Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Faculty and staff celebrate employment milestones

The annual recognition reception for new members of the University community celebrating milestone employment anniversaries takes place tonight, and new members of the 25-Year, 35-Year, and 45-Year Clubs will be presented with an award for their dedication and years of service at the Physical Activities Complex.

98 employees, faculty and staff alike, will be officially welcomed to the club tonight, and in honour of the celebration event, the Daily Bulletin has asked a few of them to reflect on their time at the University.

Geoffrey Hayes, Associate Professor, Department of History

It was January 1991 and Geoffrey Hayes was teaching a history class on the origins of war when a student announced that Iraq had begun firing missiles at Tel Aviv. For Hayes, who this year celebrates 25 years of teaching at UWaterloo, history rushed to meet the present, showing its “weird utility” in a teaching moment as he and his students tried to place the Gulf War into a historical context.

Hayes, who studied at Laurier and then at Western, had been pleased to have the uncommon opportunity to teach in his hometown at Waterloo. Fascinated by history ever since a family trip to Europe when he was a boy, Hayes has regularly led students on WWI and WWII battlefield trips to Europe, where he says he gains new insight each time.

Technology has significantly changed the university and the study of history during Hayes’ tenure—he recalls the introduction of e-mail and the transformation wrought by the Internet, something digital historians are now studying. The study of history has been both challenged by technology (i.e. Wikipedia) and enhanced by the availability of online collections.

Hayes has sat on the University's Senate and its Board of Governors, as well as the Board of Directors for the Canadian Battlefields Foundation. He has written an award winning history of Waterloo County, as well as co-edited three collected works: one on Vimy Ridge, another on contemporary Afghanistan, as well as a festschrift for his mentor and friend, Terry Copp. He has recently completed a manuscript for UBC Press that explores Canadian military leadership during the Second World War through a gendered lens.

He skis and plays pick-up hockey and enjoys walking his dog with his wife on Waterloo trails.

Mary Stanley, Associate Director, Advancement, School of Pharmacy

While working in the midst of a construction zone at Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy has its hazards, it also has its benefits. Mary Stanley, who celebrates her 25^th year at Waterloo, finds it very interesting to be part of the growth and rejuvenation of the City of Kitchener and the changing face of the University of Waterloo.

Stanley first came to Waterloo as an undergraduate. After a stint in Toronto, she returned to the University where she worked for most of her career at the Library, where she was responsible for communications and fundraising, before joining the School of Pharmacy in 2011. She notes that she had one young child when she arrived at Waterloo, and now has four grown children

Over her career, she notes, that fundraising has changed in many ways, but that the basic principles of relationship-building remain the same. She recalls Campaign Waterloo, under President David Johnston, as being a game-changer in terms of the scale and expertise brought to advancement at the University but also says that at the core, keeping alumni engaged, interested and involved is still key.

Working at a satellite campus has also reinforced that relationship-building. Stanley says, “Too often I think we forget that we are here to educate future leaders and to get to know them. I was reminded of that when I moved to the Pharmacy School. My role provides me with that opportunity to get to know students and I can continue that relationship after they graduate. It’s a wonderful way to see that what we are doing is really making an impact on people’s lives.”

Sally Gunz, Professor, School of Accounting and Finance, President, Faculty Association

In one sense Sally Gunz has worked for the same department for her entire 35-year career at Waterloo and in another sense she hasn’t: what is now the School of Accounting and Finance was part of Economics when she started in 1981, and has undergone a variety of incarnations and names over the years.

Gunz came to Waterloo as part of a hiring boom in accounting in the early 80s and the development of a unique academic identity for the School at a somewhat unexpected time. Gunz believes the creation of the School in the midst of a very difficult economic climate reflects the innovative and entrepreneurial mind of the University of Waterloo. It saw opportunities to move in a new direction in the of hard times and not many academic institutions would choose to do this. The approach was highly successful.

While Gunz was originally hired part-time as a lecturer, she began pursuing a tenure track in the mid-1980s. Her current research examines applied ethics in the professions.

During her early years at Waterloo, Gunz also had four children. She has long been active in the local community, working on issues related to downtown Kitchener, and chairing the board of a summer residential camp for mentally disabled adults, something she describes as a place that provides pure joy.

Last July, Gunz began serving as the President of the faculty association, a role she will hold for at least another year. In this role, she says she sees a variety of aspects of the University, many good and some not so good. She continues to feel “pretty damn lucky” to work for “a very good employer” and says she works on the faculty association to make sure this can continue to be the case for everyone.

Marianne Vandergriendt, Senior Research Technician, CERC Ecohydrology Research Group, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences

When Marianne Vandergriendt began working at the University of Waterloo as a research technician supporting postdocs and grad students in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, data graphing was done by hand—although only several months into her role, the department got a Commodore 64, which changed everything.

Vandergriendt came to Waterloo as an undergraduate in honours biology and aside from a year in Europe, never left. For the first thirty years of her career, she worked with hydrogeologist Dr. Jim Barker in his groundwater and bio-geochemistry lab. Upon his retirement five years ago, Vandergriendt has worked under Dr. Philippe Van Capellen in the Ecohydrology Research Group where she is a senior research technician and lab manager.

Vandergriendt feels very fortunate in many ways, explaining that she feels as if she has done the equivalent of ten Master's degrees and has the continuing opportunity to learn on the job, has met fascinating people from around the world, had the opportunity for a reduced workload with still-meaningful work when her three children were small, and has worked with intelligent, capable researchers. With her salary depending on soft money, she has also been appreciative of working with researchers whose work has been awarded grants to run labs and facilities.

For 25 of her 35 years on staff, Vandergriendt has joined other Waterloo friends in fitness classes on and off campus. She enjoys gardening, reading, cottaging and design (and particularly enjoyed the opportunity to help design a previous lab).

Her work in groundwater and hydrogeology also spills into her life, whether in volunteering at the Groundwater Festival and World Wetlands Day or the decision to drink tap water.

Ian Munro - Professor and Canada Research Chair in Algorithm Design, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Ian Munro notices size and scale. As he celebrates his 45^th year at the University of Waterloo, Munro observes changes on the campus and in the community—the city and university have tripled in size since he arrived, the trees have grown taller and the campus is more dense. These seem appropriate observations for a researcher whose focus is on how digital information is stored, and the efforts to allow it to be accessed quickly and in context. Whether the information is a mapped genome or the Oxford English Dictionary (two projects he focussed on twenty years ago), Munro notes, “smaller means closer and closer means faster retrieval of information”. The scale has increased dramatically, but the principle remains true.

Munro first came to Waterloo in 1971 before the real development of integrated circuits which shifted thinking from the idea that computers and their memory would get bigger to the reality that they would become smaller.

Munro has held visiting positions at a number of major universities and research labs and has consulted for government and major computer companies, in addition to teaching, supervising and authoring papers. He is a former Director of Waterloo's Institute for Computer Research, and currently sits on the board of the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2003 and made University Professor in 2006.

Once the youngest member in his department, today Munro is the oldest but he intends to continue his work as long as he is doing it well and enjoying it. He observes that the computer science field benefits both from younger and older thinkers—“Technical ideas are more likely to come from younger people but questions of what to work on may come from people with more experience.”