Waterloo awards nine honorary degrees at convocation

The executive chairman and chief strategy officer at OpenText Corporation, a University of Waterloo spin-off company, is among the nine recipients of honorary doctorates to be presented during the University of Waterloo's spring convocation ceremonies this week.

Tom Jenkins has played a major role in several successful Canadian startup firms, including DALSA Inc. He joined OpenText in 1994, and became executive chairman in 2005. He will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree and address convocation at the Faculty of Arts ceremony on June 12 at 10 a.m.

Other honorary doctorates will be given at the following ceremonies:

APPLIED HEALTH SCIENCES – Tuesday, June 11 at 10:00 a.m.

Dr. Jean Chamberlain Froese will receive an honorary doctor of laws and address convocation. Froese is an associate professor in obstetrics and gynecology, director of the International Women’s Health Program, and founder and executive director of Save the Mothers, an international organization she helped found in 2005.

ENVIRONMENT – Tuesday, June 11 at 2:30 p.m.

Ian Burton will receive an honorary doctor of environmental studies and address convocation. Burton has been one of the most influential scholars on issues related to hazard management and climate change. He holds a BA and MA in Geography from the University of Birmingham, and a PhD in Geography from the University of Chicago.

ARTS Ceremony Two – Wednesday, June 12 at 2:30 p.m.

John McKnight will receive an honorary doctor of letters and address convocation. McKnight is a professor of human development and social policy, and co-director of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University. He has a known and respected track record of research and outreach relating to marginalized populations, improving social service delivery and combating racism and other forms of discrimination. McKnight has also had a significant career as a human rights activist.

SCIENCE Ceremony One – Thursday, June 13 at 10 a.m.

John Gartner will receive an honorary doctor of science and address convocation. Gartner is a founding partner of Gartner Lee Ltd., the highly successful consulting firm with a history of leadership in environmental and engineering geology. Gartner was also appointed as adjunct professor in Waterloo's department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. The Canadian Geotechnical Society awarded him the R.F. Legget Medal, the Robert F. Farvolden Award and the Thomas Roy Award.

SCIENCE Ceremony Two – Thursday, June 13 at 2:30 p.m.

Miodrag (Mike) Belosevic will receive an honorary doctor of science and address convocation. Belosevic is a world-renowned parasitologist and fish immunologist, and a leader in developing water quality assessment assays. He pioneered the understanding of fish immunity, and successfully developed a sensor for detecting waterborne pathogens that has proved useful for the aquaculture industry specifically to the prevention of costly disease outbreaks in the industry.

MATHEMATICS Ceremony One – Friday, June 14 at 10:00 a.m.

Robert Bixby will receive an honorary doctor of mathematics and address convocation. Bixby's early work was mainly in combinatorics, though he is known best for his work in optimization. His designs for new implementations, particularly CPLEX codes, spectacularly improved the efficiency of solution for linear optimization problems. His linear programming codes led to his co-founding a company called CPLEX Optimization Inc., which soon became the leading provider of optimization software. Bixby is the Noah Harding Professor Emeritus of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University and research professor of management at Rice's Jones School of Management.

MATHEMATICS Ceremony Two – Friday, June 14 at 2:30 p.m.

Hans-Ulrich Gerber will receive an honorary doctor of mathematics and address convocation. Gerber is conceivably the top academic actuary in the world in the past 50 years. His role in advancing insurance risk theory and promoting actuarial education has been exceptional. A paper he co-wrote in 1998 introduced what is now commonly referred to as the Gerber-Shiu discounted penalty function, which completely changed the direction of research in insurance risk theory. There is now a series of Gerber-Shiu conferences held worldwide, including at the University of Waterloo. Now retired from the University of Lausanne, where he was a professor of actuarial science, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong.

ENGINEERING Ceremony One – Saturday, June 15 at 10:00 a.m.

Jacob Apkarian will receive an honorary doctor of engineering and address convocation.

Apkarian is an engineer, entrepreneur and valued colleague of the University of Waterloo. He is an authority in the area of control systems and related fields such as mechatronics, haptics and robotics. Apkarian's work contributed to the success of the Canadarm I and II. As an entrepreneur, he founded and grew Quanser, which stands today as a Canadian success story that has transformed the way we study, explore, and design control systems. His body of work spans involvement in high profile national projects to developing the very basis of training systems for engineering students across the globe.