Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Seizing happiness through adversity

This is the latest in a series of articles published in Waterloo magazine.

For Dr. Brian Orend (BA ’94), a professor of philosophy and Waterloo alum, the quest for happiness has been both a professional endeavour and a personal journey.

Orend’s journey began early in his academic career, rooted in philosophical inquiry. He has long been fascinated by questions of ethics, justice and the nature of a good life. However, it was his battle with mysterious and uncontrollable seizures that brought these abstract concepts into sharp, personal focus.

In his book, Seizure the Day: Living a Happy Life with Illness, he shares perspectives of his journey, revealing how his philosophical insights have shaped his understanding of happiness, resilience and the human condition.

Read more about Orend’s journey in the Waterloo Magazine.

From myopia to the skies

By Karen Kawawada. This is an excerpt of an article originally published on the School of Optometry & Vision Science's website.

For a big chunk of her career, Dr. Elizabeth Irving was best known as a "chick scientist." Not because she was one of the very few women awarded a Canada Research Chair in the early days of the program. Nor because she raised three children while making major scientific contributions.

Irving, who recently retired as a much-awarded professor at the School of Optometry and Vision Science, made important discoveries about myopia using baby chicks as models.

Starting in the early 1990s, when she was doing her PhD, Irving contributed significantly to the understanding of how myopia develops. These initial discoveries led to the development of myopia control techniques, now in common use, to slow the progression of myopia in children.

Irving found that by fitting chicks with positive or negative lenses – positive prescriptions correct for hyperopia (farsightedness) and negative ones for myopia (nearsightedness) – the chicks’ eyes grew to adapt to their lenses.

In normal vision, the light is focused on the retina, at the back of the eye, producing clear vision. In a myopic eye, the eyeball grows too long and light focuses in front of the retina, while in a hyperopic eye, the eyeball is too short and light focuses behind the retina.

“I could make chick eyes whatever size or shape I wanted them to be,” says Irving. “This meant we should be able to control eye growth, because eye growth is controlled by the light that’s coming into the eyes.”

Risk factors for myopia, such as too much time indoors and too much time on close-focus tasks, have since been identified. However, the mechanisms still aren’t fully understood, says Irving, who would like to see more money invested into the fundamental science of myopia.

Now that she’s retired, Irving won’t do that fundamental science herself. However, she plans to continue work in a newer area of interest – the visual science of aviation.

When she was growing up in rural Saskatchewan, Irving was surrounded by men with an interest in flying. At the time, it wasn’t her thing. Even after she graduated from the University of Waterloo with her OD in 1983, she imagined an earthbound life as a small-town optometrist, which is why she practiced for over a year in Humboldt, Saskatchewan.

However, in Humboldt, Irving’s husband had trouble finding work in his field of engineering. So the couple returned to Ontario and Irving was offered a part-time job at the School as a clinical supervisor, eventually moving to full time. That was when Dr. George Woo, now a professor emeritus, offered her some advice.

“He said to me, ‘Beth, if you’re going to do this, do it right. Go get a PhD and become a professor,’” remembers Irving. “So I did.”

Irving earned a master’s in 1989 and a PhD in 1994, both at the School. With two prestigious honours in hand, a Royal Society of Canada Alice Wilson Award and a Medical Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship, she spent some time doing eye movement research at the University of Toronto. She returned to the School as an assistant professor in 1996.

For years, in between teaching and service to the School, including a couple of years as clinic director, Irving kept up productive streams of research in myopia, eye movements and binocular vision – how the two eyes work together. She has also done significant work in patient education, measuring infant vision, ocular imaging and the visual effects of concussions. She maintained her title of Canada Research Chair in Vision Science for 10 years, the maximum for her category.

Irving got into aviation in 2012, when some contacts at York University wanted someone with her clinical experience to join them on a project investigating binocular vision in helicopter pilots with the Canadian Forces.

Not long after, Dr. Suzanne Kearns, an aviation expert with the Faculty of Environment, asked her to join a developing aviation research cluster. Irving wound up working with others on a grant application to get a flight simulator for the University.

Read the full article on the School of Optometry & Vision Science's website.

2024 Cheriton Research Symposium coming up on Friday

Members of the University community are invited to attend the 2024 Cheriton Research Symposium, an annual event celebrating computer science research excellence made possible by the generous support of David R. Cheriton. This year's symposium will take place on Friday, September 27, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Program highlights include:

• Morning presentations by Cheriton Fellows Eric Blais and Semih Salihoğlu, followed by a panel discussion on the future of computer science education featuring Professors David Cheriton, Carmen Bruni, Gordon Cormack and Mei Nagappan, moderated by Dave Tompkins. This event takes place from 10:00 a.m. to 12:05 p.m. in DC 1302.
• Afternoon poster presentations by Cheriton School of Computer Science graduate students in the DC atrium from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

The full program and agenda is available on the Cheriton School of Computer Science website.

Go on a data journey with the Library

A message from the Library.

The Library is hosting a series of workshops this fall that will guide researchers through each stage of the research process, with a focus on research data management best practices. Workshops are online and open to anyone, and include an optional supplementary office hour to discuss specific projects with the research data management librarian and digital scholarship librarian.

Workshops kick off on Thursday September 26 and run through November. Register now on the Library’s website.