Science Co-op Student Gets Double Honours

Bobby Beattie in Freiburg, Germany

Robert (Bobby) Beattie, an undergraduate student in the Faculty of Science’s microbiology co-op program, was presented with $1750 and the title of Co-operative Education Manitoba Student of the Year award. Earlier this month Beattie was nationally recognized with an honourable mention in the Co-op Student of the Year Award competition annually organized by the Canadian Association for Co-operative Education.

Beattie started his university education not really sure about what he wanted to do or where he wanted to go.  His international co-op experience, arranged through the Co-op Program at the Faculty of Science, changed everything.

In the summer of 2008, Bobby, along with nine other students from around the world, traveled to the Max-Planck Institute in Freiburg, Germany to start a summer work term.  The initial travel to Germany was “definitely out of my comfort zone,” said Bobby, but the 10 international students, housed in two guest houses, soon became their own family.  The students purchased bicycles, and on weekends would take excursions to places like Paris, Prague and the Black Forest - an unforgettable experience.

At the Max-Planck Institute, Bobby worked on a project in developmental embryology that involved neural stem cell research.  He generated a transgenic mouse line that combined state-of-the-art technology in conditional genetics using an in vivo approach to analyzing gene function in neural stem cells.  He learned new techniques in mouse genetics and neurogenesis, and his research is now part of a larger on-going study at the Institute. 

Researchers at the institute made sure he was part of the entire research experience; he participated in group discussions, journal club and was regularly called upon to give updates and presentations on his work.  He was welcomed as part of the team, and will be included as a co-author on resulting publications.  Bobby’s summer research experience inspired him to sign up for an Honours Project course in the Faculty of Science where he worked in Steve Whyard’s lab learning techniques in RNA interference and electron microscopy. 

According to Bobby, “joining the co-op program was the greatest decision I made in my undergraduate career.”  He now has international contacts, incredible research experience and direction - he wants to do a graduate degree in developmental biology and continue working in research.  It was the experience of a lifetime.

For more information contact Diane Kunec, Science Co-op Coordinator, Faculty of Science, University of Manitoba at (204) 474-7396.

Posted in:  Science

Robson Hall shines again

University of Manitoba’s Robson Hall mooters score big at the 2009 Laskin Moot.

Students Shaheen Haji, Brian Monteiro, Jason Roberts and Danielle Szabo ably represented Robson Hall Law School at the 2009 Laskin Moot held on February 27 and 28 in London, Ontario.  Competing with students from eighteen Canadian law schools, the Robson Hall team won the First Place Factum prize at the competition hosted this year by the University of Western Ontario.

The Laskin Moot, Canada’s only national bilingual appellate advocacy competition, focuses on constitutional and administrative law.  This year, students mooted a problem centred on a challenge to the federal judicial appointments process which raised issues of judicial independence and equality rights.

The Laskin team was coached by Professor Gerald Heckman. Congratulations to those who helped the Robson Hall team achieve this remarkable accomplishment!

Posted in:  Law

Meet Richard Sigurdson

Of course, Faculty of Arts dean Richard Sigurdson was going to be a teacher. Both his parents were school teachers in Winnipeg, and his sister went on to a career in the field too.

But try telling that to an 18-year-old.

“I really didn’t have any plans at all when I started university and certainly didn’t plan to be an educator,” Sigurdson said.

Still, if Sigurdson didn’t know where he wanted to go with university, it didn’t take him long to find his niche.

“When I was taking classes at the University of Manitoba I found an interest I didn’t know I had,” Sigurdson said. The catalyst was professor Ken Reshaur, since retired, and his Great Political Thinkers class.

“It hooked me on political theory,” Sigurdson said. “I think it was the sense of a world of ideas I knew nothing about before I came to university that attracted me.”

It was an interest that bridged the gap between history and political science – a combination of fields that Sigurdson has kept up throughout his academic career. Initially though, it was only an interest.

“I took the three-year degree program and then thought I would do something else, maybe get a job. At that point I was still unsure what I wanted to do,” Sigurdson said. But he went on to take the pre-master’s year and then completed his master’s degree at the University of Manitoba.

“By that time I was hooked on academic life,” Sigurdson said. “I had done a bit of work as a teaching assistant and enjoyed it. I had the chance to study topics ranging from Manitoba’s electoral history to the political thought of the Marquis de Sade.”

For Sigurdson, the U of M turned out to be a great place to do a master’s degree. His cohort included people who would go on to illustrious careers in government, industry and academics. The variety of people being drawn into the program was also impressive, with international students from Greece and the Middle East signing on to study in Manitoba.

“It was an interesting place to be,” Sigurdson said.

He went on to do his PhD at the University of Toronto, tapping that university’s expertise in political theory, but also acquiring an interest in Canadian politics.

“I got into Canadian politics when I was a teaching assistant for professor Stefan Dupré,” Sigurdson said. “And I was mesmerized by his teaching ability and the way he could have 300 students on the edge of their seats while he lectured about fiscal federalism, which is quite a feat.

“I thought to myself: ‘I want to be able to lecture like that and engage young Canadians in an understanding of our political system.’”

For that reason he still has a particular love of teaching first year classes – the classes where students are deciding what interests them.

Sigurdson has maintained a dual interest in political theory – looking at European thinkers – and Canadian politics – looking at issues from the Charter of Rights to party politics. It creates the added challenge of trying to stay abreast of two fields, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“For me the whole appeal of academic life is the ability to follow your interests where ever they are. You can do research in fields you find compelling,” Sigurdson said.

He said one of the perks of scholarly life is the ability to work with ideas and follow your own path of intellectual curiosity.

“Students always ask, ‘What courses should I take?’ I tell them to take the courses they’re most interested in, rather than those they think they should take for some other reason. Students will have a much better university experience if they go where their heart takes them,” Sigurdson said.

While completing his PhD, Sigurdson moved on to the University of Saskatchewan for three years, and then to the University College of the Cariboo – now known as Thompson Rivers University – in Kamloops.

It was an interesting time to be in Kamloops. The university was making the transition from being a college that granted degrees through the University of British Columbia to being an independent university with four-year degree programs. Sigurdson was almost immediately thrown into administrative work as a department head and then later as an acting dean. Among the projects under his watch was creating a new journalism program to be run by the university.

“Doing the job made me realize I had a personality that was not ill suited to administrative work,” Sigurdson said. But it also made him realize he didn’t want to give up teaching and researching full time just yet. So while he could have applied to become a dean in Kamloops – instead he took a new placement at the University of New Brunswick in 1999. He’d probably be there now if an opportunity hadn’t opened up in the dean’s position at the U of M.

“The University of Manitoba was attractive for personal and professional reasons,” Sigurdson said. “In the back of my mind I always thought that if an opportunity came to go to the U of M, I would consider it very seriously.”

Of course, coming home again is always a little strange. He had kept in touch with colleagues at the university over the years and spent a sabbatical year at the U of M in the late 1990s so he certainly had an up-to-date view of the place. But it was also the same university where he studied as an undergraduate student.

“It’s happened on several occasions where I’m first meeting a faculty member and they’ll say, ‘this is professor so and so.’ And I’ll remember them because I took a class with them 20 years ago, but of course they don’t remember me because I was one of dozens of students in the class.”

Apart from that, there were the usual adjustments of sliding into an administrative position.

“I’ve wanted to be a part of the hiring process and meet as many of the candidates as I can when they come through for interviews. I want to be engaged in the process because a university is only as good as its faculty and students,” Sigurdson said.

Renewing faculty is more than just filling a job. It’s a chance to decide what research areas the university wants to focus on and what opportunities it can provide its students with.

“It’s fascinating to find out about the breadth and depth of research that goes on among the faculty and to see what fascinating work the candidates are doing,” Sigurdson said.

One area that Sigurdson says the faculty is expanding its reach in is the area of global coverage.

“So many of the new faculty we’ve hired do international work that it’s really going to open up the world to students at the University of Manitoba.”

That’s critical, Sigurdson said.

“The University of Manitoba primarily serves people in Winnipeg and Manitoba and if we want to stay competitive as a community we have to have students that understand the world, have the chance to study languages and the opportunity for study abroad.”

An agreement the university has with the University of Iceland is a good example of the sorts of partnerships and exchanges that can take place. Sigurdson says that the faculty is working on creating new agreements, such as one with the University of Freiburg in Germany.

The notion of exchanges is more than just a passing interest for Sigurdson – his eldest daughter, the eldest of four children – is now at the University of the Saarland in Germany on an exchange program that was created when Sigurdson was at the University of New Brunswick.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Sigurdson’s parents had the last laugh, in the end he did become a teacher.

Posted in:  Arts

Robson Hall is the perfect fit

For Chris Axworthy, becoming dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba was a case of finding the right opportunity at the right time.

But then again, most of the major changes in his life have happened that way.

“I can’t pinpoint any one moment that defined my life, where I had that sort of epiphany about what I wanted to do. It was just a whole range of decisions that fit together,” Axworthy said.

He was born in Plymouth, England to working class parents and was the first person in his family to go on to a higher education.

“My parents certainly didn’t undervalue education but they didn’t fully understand the importance of it. They were always very supportive of me obtaining my education. It was a struggle for them financially, but they some how managed it,” Axworthy said.

The first fork in the road came when his performance on an entrance exam earned him a spot in a private school. That experience put him on the road to higher education; it also coloured his view of the world.

“I remember as a pretty poor kid at this private school visiting the homes of some of my friends and noticing that they lived quite differently from the way I did. I didn’t think their parents worked any harder than mine did but they were obviously living a different life. It was a realization that life didn’t necessarily deal cards out fairly and that there was a need to pay attention to those kinds of social inequities,” Axworthy said. The idea stayed with him, but it didn’t keep him from enjoying school or looking towards university.

“I’m not really sure what prompted me to take law. I remember certainly seeing an advertisement for a course in law so I applied and I got in,” Axworthy said. “I didn’t know anybody who was in law at the time. It was entirely serendipitous.” But he discovered that he loved the entire university experience, enough to want to go on and become an academic.

“I did really well at it and that may be why I enjoyed it. But I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of law and I really threw myself into.” It was the late 1960s and he was surrounded by people in the same situation, kids who were the first in their family to be able to take advantage of expanding education opportunities.

After graduation, Axworthy headed to McGill University in Montreal to continue his education.

“I have no idea what made me want to leave the country,” he recalled. “None of my friends or colleagues were doing that. And it wasn’t necessarily Canada, I considered Australia and other areas.”

But McGill was a good fit. He focused his graduate studies on commercial and corporate law and after graduation he decided to stay in Canada, landing a job at the University of New Brunswick in 1972 before moving on to Dalhousie.

“There I got quite interested in cooperatives and credit unions and I wrote a number of papers in that area,” Axworthy said. That focus made him an ideal fit in 1984 when the University of Saskatchewan was launching its Centre for the Study of Cooperatives. He was hired as the founding director of the centre.

“It was a great opportunity to start something from scratch. There was nothing there and that meant hiring faculty and planning research agendas,” Axworthy recalled. “And we were able to hire really good people.”

But something else happened when he moved to Saskatchewan. The interest in social inequities that had caught his eye in England, drew him into the New Democratic Party.

“I had been a member before, but when I was in Saskatchewan I got to know people like Roy Romanow (Saskatchewan NDP leader from 1987 to 2001 and premier from 1991 to 2001) fairly well,” Axworthy said. In 1988 he took his relationship with the NDP one step further and ran in the federal Saskatoon – Clark’s Crossing riding in the 1988 election, unseating government minister – and later governor-general – Ray Hnatyshyn.

“It was a really a big switch, because I really had no political experience,” Axworthy said. “So I had to learn as I went along. I had been in Saskatchewan for only four years so there were lots of things I really didn’t understand about the province and the city of Saskatoon.”

But he listened and he learned and he found ways to speak on behalf of his constituents. It was a heady time for the NDP, they had just won 43 seats in the 1988 election, their best showing ever. But the party tumbled in the 1993 election winning only nine seats, before recovering to win 21 in the 1997 election. Axworthy was a high profile member of the party in Saskatchewan and hung on to his seat through the ups and downs, but increasingly he found himself moving in a different direction from the federal party.

“At this time Tony Blair had come to prominence and was changing the Labour Party in England and I was a big supporter of that approach and of him until the Iraq war,” Axworthy said. “He revamped and modernized the labour party which is what I thought the NDP should do in Canada.”

When he was approached about running for the Saskatchewan NDP under Roy Romanow, a like-minded politician, he was happy to make the transition. He won in 1999 and went on to serve as attorney general and minister of justice and later minister of Aboriginal affairs and minister for intergovernmental affairs. Axworthy contested the leadership of the Saskatchewan NDP in 2001, ultimately coming in second to Lorne Calvert. He stepped down in 2003 and after15 years in politics, he headed back to work at the University of Saskatchewan.

“I found it really hard,” he said. “Going from a position where you could actually change people’s lives on a day to day basis and really being kind of an integral part of what was going on in the province, it was strange. You can’t underestimate the importance of being in the lime light to not being. It would be foolish to say it had no impact.”

He adjusted and went back to teaching and researching, but when the University of Manitoba came calling, it rapidly seemed like a perfect fit.

“I knew they were contacting many people, I didn’t think I was special when I was contacted,” Axworthy said. “But, I knew I needed a new challenge. I needed something to focus my energies. I thought that’s a job I could do. My political experience was useful, dealing with people from different walks of life, fundraising and public relations as well as the substance of being in a university so I thought I could do all those things.

“Had I not had the good fortune to get elected and had the opportunity to be a cabinet minister, I’m not sure I would have learned the skills which could be put to good affect in this job,” Axworthy said.

He took up his position as dean of the Faculty of Law on July 1, 2008.

“Law is changing, law schools are changing, law practice is changing, society is changing, and universities are changing. It’s a great time and spot to be in as we create our own environment to move into the future and create a law school which will hopefully be even more unique,” Axworthy said. “We don’t have a desire to be just like every other law school.”

Robson Hall has a good reputation for educating students in the practice of law and a growing reputation as a research centre.

“What we’re faced with now are a number of things,” Axworthy said. “Globalization has changed the nature and practice of law, lawyers are representing clients who are doing business all over the world. Society is more complex now than it was before and the practice of law has changed and become more complex, more interdisciplinary, requiring slightly different skills.”

Law students used to graduate and move on to work in a court room. Now, they might graduate and never see the inside of a court room.

“Other methods of resolving disputes are much more popular now than they used to be. The practice of law has changed,” Axworthy said. “So that’s something that we will be focusing on. What should the law school’s curriculum be like, what sort of programs and services should it be delivering to students?”

The faculty will also be searching to find better ways to serve communities in Winnipeg.

“We have a very large Aboriginal population that we at the law school need to serve more effectively; both the community in general and individual First Nations and Metis people who wish to become lawyers.”

The faculty will also have the opportunity to partner with the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights to create a true centre of excellence around human rights.

“We have to decide our own future and then we have to go out there and sell that vision of the law school to get the support of the bar, of the university and the process will engage all of these constituencies as we define ourselves for the future,” Axworthy said. Seeing what his colleagues envision is exactly the sort of work Axworthy did as a politician when he was working with his constituents.

“My whole life experience tells me that you can’t do any of these things on your own. If I can’t persuade somebody that an idea I have is a good one then perhaps I should conclude that it’s not a very good one,” Axworthys said. “I’m committed to working in a collaborative way with everyone who has an interest in the faculty.”

Posted in:  Law