U of G Featured in National News Reports
December 15, 2008 - In the News
Several U of G professors and researchers have been featured in national news reports this week.
Wednesday, Plant Agriculture Prof. Manish Raizada and his research team were featured on CBC TV's The National. They were part of a larger feature story on the global food crisis. The segment featuring Raizada and his team looked at how they are using science to find permanent solutions to feeding the world's poor.
Part of Raizada's research is focused on helping farmers in developing countries create new plants and more intensive practices so that they can produce food with fewer resources such as land and water. In addition, Raizada has used his own funds to set up the Raizada Foundation, a charitable organization that involves Guelph students in finding inexpensive prize-worthy ideas and tools to help poor people in developing countries. Read more
The National is CBC's national evening television news program. Watch the broadcast (to advance directly to the segment featuring Raizada, fast forward to 29:45 ).
Monday night, a U of G professor who conducted a study on how some consumers changed their eating and buying habits after the listeriosis outbreak was featured on two CBC national news programs.
CBC Radio's World at Six ran a segment that included interviews with Prof. John Cranfield, Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics, and staff member Sue Bennett, director of university and community relations.
Cranfield, who conducted the study with colleague Prof. Spencer Henson, discussed the findings and talked about the Guelph Food Panel, the first large-scale panel of consumers dedicated to food research. It allows researchers to accurately track changes in Canadians' eating habits and measure consumer responses to issues such as food scares. Bennett is one of the 2,000 people from the Guelph area on the panel. She discussed her awareness, concerns and changes in consumption patterns following the outbreak. The World at Six is CBC Radio's evening national news program that airs on CBC Radio One (Listen to the broadcast).
In addition, CBC's The National ran an interview with Cranfield about the study and its findings. The National , the flagship nightly newscast of CBC News, airs on Channel 5 in Guelph at 10 p.m., and at 9 and 11 p.m. on Newsworld, Channel 26 in Guelph. (To watch the newsclip of Cranfield, click here and fastforward to 24:30 into the newscast).
Sunday, by two U of G chemists was featured in the Toronto Star . Prof. Nigel Bunce and research associate Dorin Bejan's work on hog manure was highlighted in a science column on new innovations. Bunce and Bejan have been working for years to reduce the smell of hog manure. The two have discovered that a low-voltage electrical current passed through the watery manure reduces the intensity of the smell by 99 per cent.
U of G was also featured in a CBC News: Sunday news report this weekend. The story focused on the topic of free run eggs. The segment featured an interview with Prof. Emeritus Ian Duncan, an animal welfare expert who studies the effect cages have on chickens and egg-laying. There were also interviews with U of G students regarding a 2007 decision to start offering free-run eggs in some campus food outlets.
Saturday, U of G and the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (BIO) were featured in the Globe and Mail. The column by Margaret Wente focuses on Prof. Paul Hebert's groundbreaking research on DNA barcoding. She discusses how the U of G technology has helped identify overlooked species, its potential impact around the world, and the need for entrepreneurial support.
In the column, Wente says U of G is "on the leading edge of food and water studies, now among the hottest research areas in the academic world."
Hebert, an integrative biology professor and BIO director, is spearheading the International Barcode of Life (iBOL) project. The consortium, which will involve more than 100 researchers from 25 countries once fully activated, will create the world’s first reference library of DNA barcodes for use in species identification around the globe.
