• A new Black Canadian studies minor in the College of Arts, being launched this fall, grew out of U of G president Dr. Charlotte Yates’s Anti-Racism Action Plan. The program was created in collaboration with the Guelph Black Students Association and will offer community-engaged and experiential learning with the Guelph Black Heritage Society.

• Also launching in the fall is Sexualities, Genders and Social Change, a multidisciplinary degree program within U of G’s BA program. The degree will explore scholarship of human identity, embodiment and self-expression and interconnections with social, political and cultural systems.

• With COVID-19 highlighting the need for skilled personal support workers for long-term care facilities, a new continuing education course launched this year is intended to enable Ontario PSWs to upgrade skills quickly and easily. The “micro-credential” program offered by U of G’s Open Learning and Educational Support department will address critical workforce shortages and improve quality of longterm care by mitigating employee burnout and improving resiliency and retention.

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U of G claimed second spot out of 50 comprehensive universities – those with a full range of graduate programs and professional schools without a medical school – in the 2021 Research Infosource Inc. ranking of Canada’s Top 50 Research Universities.

Rankings are based on measures including sponsored research, numbers of publications in leading journals and research impact.

In a separate ranking, the Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics placed among the world’s top sustainability-focused business schools.

The sustainable business magazine Corporate Knights ranked the Lang MBA program 5th in the world and 2nd in Canada for its focus on sustainability. It marked the first time that the program ranks among the top five programs in the world and the third year running that it has made the global top 10.

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OVC Pet Trust launched the $8.36-million infrastructure project to accommodate complex case referrals amid a current shortage of veterinary professionals and an increase in pet ownership during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Improving the space to allow for leading-edge approaches to veterinary care and education in the intensive care unit of OVC’s Health Sciences Centre is the goal, to be supported with a $4.2-million bequest from the late Catherine Bergeron, a long-time OVC Pet Trust supporter. The unit will be named the Catherine Bergeron Centre for Urgent and Critical Care.

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The Times Higher Education Impact Rankings assessed the progress of more than 1,500 universities from 100 countries and territories toward meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The 17 goals—which include providing inclusive and equitable quality education, achieving gender equality, and building sustainable cities and communities—were adopted by the UN in 2016 to provide a framework for developing the world in a sustainable way.

U of G earned high marks for development goals including poverty and hunger alleviation and clean water and sanitation.

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Head coach Ryan Sheahan has been joined on the squad by his father, Pat Sheahan, who was appointed this year as the Gryphons offensive line coach and an offensive assistant.

Father and son were last fellow coaches in 2014 with the Queen’s Gaels at Queen’s University, where Pat spent 19 seasons as head coach.

“It’s a great feeling,” Ryan says. “I looked at it through two different lenses and the most important one is that I think we brought on one of the best coaches to join our staff and our team.”

Both father and son also coached the University of Calgary Dinos more recently; Pat replaced Ryan as offensive coordinator in Calgary after Ryan became U of G’s head coach.

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“It is about taking our ‘genius’ and using it to make the world a better place,” she said. Yates said U of G will pursue global excellence by recruiting top students, faculty and staff “with different experiences, different backgrounds and different perspectives. We must elevate and advance those voices that are under-represented today.”

She also promised to “reconnect the social fibres that have been frayed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic” and build on U of G’s civic-minded values and sense of community.
She pledged to ensure fiscal stability, invest in research and scholarship, and engage with alumni, donors and other supporters.

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$1.2-million grant from the foundation to continue studying the bacterial pathogen and the disease it causes. The foundation’s initial investment of $1.4 million in 2017 helped to establish the lab in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB).

Beyond studying diagnostics, members of the lab aim to help improve disease treatment and prognosis for people infected with Lyme disease. “Our end goal is to improve patient outcomes,” said lab director Dr.
Melanie Wills.

The team is pursuing various projects, including learning about individuals’ responses to drug treatment and why the disease goes undiagnosed in some infected people. Wills is also obtaining tissues from people bitten by ticks to build a biobank used to identify biomarkers for Lyme disease.

Along with MCB professor Dr. Cezar Khursigara, she is also investigating the formation of bacterial clumps called biofilms that help the pathogen evade detection and treatment.

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Forty post-secondary institutions signed the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion in Canadian Higher Education. The Charter is a national action plan for fighting structural racism and inspiring positive change in Canada’s postsecondary sector.

“The charter is about taking action and responsibility,” says Prof. Lawrence Hill, a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies and former co-chair of U of G’s President’s Advisory Committee on Anti-Racism.

“Racial injustice continues, affecting members of our Black campus community. Ensuring fulsome, transformative inclusion and change across this University will require action and co-operation from the entire U of G and greater Guelph region.”

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She is the tenth chancellor since the University’s creation in 1964.

“Mary Anne Chambers embodies our University’s purpose and promise to ‘Improve Life,’” said U of G president Dr. Charlotte Yates. “She has worked tirelessly to make higher education accessible and inclusive for everyone and to improve circumstances for children, youth and families, especially in racialized communities in Canada and around the world.”

” Chambers was a senior vice-president at Scotiabank. She was elected to the Ontario legislature as a Liberal in 2003 and appointed minister of training, colleges and universities and then minister of children and youth services. She was a member of U of G’s Board of Governors from 2010 to 2016.

A graduate of the University of Toronto, Chambers was named to the Order of Ontario and has received the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee and Diamond Jubilee medals.

“This University has so much to contribute to the achievement of the ambitions of the people of this province, our country and beyond, given its areas of specialty and its long-standing commitment to sustainability in its broadest sense. I am truly honoured to be chosen to serve the University of Guelph as its chancellor,” Chambers said.

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In 2009, Dr. Alex Smith began using GigaPan photography technology to record weekly habitat panoramas in U of G’s Dairy Bush.

The 8.5-hectare hardwood forest on the University campus is a research site for students in a popular biodiversity course in the Department of Integrative Biology taught by Smith and Dr. Shoshanah Jacobs.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, they used 11 years’ worth of GigaPan images to create the Digital Forest, a virtual classroom that stands in for the real thing.

“We are now working with GigaPan to make the user interface more accessible to more people, whether they are right next door or thousands of kilometres away,” Jacobs says.

They expect to continue using the Digital Forest after the pandemic.

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