The 2011 Acta Biomaterialia Gold Medal has been awarded to Professor Michael Sefton (IBBME, ChemE). The award recognizes excellence and leadership in biomaterials research and practical applications.
Professor Sefton is regarded as a pioneer in tissue engineering and a leader in biomaterials, biomedical engineering and regenerative medicine.
He is the first to recognize the importance of combining living cells with synthetic polymers to create “artificial” organs and tissues. Professor Sefton’s lab was also one of the first in the world that succeeded in micro-encapsulating live cells – with a view to creating an artificial pancreas and other tissues, that could then evade the patient’s immune system through the barrier properties of the encapsulating membrane.
Professor Sefton has published extensively in the world’s leading journals and international conference proceedings, and is the holder of several U.S. and international patents. He has delivered more than 400 invited lectures, seminars and keynote speeches at high-profile meetings in more than 20 countries. In addition, he has served on the editorial board of several professional journals.
“On behalf of the Faculty, I congratulate Professor Michael Sefton on this tremendous achievement,” said Dean Cristina Amon. “He continues to redefine the forefront of tissue engineering research, and we are delighted that Acta Biomaterialia is honouring Professor Sefton for his remarkable innovation and contributions in this crucial field.”
He will receive the Acta Biomateriala Gold Medal Award at a plenary session of the Society for Biomaterials’ annual meeting in April 2011 in Orlando, Fla.
For more information, please visit: www.elsevier.com/locate/actabiomat
Thousands of Canadian trucking companies violated U.S. road safety rules in the last two years, failing to keep proper records and driving longer than officials south of the border deem safe, according to U.S. data.
A CBC analysis of the data from the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration shows some 4,800 Canadian carriers violated key parts of the hours of service and logbook rules in 2009 and 2010. Hundreds of carriers, based in every province but Newfoundland and Labrador, violated rules related to driver fatigue.
Canada and the U.S. have different trucking regulations and enforcement mechanisms, and Canada does not have a similar database on how carriers are faring in this country. Michael Arpin, a Winnipeg-based trucker, said truck drivers often face pressure to violate hours-of-service rules.
Alison Smiley (MIE), a Toronto university professor and an expert on driver fatigue, said “just-in-time delivery” means many truckers are driving all night.
A range of factors play into deadly truck accidents, but Smiley said lack of sleep is a major concern — one that is often overlooked.
“We don’t have a fatigue-alyzer the way we have a breathalyzer,” she said, adding that some police forms don’t even have a space to check off fatigue as a possible contributing factor in an accident.
“We’re sacrificing people on the roads to have our strawberries on time and to not have to pay too much for them,” Smiley said.
Read the full article at CBC.ca and watch the report on CBC’s The National.
A group of University of Toronto students have designed a social networking platform that they believe will save time and prevent aggravation among students.
uBuddy, designed by Engineering student Charles Qu, is the first academic social networking platform that allows students to effectively facilitate note-sharing, meetings and course discussions online. “It brings all those features together,” said uBuddy Communications Director Ryan McDougall. “It’s built by students for the students.”
McDougall said that since the official launching of uBuddy last week they have already hit 1,000 registered users and the group has plans to add more.
Currently, uBuddy is available exclusively to U of T students, but McDougall said the networking site will spread. “We plan on opening the platform to other campuses,” McDougall said.
First-year students in large classes wanting to meet people to form study groups, or simply make friends, will get the most of the social networking platform.
Follow the link to read the full article and see a photo on Metronews.ca.
Most people have never been up close to a natural gas processing plant, an oil sands operation or a large wind turbine. Yet the energy sector fuels not only Alberta’s prosperity, but also drives the country’s economic engine. Continued innovation in this sector is vital for Canada to remain globally competitive, to ensure a strong, environmentally sustain- able economy for Canadians now and in the future.
But it will take a new way of innovating to find solutions to large challenges such as climate change, or ‘greening’ oil sands production, or making our cities more energy efficient. Universities can and must play a leading in engineering, geoscience, business and other disciplines, and expand our interdisciplinary research and teaching in energy and environment. Here are three examples:
Researchers and graduate students at the University of Calgary are working with those at the University of Toronto–including Professor Heather MacLean (CivE)–along with industry and government partners, on the Life Cycle Assessment of Oil Sands Technology project. It will produce the first comprehensive picture of the economy-wide impacts of current and proposed oil sands operations – a standard that companies can then use to reliably measure their total environmental footprint.
In the Wabamun Area Sequestration Project (WASP), engineers, geoscientists, lawyers and social scientists explored a wide range of issues that must be resolved before carbon emissions can be safely captured from Alberta’s coal-fired power plants and permanently stored underground. Insights from WASP not only identified critical areas needing research, they informed investment and policy decisions by industry and government.
A ‘micro-grid’ electricity system on the Burnaby campus of British Columbia Institute of Technology could be the catalyst for major changes in power distribution at BC Hydro.
BCIT and research partners, including the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, share $5 million in federal funding awarded last week by science and technology minister of state Gary Goodyear to ramp up the technical institute’s smart-grid research program. ECE’s Professor Reza Iravani is one of three team leaders on the project.
When New York artist Wafaa Bilal visited Toronto recently, he got together with inventor Steve Mann to compare notes on mounting cameras on their heads. Then they jumped into Mann’s hot tub to play some music.
Bilal, an Iraqi who has lived in the United States since 1991, is a performance artist who hopes to spend 2011 streaming photographs from the camera he had surgically implanted in the back of his head. Snapshots of his apartment and the streets, cafés and shops he frequents show up in batches on his website, with black blanks indicating places where he has not received permission to shoot, including New York University, where he teaches art.
Mann, an artist, musician and ECE professor at the University of Toronto who mounted a camera on his own head back in the 1990s, could be called the godfather of cyborg art, the inspiration for artists such as Bilal to consider how they might fuse their bodies and technology.
A pioneer of wearable computers and webcams, including various eyeglasses that use cameras to enhance sight, Mann is currently researching the possibilities of directing computers through brain waves, although he warns that a brain-computer interface is a long way off. Meanwhile, he’s perfecting his hydraulophone, the first musical instrument to make a sound exclusively with water – including a model incorporated into a hot tub and dubbed the balnaphone, in which Bilal was invited to take a dip.
Follow the link to read the full article on The Globe and Mail website.