Ask Bonnie Mallard, a pathobiology professor in the Ontario Veterinary College and one of the principals in U of G’s Food From Thought project meant to feed a growing world in sustainable ways.

This year she won a Governor General’s Award for Innovation for developing a tool called High Immune Response technology that improves dairy cattle health while ensuring food safety and quality.

Her moment to shine at Ottawa’s Rideau Hall this past spring was well-deserved recognition of an advance that will transform our quality of life in Canada and abroad.

Before that moment, of course, came years’ worth of work involving numerous campus and external researchers. Bonnie herself has published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and spoken about her work hundreds of times at scienti c meetings.

Her example highlights a truism about research and innovation. While we tend to focus on the end result, it’s the process that matters more than the nal product or service.

At some point, Bonnie had a bright idea. But that spark also needed the fuel of excellence. That fuel is a blend including several key ingredients, as follows:

Discipline. Research calls for dedication, rigour, consistency and attention to methodology.

Perseverance. The “aha” moment normally arrives only after a lot of slogging and hard work.

Focus. Researchers need to maintain a laser focus on excellence.

Luck. Research involves serendipity. Researchers need to stay open to chance and be willing to follow detours.

Failure. We often regard failure as a bad thing. But accepting failure means you’re more willing to try things, to take risks and to nd the road to ultimate success.

Viewed this way, excellence becomes the process – a way of life, a way of thinking and doing. It’s the necessary fuel that, along with the spark of innovation, drives our researchers to Improve Life.

Franco Vaccarino
President and Vice-Chancellor

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But there’s something else humming through those endeavours.

From a laboratory on the main campus, to a classroom at the Ridgetown Campus, to the green atrium at the University of Guelph-Humber, look and listen closely, and you can sense a purposefulness. Learning and discovery matter both for their own sake and for their power to improve life in the wider world.

Making the world a better place is a central idea at the University of Guelph, one that shows not just in what we say but also in what we do. Across the disciplines here, we aim to improve life. By focusing on the whole student, we produce not just graduates but also engaged citizens.

In teaching and in research, we seek ways to engage with the wider community — whether that’s here in Guelph, elsewhere in Canada or around the world.

Our campus members explore the natural and physical sciences, touch hearts and mind through the arts, and integrate culture into study and learning.

We emphasize ethical and sustainable business practices, and we look to engineer solutions for the immediate and wider worlds. We aim to help feed a growing world in sustainable ways.

And we strive to nurture caring, interconnected campuses that value diversity and embrace inclusiveness.

At U of G, we look at life in all of its full and nuanced forms — truly the only way to make sense of our rapidly changing and ever more complex world.

Universities are among the few places in our world where we encourage opportunities for reflection and thoughtfulness, and where we can harness reflection and thought to help make that world a better place.

For faculty, staff and students on our campuses, and for our alumni and partners in other places, our underlying purpose is improving life. I invite you to explore this issue of the Portico to experience that sense of purpose for yourself.

Franco Vaccarino
President and Vice-Chancellor

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We live in a fast-changing world, one that often seems to value quick reaction over deep reflection. Who has time to slow down in a world where we measure time in tweet- and Instagram-sized chunks?

Certainly we all have to be more nimble and ready to take advantage of short-term opportunities. Like driving along a winding road, you need to follow the twists and turns from minute to minute. That’s reactive thinking, or adapting to the here and now.

But those kinds of opportunities aren’t the only ones that matter. Often the really important issues are bigger and more complex. Defying quick and easy solutions, big problems require us to think longer-term and in more strategic ways.

Reflective thinking rises above the here and now to consider not just what we’re doing but why. Is there a better road to your destination, one that will help you avoid all that white-knuckle steering in the first place?

Feeding our growing world is one of the grand challenges of our day. How will we provide enough food for the nine billion people expected to share this planet by mid-century, all while sustaining the planet’s ecosystems?

We can grow more food, but that’s only part of a much bigger and more complex answer. Relying only on growing more food is reactive thinking, like steering along that winding road.

Reflective thinking is transformative thinking. Finding better routes to our destination will involve transforming how we feed the world.

That’s the point of Food From Thought, a new long-term project at U of G funded by a $77-million investment from the federal government. I invite you to learn about this digital revolution in food and farming systems in this issue of the Portico.

Meeting this century’s pressing food challenge will take the creative efforts of many bright minds. Universities such as the University of Guelph are places where this kind of reflective thinking needs to happen.

It’s food for thought but, more importantly, Food From Thought.

Franco Vaccarino
President and Vice-Chancellor

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Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne invited me, along with Malcolm Campbell, U of G’s vice-president (research), on a provincial life sciences trade mission to Israel in May. Malcolm Campbell, U of G’s vice-president (research), also attended.

While there, I signed a cooperation agreement with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to pursue faculty and student exchanges, and to undertake joint research projects and conferences.

And I met U of G alumnus Ido Schechter, who completed his graduate studies at the Ontario Agricultural College. He now runs Agrinnovation, which commercializes technologies from research in Hebrew University’s Faculty of Agriculture.

Schechter’s roots are entwined with those of the University of Guelph. By helping to find real-world applications for food, agricultural and veterinary research, he’s grounded in nearly 150 years’ worth of U of G tradition.

And he’s not alone.

Schechter is one of more than 122,000 Guelph alumni living in Canada and 149 countries around the world. Each of those graduates, including the class of 2016, became similarly grounded in this community.

During your time on campus, each of you took in that “Guelphiness,” that hard-to-define sense of community and shared heritage that identifies Guelph grads in the wider world, even decades after graduation.

From Israel to China to Toronto, wherever I go I find U of G. It’s a Guelph community and, at the same time, an “international community.”

Community grounds and strengthens us. That strength comes from shared purpose. It also comes from diversity. Among our nearly 28,000 students on campuses in Guelph, Ridgetown and Toronto, some 1,200 international students arrive from more than 100 countries.

We maintain that strength — that sense of shared community purpose — wherever you find yourself, at home in the world as a Guelph grad.

Franco Vaccarino
President and Vice-Chancellor

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Each artwork is eye-catching on its own. Viewing them together makes me think of collaborations between disciplines at U of G. Art and science talk to each other on my wall and across this campus.

Guelph is home to experts who devote their lives to profound study of disciplines in the humanities, sciences and social sciences. At the same time, our researchers often connect with each other in surprising ways.

For example, our School of Environmental Sciences invites artists for a residency program intended to challenge our imagination, and to offer new viewpoints on science and culture.

Veterinary researchers, biologists and ecologists meet up under U of G’s “one-health” approach to tackle health problems where people, animals and the environment intersect — notably in our Centre for Public Health and Zoonoses.

In our Bioproducts Discovery and Development Centre, Guelph engineers work with plant scientists to find uses for crops as renewable materials for car parts.

Each of these disciplines matters on its own. Perhaps more exciting is what happens when they come together in shared projects.

This campus is a community of minds that meet and collaborate and innovate together. In our fast-changing world with its big and often messy challenges, fostering those connections is more important than ever for innovation.

At U of G, dealing with epidemics and infectious disease outbreaks calls for bringing together expert minds not just in human health but also in animal health and environmental studies.

Beyond our own planet, we are looking outward to new worlds, and to a host of new challenges that we can meet only by joining minds across physics, planetary studies, humanities, environmental sciences and social sciences.

As technology continues to evolve, we need to bring minds to bear on new ways of innovating. “Innovation 2.0” will fundamentally change how we think and how we understand our evolving world.

Supporting Canada’s university communities — with their sometimes chaotic chatter in the classroom, the laboratory and the library — is vital for fostering Innovation 2.0 for a better future.

Franco Vaccarino
President and Vice-Chancellor

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