The many faces of excellence

The reception to celebrate excellence, which took place on September 23, served to draw attention to the quality teaching and research work being done by about three dozen professors, all of whom either won prizes or were awarded chairs during the past year.

Deryn Elizabeth Fogg is one researcher who did not wait around before making her mark both at the University and in her field. Fogg, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, recently won the University's 2004 Young Researcher of the Year award. Known mostly for her work on the catalytic properties of ruthenium, Fogg has also received the Polanyi Prize, won a Premier's Research Excellence Award and obtained funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

During the course of the gala – an annual event for the last four years – attention was also drawn to the three holders of the first research chairs in Canadian Francophonie: Linda Cardinal, Joseph-Yvon Thériault and Lucie Hotte.

Cardinal, a professor at the School of Political Studies, is particularly interested in the situation of francophones in Ontario, and especially how people at the community level can participate in political and social change.

Thériault is a sociologist and the director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Citizenship and Minorities, known by its French acronym, CIRCEM. His research chair has three components: Acadians and the francophone minorities of Canada; the question of identity in Quebec society; and Francophonie, globalization and small societies.

Hotte is a professor in the Department of Lettres françaises and a specialist in literary theory and Quebec and Franco-Ontarian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Five other professors received University Research Chairs this year. These chairs, created in June 2002, provide these professors with $15,000 for five years. The new holders of these chairs are:

Christopher Blanchard, an assistant professor in the School of Human Kinetics and the School of Psychology. He is trying to better understand the factors that affect physical activity in relation to the quality of health in population groups.
Emil M. Petriu, a member of the teaching staff at the School of Information Technology and Engineering. His research deals with the development of networked wireless sensor-based intelligent information appliances that will allow the creation of intelligent homes and cars. He envisions a world where these "smart devices" go about daily life interacting with human users as well as with other appliances.
Gary Slater, vice-dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Post-Doctoral Studies. He is a specialist in theoretical polymer dynamics. He is interested in DNA, the human genome project, computer simulations and applications of the diffusion theory in biophysics.
Joel Westheimer, associate professor in the Faculty of Education. His work deals with democracy and education, particularly the way schools teach children about democracy and citizenship. His work on the "Democratic Dialogue" project has led him to ask questions about what good citizenship means in democracies and how schools can educate citizens who will participate in democratic life.
Julian Roberts, Department of Criminology. He is working on ways of reducing the use of incarceration in Western societies while at the same time preserving the integrity of the legal system in the eyes of the public. Roberts is known around the academic world as a prolific researcher and has a solid reputation as a commentator on legal news and issues.