As Dr. Cliff Redford prepares to take his veterinary skills into a war zone, the thing he’s most worried about is crying.

The owner of a veterinary clinic in Markham, Ont., and graduate of the University of Guelph’s Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) will volunteer in Poland in late March and early April at refugee shelters near the Ukrainian border.

He and his daughter, Emily, will work with the ADA Foundation – a charity shelter in Poland – and with DIOZ, both organizations tending pets of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Redford – known as “Dr. Cliff” – said, “I know how quickly I cry when things become emotional. Anytime I talk about my daughter and my pride in her, or if I see a kid crying…. I’m sure I’ll be falling asleep crying a few times.”

He plans to spend two weeks in Poland, including potential forays into Ukraine as far as Lviv to retrieve injured and traumatized animals.

After he announced his plan in mid-March, donations of money and medical supplies began pouring into Wellington Veterinary Hospital, which he has owned since 2000. By St. Patrick’s Day, a GoFundMe campaign had raised $5,000 for travel costs and another $10,000 to buy an animal ambulance for DIOZ.

Redford expected to raise another $10,000 before leaving for Poland on March 21.

His plans drew widespread media interest, including Global News and CTVNews.  

He said several local animal rescue groups have also volunteered to take in patients if Redford manages to arrange their transport by the time he returns to Canada. “If we arrive with 50 animals at Pearson Airport, there will be a slew of cars to drive them to rescues in the York area.”

As of March 21, more than 3 million people have fled Ukraine since the war began in late February.

Redford said hearing about the plight of many refugees and their pets – and the challenges faced by veterinarians in Poland – stirred him to action. 

“It was stressing me out, I was feeling anxious and upset and wished I could do more.”

He talked with colleagues who urged him to act on his feelings.

“Although I’m still feeling a lot of stress, it’s a different stress. I’m feeling so much better. It’s only going to be a bit of help in the grand scheme of things, but a little bit of help is a decent thing.”

Beginning with animal rescue groups in Jamaica in 2016, Redford has volunteered abroad in several countries, including Greece, Egypt and Panama. He volunteers weekly at a local wildlife refuge.

Emily, who is training to become a veterinary technician, has accompanied him on several assignments.

“She’s better at a lot of things than I am. We’ve never gone to a country neighbouring a country at war.”

From animals suffering from hunger and dehydration to pets with burns and broken bones, he said, “I expect there are going to be a lot of trauma cases.”

Redford completed his DVM in 1998.

He said attending veterinary school at U of G equipped him for tackling challenges of all kinds.

“Going to vet school and graduating with a DVM grants you a very specific set of skills that allow you to analyze problems and find solutions. It allows you to ‘MacGyver’ up solutions with limited materials, teaches you to keep calm when problems occur, and then it gives you a polite, loving push out the door into practice.

“It teaches you very quickly to sink or swim. If you can swim, what a great life this is.”

He credits biomedical sciences professor Dr. Peter Conlon, OVC associate dean of students, with providing open-door advice and encouragement during his studies.

“Those were the greatest times of my life,” said Redford. “I love the place.”

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Dr. Harpreet Kochhar was appointed as president of the Public Health Agency of Canada effective Oct 12. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the announcement among several changes in the senior ranks of the federal public service.

Since spring 2020, Kochhar has helped support the federal government’s efforts to fight COVID-19 as Canada’s associate deputy minister of health.

A veterinarian, Kochhar received his PhD in animal biotechnology from U of G’s Ontario Veterinary College in 1999 before becoming a professor in OVC’s Department of Biomedical Sciences. OVC has long promoted a One Health approach combining human, animal and environmental health for tackling infectious diseases.

Kochhar joined the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in 2002 as an animal biotechnology policy specialist.

He was appointed Canada’s chief veterinary officer in 2014, helping manage emerging disease threats to protect animal and human health.

He also served as an expert on animal biotechnology for the World Organization for Animal Health and with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In 2017, he was appointed as assistant deputy minister with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

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Does the best-before date on a food item mean that it’s unsafe to eat and you should throw it out? Not according to U of G grad Hayden Fox, a fourth-generation farmer who says consumers misled by best-before labels routinely waste huge amounts of perfectly edible food.

After he saw a TikTok video that recommended throwing out food on its expiration date, Fox posted his own video. He wanted to inform consumers about what he calls a wasteful practice mostly driven by food companies’ marketing efforts and consumers’ misunderstanding of food labels.  

His video went viral this spring, garnering more than 1.6 million views by April 21 and drawing BuzzFeed to post an article about the controversy.

Speaking over the phone from his family’s farm in Cayuga, Ont., Fox says best-before dates refer to peak product freshness rather than spoilage. “It’s not saying that once it hits that date, it’s poison. I see time and time again people throw food out for no good reason, simply because of a number a manufacturer put on their item.”

Each person wastes about 200 pounds of food a year, he says. He urges consumers to use their senses to check food for spoilage beyond its best-before date. He also wants more people to learn about where their food comes from and how it’s made.

That learning can happen at farmers’ markets, where consumers are more likely to encounter the people who have grown or raised the food. Ironically, he says, produce at farmers’ markets often consists of seconds, as grocery stores often demand picture-perfect items for their shelves.

He figures market patrons value freshness and a connection to the farm even if it means paying a bit more.

His food waste concerns stem partly from his experience on the family cash crop farm, where they grow corn, wheat, soybeans and other crops. In his original video, Fox says, “I literally work all year long for 60 per cent of that food to be thrown in the garbage.”

As well, he learned about the topic at U of G, where he took courses that focused on food waste and food security. Those issues are central for many researchers on campus, including members of the Arrell Food Institute that aims to find sustainable ways to feed the world.

Fox graduated in 2020.

In the BuzzFeed article, he says, “I used to live with a roommate who threw food out the moment it reached its ‘expiration’ date and it physically pained me. I studied food and agricultural business at the University of Guelph, and almost every problem that could be attributed to food insecurity stemmed from consumers being misinformed.”

Earlier, Fox posted a few short videos on social media intended to draw attention to food and farm issues. He purposely keeps the message light: “To educate people, you have to do it through humour.”

Still, he says, food waste is a serious issue that isn’t helped by misunderstanding or misuse of best-before dates.

“We have enough food on the planet to feed everybody. It’s not that we don’t have enough. It’s that the food isn’t being distributed equally or that people are not informed enough.”

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Starting as undergrads doing fermentation experiments in a Guelph basement and in a U of G food lab, Allan Mai and Cole Pearsall have built a 30-employee company making acid-based ingredients for foods and non-alcoholic beverages.

Acid League’s line of unpasteurized “Living Vinegars” is now selling in Whole Foods outlets in the United States; they expect Whole Foods will begin stocking Canadian shelves with nearly a dozen of their specialty and balsamic vinegars this year.

They’re also selling sauces, vinaigrettes, condiments, salad dressings and related products in about 1,000 stores in Canada and the U.S. and are busy creating new recipes for food products. Many of their products are available online.

Acid League also produces non-alcoholic wine proxies that they say create new possibilities for food pairings for consumers dining out and at home.

Non-alcoholic beverages from beer to spirits have become popular with consumers, with new products routinely appearing in restaurants and at trade shows. What was lacking was an equivalent wine proxy. Some companies sold wine with the alcohol removed, but Mai says the result was unsatisfactory.

“There was no great-tasting non-alcoholic wine on the market,” says Mai, “but one of the things that pairs best with food is wine.”

Looking to understand why, he and Pearsall set out to deconstruct wine, examine its chemical components and figure out how to rearrange ingredients to provide the same texture and sensory experience in a proxy beverage.

“Acidity is a massive part of that,” says Mai. “Acidity really lifts the dish. It works with fat really well.”

That acid comes from vinegars – not just your basic white vinegar but numerous variations, from a sundried tomato variety to a mango jalapeno vinegar that flavours a mango jalapeno hot sauce.

Acid is also key for preserving and extending the shelf life of many grocery store items.  

“We knew vinegar was a core ingredient in almost every grocery shelf-stable product,” says Mai. “If we were able to unlock flavour differentiation and quality, we could slot that into any category of hot sauce, condiment, salad dressing.”

In the process, says Pearsall, they would be rejuvenating a basic product that hadn’t seen a new innovation since the introduction of balsamic vinegar about four decades ago. “We saw this big opportunity. We could blow up the category.”

The duo learned how to make vinegar, just the latest form of experimentation that had already occupied numerous hours in Pearsall’s basement and in the Guelph Food Innovation Centre on campus.

They had met in 2015 at U of G, where both students completed the food science program in 2018. Both had brought food experience to their studies: Pearsall worked at a bakery in Toronto; Mai attended culinary school after completing a degree in economics at Queen’s University.

They discovered a mutual interest in experimenting to create new products – something that still drives Acid League today.

They launched the company just before the pandemic. Along the way, they took part in the business incubator program run by the John F. Wood Centre for Business and Student Enterprise in U of G’s Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics.

Although both still live in Guelph, they make their products in a facility in Mississauga, Ont., where several employees are U of G food science grads.

They’re working with Scott Friedmann, a food entrepreneur. Pearsall serves as chief sales officer and Mai as chief product officer.

They’re also investigating collaborations, including working with local partners, according to a recent Guelph Today article. They’ve sourced malt from Wellington Brewery, experimented with produce from the Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming and worked with a producer using vinegar to make jams.

Creating lasting food experiences is the goal, says Pearsall. “Something that connects every single person is food. What we do can bring people together – everybody breaks bread. We aim to make that into a more memorable experience.”

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Waiting for news of the safe landing of NASA’s latest Mars rover in mid-February, U of G physics grad Dr. Chris Heirwegh had a discomfiting thought: If the mission failed, what would he be doing next?

As a scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, Heirwegh had spent nearly five years helping to prepare a high-tech instrument carried aboard the Perseverance rover. The rover touched down in the red planet’s Jezero crater on Feb. 18.

PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) is designed to help look for signs of ancient life on Mars. Carried on the rover’s robotic arm, the device aims X-ray beams into rock to scan for trace inorganic elements.

Along with a second device that looks for organic molecules, PIXL will give scientists a “bio-signature” of any fossilized microbial remains in the rock.

Heirwegh and his JPL colleagues will analyze data being sent home from the instrument and maintain the instrument from 300 million miles away during the rover’s planned three-year mission.

Monitoring the rover landing last month – an intricate operation involving a sky crane that lowered Perseverance to the planet’s surface – Heirwegh felt “pretty relaxed but excited.”

Only later, he says, “It hit me how much was going to happen, how much strain and stress there was on the instrument going through the landing process, hoping everything would work out all right. You never know.”

He and his wife, Meagan, and their six-year-old daughter, Harper, watched the landing at home while Chris was on a web call with his JPL team. Meagan completed a master’s degree in molecular and cellular biology at U of G in 2011.

“All of a sudden, it was done, and we were cheering,” he says. The family celebrated with a rover-themed cake.  

As a PhD student and post-doc at U of G, Heirwegh studied X-ray fluorescence with emeritus physics professor Dr. Iain Campbell.

Earlier, U of G physicists led by Dr. Ralf Gellert calibrated scientific instruments for the Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity Mars rovers; Heirwegh was involved in analyzing data from those missions.

He expects to start seeing PIXL data from Mars in late spring.

Originally from Simcoe, Ont., Heirwegh studied medical physics for his master’s degree at McMaster University. In a Hamilton Spectator article this year, he said he had thought he might become a pharmacist like his dad. But he wanted to learn more about the physics behind medical imaging.

After completing his doctorate at U of G in 2014, he did a post-doc here before heading to Caltech for another post-doc at JPL in 2016.

Referring to his U of G supervisor, Heirwegh says, “Iain was very influential in helping to shape my career, not just learning physics but helping me navigate more practical elements of conducting a working career as a research scientist. I feel very grateful for the guidance he gave me.”

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It was a weekend walk in the U of G Arboretum that helped Amritpal Singh solve his PhD research problem involving sugar maple tree propagation.

Singh had been trying to clone sugar maples, a challenge that had stumped scientists for decades. Trees grown from seeds often produce inconsistent amounts of sugar from one generation to the next.

“We resemble our parents, but we’re not an identical copy,” says Singh, a research scientist who in 2017 joined the Summerland Research and Development Centre run by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Summerland, B.C.

To avoid the genetic seed lottery, maple sugar tree breeders want to use vegetative tissue culture to turn out identical plants that reliably produce lots of sugar in their sap. That would help maple syrup producers looking to cut high energy costs: higher sugar content requires less boiling of sap.

“More than 40 per cent of the cost of maple syrup production is the energy used in boiling sap. We want to propagate trees with high sugar content.”

It’s been an intractable problem for scientists, and no less for Singh. Working in the plant tissue culture lab run by plant agriculture professor Dr. Praveen Saxena, he had tried various growth media and hormone combinations. But nothing was working.

In the arboretum that day, he noticed sugar maples with numerous seedlings growing around them. The youngsters growing in the shade looked much healthier than those in full sun.

Back at the lab, he scoured the literature on plant lighting, then worked with Saxena and plant agriculture professor Dr. Max Jones to make inexpensive custom lighting racks to experiment with different light intensities. Within a month, they were growing healthy plants.

At U of G, Saxena runs the Gosling Research Institute for Plant Preservation, which uses tissue culture, cryo-biology and other methods to preserve plant biodiversity. Jones is also a GRIPP member.

Since publishing their work, the U of G researchers have had discussions with maple tissue culture specialists at Cornell University. Singh hopes to see his research ultimately benefit maple syrup producers.

Since graduating in 2017, he has used his U of G training in breeding apple and cherry varieties in British Columbia’s Okanagan district. He leads a team of five people in the lab and the field.

Interviewed by The Tyee in B.C. this year, he said his team aims to develop new, high-quality fruit varieties for the Canadian horticulture industry.

Singh’s passion for trees developed in India, where he grew up on a research farm; his father was a dairy chemistry professor there. After completing a master’s degree in India, he worked on fruit trees and horticultural crops at an agricultural university before coming to Canada with his wife in 2012.

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Biodiversity, climate change, First Nations drinking water, the youth vote: they’re among pressing issues that will affect the future of young Canadians, says U of G alum Manvi Bhalla.

A 2019 biomedical sciences grad, Bhalla now heads Shake Up the Establishment (SUTE), an advocacy organization she co-founded in her graduation year. The group, which includes 11 University of Guelph grads and four current U of G students, aims to encourage young voters to speak up and act on climate justice.

Their initial goal was to provide evidence-based, non-partisan voting guidance to youths ahead of the federal election in 2019.

That year, thousands of Canadians responded to a call by SUTE to email MPs about declaring a climate emergency. The campaign went viral on Instagram and Facebook; the federal government complied. “I’m grateful for the part we played towards achieving this,” says Bhalla, who in 2020 was named one of Starfish Canada’s top 25 environmentalists under 25.  

Still working to promote informed political advocacy, the organization disseminates information about the environmental platforms of political parties, and campaigns to address human and social justice issues related to climate.

Canada’s National Observer recently interviewed Bhalla about SUTE as part of a series on how young people are working to address the climate crisis.

Begun as a grassroots organization, SUTE is now a climate justice non-profit run by Bhalla along with U of G art history grad Janaya Campbell and Dr. Komil Bhalla.

In November 2020, Corporate Knights named SUTE executive members among its top 30 under 30 sustainability leaders.

SUTE members study and speak on varied issues, including a representative on a recent international biodiversity working group and teams looking at endangered species policies and the First Nations drinking water advisory crisis.

Bhalla has focused recently on supporting a proposed national strategy to address environmental racism.

She says motivated, social media-savvy younger people can band together to push for a more equitable and livable future. “The future voice really centres the future,” says Bhalla. “We need to have a say.”

Now working on a master’s degree at the University of Waterloo, she’s exploring barriers preventing public health decision-makers from acting on climate-related health risks.

She says her activism and advocacy stem partly from her activities at U of G. Among other initiatives during her undergrad, she led the local chapter of an international anti-poverty group, participated in high school outreach for women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and took part in an annual stem cell symposium.  

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Released on Jan. 7, the calculator had received more than 1.5 million page views as of Feb. 25, says Mah, a 2019 master’s grad and now a Web content developer with Omni Calculator. The company makes apps for numerous uses, from calculating unit prices to finding true north using just a compass.

Since fall 2019, she has worked from Los Angeles as a calculator developer for Omni, a Poland-based company with developers worldwide. She partnered with U.K. colleague Steve Wooding to adapt the first vaccine calculator he developed there.

The Vaccine Queue Calculator has also gotten plenty of media attention from Canadian news outlets this year, including CBC Radio, CTV, the Toronto Star and the Vancouver Sun.

“I track every day how many Canadians are getting vaccinated,” says Mah. Along with data about vaccine deliveries, that information is being used to improve the calculator’s accuracy.

She says the app generally proved accurate through January and February even as Canadian shipments were delayed from suppliers.

The calculator assumes that no further shipment delays will occur and that at least 70 per cent of the population will be vaccinated (based on the uptake rate for the flu vaccine in 2020).

Mah says the app gives users a rough timeline as vaccines become available for various groups across the country; the initial phases of the rollout have targeted seniors, health-care workers, Indigenous adults and long-term care residents.

She says people want to know not just where they stand in the vaccination queue but also when other family members – including people with risk complications – might get the jab.

With months yet to pass before all Canadians will be vaccinated, she says, the calculator also underlines the need to maintain public health measures to prevent the virus’s spread.

“At the end of 2020 with vaccines coming, we heard a lot of people being too optimistic,” she says. “For most of 2021, we’re still going to have to be careful. It’s not over yet.”

For her master’s degree, Mah studied plants in growth chambers and greenhouses in the School of Environmental Sciences. Referring to a statistics course especially, she says, “Everything I learned in my master’s is useful.”

She learned about Omni after looking for a handy app to estimate amounts of energy in light sources. “They didn’t have the calculator I needed, but they were hiring.”

She’s now developing calculators to help photographers figure out depth of field and to assist growers in gauging horticultural lighting.

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When he was laid off from his IT sales job last spring, the 2012 B.Comm. grad decided to go all in on his sports equipment venture. Since he moved from Toronto to his mother’s home in Oakville, he says, the business has seen an up-and-down year.

After Ontario’s first COVID-19 lockdown ended, Mueller saw monthly doubling of sales of his branded Techniques line of boxing gloves, headgear, shin guards and other Muay Thai equipment.

After the second pandemic lockdown in late December, gyms shut and many of his potential customers vanished. “I still get online sales, but they’re not where they could be,” he said in mid-February.

Those rollercoaster emotions continue. Sometimes Mueller feels that he’s sunk a lot of money into a business without a future. More often, he thinks about new prospects and connections.

He’s built up his website, including getting fighters at martial arts gyms to model his equipment for shoots by a photographer-videographer friend. Besides ordering more equipment, he’s designed a related apparel line now being made overseas.

“When we get back to normal, I’m going to have enough inventory to capitalize on the boom that I expect,” says Mueller.

A long-time combat sports fan, he started Muay Thai lessons at a Guelph gym during his undergrad. After graduating, he moved to Toronto, where he worked in construction and fought as an amateur in bouts around Ontario. He even trained for a few weeks in Thailand, where this martial art form is the national sport.

A bad car accident ended his fighting. He used money from the settlement and savings to start his business.

Post-COVID, Mueller plans to explore potential markets in the United States and other related ventures, maybe even doing a Muay Thai podcast. As he told Toronto Life magazine in early 2020, he figures he can lean on his passion for the sport and his business smarts, including entrepreneurial genes from his parents, who ran a business in Mississauga.

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Burns, who is from southern Ontario, has a B.Sc.(’10) and a M.Sc. (’13) from U of G.

Burns considers her work at the Zoo a dream job. At this time she is working to save the Poweshiek skipperling, a small butterfly with a portly body and yellow-orange wings that is close to extinction. It only survives in the wild in Manitoba and Michigan. Burns is part of a team that successfully bred the species in captivity.

“It had never been done before anywhere,” said Burns.

CBC Manitoba’s Future 40 Awards recognizes the achievements of 40 Manitobans age 40 and younger who make outstanding professional or service contributions to the community and who are making a difference in the lives of Manitobans.

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