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UVic engineering students have ranked second among the Canadian teams in the Pacific Northwest regional portion of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest—the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world. There were 13 Canadian and 64 US teams competing in the event. UVic’s top team, Vikes White, finished fourth, behind two teams from Stanford University and the winning team from UBC. The second UVic team finished twenty-second. More info: http://icpc.baylor.edu/.
David Jenkins (Pacific and Asian studies), Stephanie Lau (psychology) and Cory Lo (business) were among the four Canadian students invited to observe the Chinese Bridge Competition in Changsha, China, in August. No small event, the language competition for international students studying Mandarin is broadcast nationally and attracts an audience of millions. The three were sponsored and supported by the Confucius Institute, which promotes Chinese language and culture internationally.
Dr. Andre Kushniruk (health information science) has been selected as a 2009 Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. The fellowship is awarded to recognized leaders in the field of health informatics who have contributed substantially in the areas of research, education and practice. Only a few Canadians have been awarded this prestigious fellowship over the last 25 years.
As an international medical graduate arriving in Canada in 1980, Dr. Oscar Casiro had his first contact with the Canadian medical community through the Medical Council of Canada (MCC). Now, almost 30 years later, he has been named its new president. Casiro, regional associate dean, Vancouver Island, and head of the Division of Medical Sciences at UVic, was inducted as the new MCC president in October. The MCC develops and implements tools and strategies to evaluate physicians’ competence and maintains the national registry of physicians in Canada.
At the Vikes Honour Roll Luncheon in November, a record 60 UVic Vikes student-athletes were recognized for their academic achievement and status as Academic All-Canadians. Remy Mock, second-year member of the Vikes swim team and science major, received the Provost Award for Excellence for the returning student with the highest academic average. Also in November women’s basketball player Kayla Dykstra received the CIS Top Eight Academic all-Canadian award. UVic’s first recipient of the award, Dykstra was one of eight CIS athletes selected from among the country’s 2,256 CIS Academic all-Canadians. List of all Vikes Honour Roll recipients
The Vikes women’s cross-country team won this year’s Canada West conference title in November and placed fourth overall nationally. It’s their 18th Canada West banner. Coach Brent Fougner was named Coach of the Year for the fifth time and Lauren Beaulieau received the conference’s student-athlete award in recognition of her commitment to athletics, academics and community.
UVic writing student Yasuko Thanh is the winner of the 2009 Journey Prize, Canada’s most significant monetary award given to an emerging writer for a short story or excerpt from a fiction work-in-progress. She won the $10,000 award for Floating like the Dead, a fictional account of the D’Arcy Island leper colony. “The first time I heard about it, I almost didn’t believe it,” recalls Thanh. “So I went to look it up in the BC history books I had on my bookshelf, and it wasn’t even mentioned. This is the part that really got me going. How could this have happened, how could these people have lived and died, under those circumstances, and there not even be a sanitized version?” Thanh is spending part of her award proceeds on a girl’s scholarship in Africa, a library in a box and literacy training for two women through Plan Canada.
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