McCalla profs focus on research

For a nine-month period that began this September, 14 lucky professors at the University of Alberta have been taking a vacation from office hours, grading papers and preparing lectures. Instead, they are free to pursue intensive research work that is otherwise difficult to manage with a heavy teaching schedule.

These researchers are recipients of the 2005/2006 McCalla Research Professorships, named for the first dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research. The award is part of the U of A's Endowment Fund for the Future. This year's recipients have made significant contributions to a wide array of disciplines, and each exemplifies the highest standards of research excellence.

ROBERT GRANT
Renewable Resources

Canada's forest, peatland, grassland, and agricultural ecosystems exchange 16 times as much carbon dioxide with the atmosphere annually as we put into it through fossil fuel combustion. Comparatively small changes in CO2 exchanged by these ecosystems could have a big impact on Canada's net CO2 emissions. In the Fluxnet-Canada Research Network (FCRN), Grant's team is trying to understand how climate and disturbance (fire, logging) affect this exchange. In his work with the FCRN, he is developing a mathematical model of terrestrial ecosystems that will be used to project how disturbances will affect the gain or loss of carbon by forests and peatlands.

EHUD BEN ZVI
History and Classics

Persian Judah, an ancient province centred in Jerusalem and controlled by the Persian Empire during the years 539-332 BCE, was a poor region with extremely limited resources. Its size was roughly 2,000 km2 (about a third of the size of the present-day West Bank). Despite being poor and peripheral, it sustained activities like composing, reading and studying the prophetic books. Professor Ben Zvi is examining why and how this was possible, addressing the social organization and the related channelling of resources that made these activities possible, as well as their impact on ancient Israelite socialization processes which involved, among others, constructions of a shared past, worldviews and texts. His work explores how issues of identity, boundaries and self-understanding were framed through these processes and why. The project also discusses how the social setting of provincial poverty, and the small number of those able to write and read prophetic literature influenced the books themselves, both in terms of ideas and style. The research also examines the impact of this highly sophisticated literature on the mostly non-literate society.

RYAN DUNCH
History and Classics

Since 2000, Dunch has been researching missionary publishing in Chinese between 1800 and 1911, under the working title "Reading Missionary Modernity in Late Qing China." Protestant and Catholic missions published thousands of books and tracts in the Chinese language over the 19th century. The importance of theses works in introducing Western ideas to Chinese readers has been generally recognized, but their role has not received detailed study. Because of his McCalla award, Dunch is working to refine his online database of these publications and to work his accumulated research notes and photocopies into written chapters for a book on the subject.

ROBERT SMITH
History and Classics

Professor Smith is exploring the nature of scientific discovery, including how descriptions of what discovery entails have changed over time and how discovery has been represented by different groups (by working scientists, historians, popularizers of sciences, and so on). The historian is examining a number of case studies of scientific discovery – including the discovery of the expanding universe – and these will be chosen to illustrate key thematic issues.

FRANCES SWYRIPA
History and Classics

The identity of European immigrant peoples who settled in the Canadian prairies between the 1870 and the 1920s reflects an evolving attachment to the land and region at personal and group levels, the specific ethno-religious group experience, and a history shared with other westerners. During the tenure of her award, Swyripa is exploring these themes, as well as examining how the construction of that identity – through domesticating the pioneer landscape, founding narratives, marking major settlement anniversaries, and visual symbols – underscores the importance of ethnicity and religion to prairie identity and Canadian regionalism.

David Geoffrey Smith
Secondary Education

Increasingly, the internationalization of education is becoming an accepted ideal both within the academy as well as politically. Smith is examining some of the inevitable conditions for understanding this internationalization within the practice of teaching. These conditions include: better critical understanding of what some scholars call "The 1492 World System" currently undergoing profound change as Asian economies assume a more central position globally; exploring the possibilities of knowledge crossing cultural boundaries; and mapping the effects of the Internet and other forms of electronically mediated knowledge on cognition. Teachers today are caught up in the complexities that these themes introduce into classrooms, therefore showing this complexity in concrete, practical terms seems a prelude to understanding how teaching might proceed in the future.

BIAO HUANG
Chemical and Materials Engineering

The emerging clean energy generation system, particularly the fuel-cell system, is considered to be a potential candidate to meet the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. Fuel cells have the potential to provide a source of energy that is very efficient, with low to zero emissions, quiet operation and high reliability. Thus far, fuel cell models have been studied with focus on static performance, including power, efficiency etc. But operations of fuel cells are frequently perturbed by numerous disturbances like changes of power demand. What hasn't been well studied is how fuel cell performance (such as voltage output) evolves dynamically in the presence of disturbances. And understanding the dynamic behaviour is important not only for safe operations but also for control. Since models that both explain this behaviour and are suitable for the control of fuel cells are rarely available, Huang is working on such a model. Based on this model, he will further develop strategies for monitoring and optimal control of fuel cell systems.

CATHERINE BELL
Faculty of Law

In Canada, protection and repatriation of First Nation cultural heritage is governed primarily through dated legislation and the common law. Little research has been conducted on indigenous concepts of property and priorities concerning cultural heritage, reconciliation of these views with legislation, and law reform necessary to respond to emerging First Nation rights and interests. To address this problem, Bell has been engaged in collaborative research with an interdisciplinary team of scholars and First Nations in Alberta and British Columbia. The McCalla Professorship allows her to complete two volumes issuing from this research and to consult with First Nation partners.

MICHAEL SCHULTZ
Biochemistry

Dr. Schultz's team is using yeast as a model organism to elucidate molecular mechanisms that control how genes are switched on and off, in response to both food supply and damage of the cellular DNA. The mechanisms of switching, as they occur at individual genes, are being characterized, and the molecules that 'send' switching signals are being identified and characterized. Genetic, biochemical, and molecular methods are employed in this work. Because the genes of interest are all found in human, these studies are expected to advance our understanding of fundamental mechanisms of cellular regulation that are likely to be conserved in humans.

FRANK TOUGH
School of Native Studies

In the field of Métis history, contrasting and often misinformed interpretations of the scrip system have been sustained largely because of an absence of detailed archival research. Tough is spending the tenure of the award completing the research and writing necessary to reconstruct a series of legal and political events that can accurately be characterized as the Métis response to a flawed scrip system. This approach challenges the assumption that native political and legal activism is entirely a late 20th century development, and this research also addresses an issue that increasingly entails a public interest.

LINDA OGILVIE
Faculty of Nursing

Ogilvie's research focuses on migration and health, particularly in relation to immigrant children. Theoretically, she is interested in what it means to provide culturally safe, competent, responsive, and/or sensitive care. This entails understanding challenges faced by newcomer children and families and development of services that ensure equitable access to health. During the tenure of the award, Ogilvie will prepare manuscripts, oversee data collection in three prairie cities for a longitudinal survey related to the health and development of immigrant children, and initiate the second phase of an action research project relating to early childhood development assessment and programming in newcomer families.

ANDRZEJ CZARNECKI
Physics

Dr. Andrzej Czarnecki's research group specializes in precise determinations of properties of elementary particles. They try to answer questions like 'How strongly does an electron interact with a magnetic field?' 'How long does a given type of a quark live?' or 'What energy is emitted in an atomic transition?' To get an accurate answer, they need to identify and evaluate quantum effects governing the dynamics of subatomic systems. A useful by-product of this research is software for manipulating large formulas. Their results improve the knowledge of physical constants, such as the electron mass or the fine structure constant, as well as improve the understanding of fundamental interactions. During his tenure as a McCalla Professor, Czarnecki will lead research on what determines the relative probabilities of the various outcomes.

RUSSELL GREINER
Computing Science

A successful researcher of machine learning, Greiner uses computer algorithms to find patterns in datasets. He intends to continue applying these techniques to medical and biological datasets, seeking patterns that can later be used to improve diagnosis and treatment of diseases. One set of tasks involves examining genomic, proteomic and metabolomic information of patients, to identify which have a certain disease (like cancer), and which will respond well to a particular treatment. Another project uses learning algorithms first to find the tumour volumes within MRI images of a brain, before predicting how that tumour will grow. Other projects involve predicting properties of novel proteins, helping users find useful information in the Internet, and personalizing customer interfaces for eCommerce.

SAMUEL SHEN
Mathematical and Statistical Sciences

Shen intends to develop a second generation of the interpolated daily climate data of Alberta. The hybrid interpolation method, developed by the University of Alberta and Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development in 2001, has been successfully used both within Canada and abroad to develop operational products like drought risk management and soil quality modelling tools. Shen's McCalla project will improve the interpolation accuracy for precipitation over high elevation regions, including the Rocky Mountains in western Alberta and the Caribou Mountains in northern Alberta.