UVic Greek and Roman studies professor emeritus Peter Smith may be retired, but he hasn’t stopped writing books. His latest is Wings Across the Water, Victoria’s Flying Heritage 1871-1971. Smith wrote the book with Elwood White who, at 87, is a pioneer aviator and recognized as the pre-eminent authority on Island aviation. The book from Harbour Publishing contains over 600 aviation photos, some never before published, taking the reader from the Island’s first manned balloon ascents in the 1800s through barn-storming and bush-flying to the jet age. Smith’s previous books include a history of UVic and Ghosts on the Grade: Hiking and Biking Abandoned Railways on Southern Vancouver Island, which he co-authored.

Eve Millar, a PhD student in history in art, is going on the fieldtrip of a lifetime. She’s the winner of a Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute Fellowship award for India Studies, which will fund her studies in India this fall. She’ll spend five months in Delhi learning Hindi. The India Studies Fellowships provide travel, research and living allowances to Canadian scholars and artists to pursue their research, studies and training in India. A total of 34 awards have been announced for the 2005-06 academic year.

Dr. Martin Taylor, vice president research, has been appointed to the board of directors of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research for a three-year term ending September 2008. Taylor’s research and teaching interests focus on environmental health and health promotion. His current and recent projects include the psychosocial effects of environmental contamination, community-based health promotion, and the impacts of economic restructuring on population health in B.C. coastal communities.

Don Jones, director of UVic alumni services since 1995, is the 2005 recipient of the Manulife Financial Outstanding Achievement Award from the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education (CCAE). The award, recognizing “extraordinary contributions to the field of educational advancement over a number of years,” will be presented during a gala awards dinner at the CCAE national conference in Banff at the end of May. Jones directed the 1998 launch of the country’s first Online Community Network (OLC) for alumni. The program has since been licensed to 14 Canadian institutions. He also established an e-mail listserv which now has 250 subscribers from alumni offices across Canada.

Five UVic authors have been shortlisted for 2005 BC Book Prizes. Dr. Jan Zwicky (philosophy) for Robinson’s Crossing; ethnobotanist Dr. Nancy Turner (environmental studies) for Plants of Haida Gwaii; Bill Gaston (writing) for Sointula; Patrick Lane (writing) for two books, Go Leaving Strange and There is a Season; and Stephen Hume (writing) for two books, A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming (co-author) and Lilies and Fireweed: Frontier Women of British Columbia. The winners will be announced in Vancouver on April 30.

The world’s number one cure for academic boredom, according to a story in the Feb. 18 issue of The Journal, published by Queen’s University students, is a course on hockey literature and the Canadian psyche taught at UVic by English professor Doug Beardsley. The author of two books on the significance of hockey to Canadians and the presence of the sport in Canadian writing, Beardsley says hockey is intrinsic to the nature of being Canadian. “The way we play the game is semi-legal mayhem, which allows us to express a darker stream of our collective consciousness,” he says. Among the other “coolest courses” listed by the Queen’s journal: Star Trek and religion (University of Indiana); mafia studies (Rome University, Italy); and the Beatles albums (University of Southern California). For the full list, visit www.queensjournal.ca.

Dr. Pauline van den Driessche (mathematics & statistics) has won the Tenth Bellman Prize from the journal Mathematical Biosciences for the best paper published in the journal over the two-year period from 2002-2003. She shares the award with her co-author, Dr. James Watmough, who was a postdoctoral fellow at UVic at the time, and is now a faculty member at the University of New Brunswick. The paper develops a framework for calculating the basic reproduction number for disease transmission models. “This number is important in understanding disease spread and control measures,” says van den Driessche. “The method developed has since been applied to models of several diseases, including HIV/AIDS, West Nile virus and SARS.”

Three members of the UVic community have been nominated for this year’s YM-YWCA Women of Distinction Awards. Sheila Sheldon Collyer, who retired as university secretary in December, is nominated in the education, training and development category. Neuroscientist Dr. Naznin Virji-Babul, who’s pioneering work is helping to improve the lives of children with Down Syndrome, is nominated in the science, information technology and research category. Lauren Woolstencroft, an engineering student and one of disabled sports’ most decorated alpine athletes, is nominated in the young women of distinction category. The awards will be presented at an awards dinner on May 19 at the Victoria Conference Centre. For tickets, call the Y at 418-1837 or visit www.ymywca.victoria.bc.ca.