances. They’ll also share potential solutions that could help guide us to positive outcomes — many of which come from the UWaterloo community.  

For Barton, who serves as the University’s 11^th chancellor, this community provides hope in a sea of change: “As Chancellor of the University of Waterloo, I have been inspired by its collective and insatiable appetite for searching out what’s next.”  

Listen to Global Futures in Focus now.

Staff Conference recordings now available

A message from Organizational and Human Development (OHD).

Thank you to everyone who attended and volunteered for the 16th Annual Staff Conference! With more than 1,400 registrants and a record number of keynotes, special sessions and workshops, it was one of our most successful conferences to date.

Conference Recordings are now available on the OHD resources site. Log in with your WatIAM credentials to view these recordings until Friday, May 10.

Help us continue to improve the Staff Conference experience by filling out our feedback survey. Those that complete the survey by Friday, May 3 will be entered into a draw for a chance to win one of two $50 gift cards to the W Store.

Save the date! The next Waterloo Staff Conference will be on April 8-9, 2025.

Pushing the pharmacy profession forward

By Milana Madzarac. This article originally appeared on Waterloo News.

For people who have been taking multiple medications for years, or those taking medication which can cause withdrawal or rebound symptoms, the notion of deprescribing can be scary, even if it may improve their health and well-being.

Deprescribing, the supervised process of reducing or stopping medication use, is at the core of Stacey D’Angelo’s (BScPhm '12) innovative health service in the pharmacy space. D’Angelo is a pharmacist, entrepreneur and founder of Your Simple Health, where she works directly with patients to help optimize, streamline and reduce medication use.

“I am passionate about improving health outcomes for patients and helping them feel better,” D’Angelo says. “My goal is to give patients the confidence that the medications they are on are right for them and empower them to make better informed health decisions.”

D’Angelo’s approach is holistic, she empowers patients by implementing lifestyle strategies to set them up for success.

“The holistic term can have a negative connotation around it. This is a whole person approach. Recognizing that it’s not just about the medications but is everything that the patient does to cultivate their health,” D’Angelo says.

Taking multiple medications, known as polypharmacy, heightens risk for patients. With each additional medication, the likelihood of experiencing falls and hospitalizations increases. The goal is to re-evaluate medications to see where medications can be reduced to improve health outcomes and quality of life.

Along with collaborating with patients’ prescribers to deprescribe safely, D’Angelo helps patients implement lifestyle strategies to manage their health. “For patients who use medications that are difficult to stop, mindset work is key to help overcome their fears that come with deprescribing,” D’Angelo says.

“What can we do outside of the prescription to help taper patients off medications,” she adds.

D’Angelo also helps optimize medications using pharmacogenomics (PGx), a proactive approach to personalizing medicine. PGx testing involves a simple saliva test to understand the right medicines for you based on your DNA. Particularly helpful in the realm of mental health, PGx helps to understand which medications are more likely to work for the patient and which are more likely to cause side effects or other associated risks, avoiding typical trial and error.

Some patients are held back from utilizing these services because of cost. D’Angelo hopes to improve access by advocating for future private insurance coverage, given that many pharmacy services lack private health plan coverage, unlike those provided by other health-care providers. Her goal is to inspire other pharmacists to use their knowledge and skills in this area to help move the profession forward and implement deprescribing on a broad scale.

Read more about D’Angelo’s entrepreneurship journey through the Women in Pharmacy Leadership Alumni Mentorship Program.

Staff and faculty appreciation sale coming up next week at W Store

A message from W Store.

Heading into the Spring term, W Store wants to show their appreciation for the hard-working University of Waterloo staff and faculty who continue to support and promote a positive campus community all year round. 

From April 29 to May 3, Waterloo staff and faculty are invited to enjoy 30 per cent off a selection of campus favourites including apparel, gifts and gear. Visit online for these exclusive and limited-time discounts!

Discounts have already been applied. No coupon code required. These select items are available to shop in-store and online. If you have any additional questions, please email wstore@uwaterloo.ca.

Waterloo Innovation Summit kicks off and other notes

The Waterloo Innovation Summit, entitled Conversations with Next-Gen Talent, is taking place today at the McKinsey & Company office in Toronto. Featured speakers include Chancellor Dominic Barton, Professor Joel Blit, and alumni Helen Huang (BSc ’17) and Sefunmi Osinaike (BASc '17). Opening remarks begin at 9:00 a.m. with President Vivek Goel, Rob Palter, Senior Partner, McKinsey & Co., and Dominic Barton, Chancellor of the University of Waterloo and Founder, Leapfrog Investments speaking. There will be additional presentations and networking sessions throughout the day, and Velocity will launch Momentum, its inaugural Velocity Impact Report at the event. You can view all the event details and speaker list on the Summit website.

Also today, the Water Institute is hosting Dr. Cayelan Carey, Professor, Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech for a lecture in the WaterTalk series entitled Advancing our understanding and management of freshwaters with near-term forecasting.

"Water quality in lakes and reservoirs around the globe is increasingly variable due to human activities, preventing managers from using historical baselines to predict tomorrow’s conditions," says the lecture's background material. "In response, our team is developing near-term, iterative water quality forecasts in which we predict future water quality conditions with fully-quantified uncertainty."

Dr. Carey is Professor in Freshwater Ecosystem Science and the Roger Moore and Mojdeh Khatam-Moore Faculty Fellow at Virginia Tech. As Co-Director of the Virginia Tech Center for Ecosystem Forecasting, Carey strives to advance our predictive understanding of freshwaters in a changing world via high-frequency monitoring of lakes and reservoirs; integrating ecosystem data with models; and cultivating collaborative and interdisciplinary teams of scientists, managers, and other community members.

The lecture takes place from 11:00 a.m. to 12 noon in DC 1302, with a lunch reception to follow in DC 1301.