UVic awarded two new Canada Research Chairs

by Maria Lironi

As you read this, 260 million cells in the retinas of your eyes are busily generating, processing and transmitting visual signals to your brain. But even a small glitch in this process can lead to a subtle vision disorder or complete blindness.

As UVic's new Canada Research Chair in Retinal and Early Eye Development, Dr. Robert Chow is trying to eliminate these glitches by achieving a greater under-standing of hereditary human vision disorders and the complex biology of the retina.

"More than 200 genetic lesions responsible for eye disease have been identified in humans," says Chow. "An important point to keep in mind, however, is that the individual genes mutated in these diseases are actually team players that interact with a multitude of other genes in complex biological networks and pathways."

Chow is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He'll join UVic's biology department in May.

Chow is one of two Canada Research Chairs awarded to UVic earlier this month. The other is Dr. Raymond Siemens, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing, who is looking for new ways to adapt books, newspapers, magazines and journal articles to the electronic medium.

"More than half the people who live in developed countries get information of this sort directly from the Internet," says Siemens. "It took us over 1,000 years to understand the medium of print. Today, we understand almost intuitively how to access, navigate, and read print materials. But electronic text is only several decades old, and the World Wide Web even younger."

Siemens' work will help create new computing tools for data-harvesting, textual content analysis, document encoding application and conversion, and communication processes. As well as his research, Siemens will teach a course on Shakespeare and a course that traces the evolution of books from 2,000 years ago to the present.

Siemens is currently a lecturer in the English department at Malaspina University-College and a visiting senior research fellow at the centre for computing in the humanities at King's College, London. He'll join UVic's English department in July.

Both are tier-two chairs, valued at $100,000 over five years. UVic now has 20 Canada Research Chairs. For more information on the Canada Research Chairs program visit: www.chairs.gc.ca.