We’ve got a reputation for research

[No. 1 in Research]
Beyond the rankings, Guelph’s research engine gains mileage from alumni innovators

By Lori Bona Hunt

Among its peers, the University of Guelph is Canada’s research university of the year, and has been for three consecutive years. The annual report published by the National Post newspaper has made for some impressive headlines and eloquent one-liners about the value of Guelph’s research engine. A $121-million research budget is pretty impressive for a Canadian university that doesn’t have a medical school, but more valuable still are the ideas being generated by Guelph researchers and the impact research has on teaching.

Research breakthroughs that are changing the world can often be traced back to teaching environments that encouraged exploration. And at their centre are usually mentors who carefully nurtured learning and discovery.

That’s one of Guelph’s great strengths, and one of the reasons why our alumni family is rife with 21st-century explorers.

In this feature, we focus on six outstanding alumni who represent a breadth of research excellence that began in Guelph graduate programs.

Serendipity and circumstance brought them all to U of G. They came at different ages, during different decades and with vastly different interests. But they all emerged from their experiences with new ways of thinking, learning and doing.

They followed varying and winding paths, but all six are now back in the classroom, maintaining the essential connection between research and teaching and educating the next generation of great innovators.

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No. 1 in Research
For the third year in a row, the consulting firm Research Infosource Inc. ranked the University of Guelph as Canada’s top comprehensive research university on the basis of financial input and research output.

In addition to the No. 1 ranking among comprehensive schools, U of G earned top honours in its division for total sponsored research income and publication intensity, and was ranked seventh overall among Canadian universities in all three categories.

In a second Infosource report, U of G placed 13th among all Canadian universities for sponsored research income. Guelph was the only institution without a medical school to report a research budget in excess of $100 million.

Healing wounds with technology
Rob Burrell has revolutionized wound care and helped save the lives of people around the globe, including victims of 9/11 and the terrorist bombings in Bali.

The U of G graduate developed a bandage that heals wounds quickly without leaving scars. The bandage contains a silver-based dressing Burrell created called Acticoat, which has antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties and uses molecule-sized building blocks to speed healing.

His 1995 invention was a scientific and clinical breakthrough. It’s used in hospitals worldwide, especially burn units, and is heralded as one of the most significant advances in wound-care history.

It’s also believed to be the first-ever commercial medical application of nanotechnology (the study of molecular and atomic particles where measurements are made in nanometres or billionths of a metre).

Burrell began developing nano-based processes and products to solve problems in medicine and biotechnology in the mid-1980s, long before nanotechnology became a household word among scientists.

Now a professor at the University of Alberta, he is a named inventor on more than 260 patents and pending patents around the world and has helped develop more than 15 medical products. He’s considered a world authority on using advanced metallic films to speed wound healing.
Burrell invented the renowned bandage while working as the chief scientific officer for Westaim Biomedical Inc. (now Nucryst Pharmaceuticals). He also initiated a connection that led to Smith & Nephew, the global leader in medical products and devices, acquiring the commercial rights to take Acticoat worldwide. The business is now worth $33 million.

Burrell says it was the arrangement with Smith & Nephew that allowed him to re-enter the classroom. “I always had it in the back of my mind that I would return to academia because I enjoy teaching,” he says. And once he didn’t have to worry about how his product would get to the people and places where it could do the most good, “it allowed me to make the decision to make the move.”

Now a Canada Research Chair in Nanostructured Biomaterials at Alberta, Burrell holds positions in the Faculty of Engineering as a professor of chemical and materials engineering and in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry as a professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

He says his years at Guelph, specifically working with his master’s adviser, Charles Corke, played a big role in his success. “He saw something in me that I didn’t see,” Burrell says of Corke. “His approach was to put me in the lab and have me learn by doing and challenging. He gave me a lot of freedom to explore what I wanted to do.”

Burrell earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1976, studied plant biology through the Ontario Agricultural College, then completed a master’s degree in environmental microbiology in 1980. He went on to earn a PhD in microbial toxicology at the University of Waterloo. His wife, Louise Colonnier, is also a Guelph graduate, earning a B.Sc. in 1980.

Burrell recalls that the first assignment Corke gave him involved a series of experiments that ended up proving a previously established theory was incorrect.

“The basis we went forward on was that all work done up to that point was founded on something that had a little flaw in it.”

He and Corke ended up publishing seven papers together.

“His giving me that freedom, not dictating what I should be doing or thinking, is what taught me to really look into things, to say: ‘Just because it’s already in print doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right,’” says Burrell. “You have to analyze everything and look at it quite carefully.”

Changing lives for the better
Robin Milhausen knew from an early age that she wanted to study the sexuality of young people, particularly young women.

“Navigating through puberty, negotiating dating and relationships, coming to terms with your sexual identity — these are extremely difficult and important life tasks,” she says. “It wasn’t easy for me, and it isn’t easy for most adolescents. I wanted to learn everything I could about the process to, in some way, make it easier for young people.”

Growing up in Collingwood, Ont., Milhausen says her role model was esteemed Canadian sex therapist Sue Johanson, whom she watched regularly on TV. “I always wanted to take steps towards a career that would follow a similar path.”

Milhausen has done just that.

After earning an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master’s degree in human development and human relations from Guelph, she studied at the world-renowned Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana and is now a post-doctoral researcher in the School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta.

She’s also co-host of the television program Sex, Toys & Chocolate, which airs on Canada’s Life Network and is known for its refreshing format and open and frank discussions on topics such as dating, relationships, gender barriers, sexuality, and sexual health and behaviour.
The program has a new subject matter each week and features different male and female guests who exchange views and experiences — no-holds-barred. There are few taboos.
“After teaching and researching about sex for so many years, there’s not much that can make me blush,” Milhausen says.

One year after its debut, the weekly show is among the highest-rated on the network. In fact, it’s so popular, it’s already in “reruns” and can now be seen every night of the week.

Milhausen was asked to try out for the program by a producer from Alliance Atlantis who had heard about her research and tracked her down in Indiana. As a graduate student and post-doctoral researcher, Milhausen produced articles that have appeared in publications such as the American Journal of Health Education and Journal of Sex Research. She also received the Outstanding Student Research Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and became the youngest member of the International Academy of Sex Research, a prestigious invitation-only organization.

Even though she had no TV experience and knew juggling the show and her research position would be a challenge, Milhausen jumped at the chance.

Each week during the four months a year the show is in production, she spends Monday and Tuesday developing interventions to prevent sexual risk-taking among young people, then catches a plane to Toronto on Wednesday to spend a day in planning meetings with producers for the show. On Friday and Saturday, she tapes two shows each day, then flies back to Georgia on Sunday.

Come fall, her weekly commute will be shorter. Milhausen is returning to Canada to start another post-doctoral research position, this time at the Social Justice and Sexual Health Research Centre at the University of Windsor.

She considers hosting the TV show a perfect fit with her career in academia.

“It’s helping me to stay current in my research and to share my findings with the world. I think all academics want to translate what they’re doing so it’s applicable and acceptable to the general public. We want to see our research used to make a positive change in people’s lives.”

Watching evolution happen
Iceland native Bjarni Kristjansson may have only just started a PhD program, but he is already known as a researcher working on the cutting edge.

As a master’s student in U of G’s zoology program, Kristjansson published three papers on the rapid evolutionary change he discovered in sticklebacks, a family of small fish that are related to seahorses and found in northern oceans and lakes.

Not only can they live in fresh or salt water, but sticklebacks also show an amazing ability to adapt quickly to local conditions in lakes and lagoons — so much so that researchers can see the fish physically alter to fit their surroundings within only one or two generations.

“You can actually see evolution taking place,” says Kristjansson.

His research looked at the ecological and behavioural processes of rapid evolutionary change, and at how the changes that occur in an ecosystem can help better protect and conserve the entire system, not simply one or two species. His work was heralded for its originality and creativity.

While he was chasing down sticklebacks, Kristjansson also hauled a brand-new creature out of the water — the first known freshwater amphipods in Iceland. In addition to being a new species, they are a new genus and an entirely new family of amphipods. His discovery indicates that these creatures survived glaciation and has changed the way people think about how life came to Iceland.

Finding a new family in a group as well-known and intensively studied as freshwater amphipods is no small feat. In fact, Kristjansson’s mentors at Guelph and at his hometown school, Iceland’s Hólar University College, call it “a lifetime achievement.” They also describe him as being “among the best and brightest in modern ecological research.”

For the past several years, Kristjansson has been actively involved in an academic exchange between U of G and Hólar. He has taught, organized and managed a field course that sees Guelph and other Ontario students visit Iceland every two years.

As a researcher at Hólar, he has taught courses in aquaculture and rural tourism and has taken a leading role in organizing new courses. Since 1999, he has also been director of Hólar’s freshwater aquarium, which receives up to 6,000 visitors a year.

Kristjansson returned to Guelph in January to start work on a PhD. He was awarded the Brock Scholarship, Guelph’s largest and most prestigious doctoral award, which is valued at up to $120,000. Recipients are considered outstanding in their field of studies, their research work and their ability to serve as mentors and leaders to other students in doctoral programs.

For the next few years, he’ll be dividing his time between fieldwork based at Hólar and studies at Guelph, where he plans to further his research on rapid adaptive change in Icelandic fish.
When asked about the success he has already achieved, Kristjansson attributes it to a
combination of luck and “seeing what’s there. You have to have an open mind.”

That was one of the most crucial things he learned as a master’s student at Guelph, he says.
“You start to realize that you have to learn to think in new ways, approach things differently. It’s a process I could feel occurring inside me as I worked through my master’s degree.”

Talk about watching evolution taking place.

Answering questions about the past
Beverly Lemire clearly recalls when she started asking the questions that have directed the course of her distinguished career.

She was in her second year at Guelph and had become intrigued by her studies of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. “It was the point at which the entire world started to change,” says Lemire, who spent 17 years as a history professor at the University of New Brunswick before joining the faculty of the University of Alberta.

The Industrial Revolution was a period of great economic, social and cultural change in the West, she says. There were also significant changes in transportation, leading to the connection of the East and the West. As a result, what was happening in Great Britain was bringing about intense transformation around the world.

“At the time, I was also taking history courses with a lot of other geographical designations: African, Eastern European, Spanish and colonial American history,” says Lemire. As a result, she couldn’t stop thinking about the interactions between Britain and the wider world.

“I starting asking myself questions about it, and from there, I have been propelled from question to question my entire academic life.”

It’s an academic life that has included winning a prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship to Oxford University, where she earned a doctorate in 1985; receiving a Killam Research Fellowship; achieving the rank of University Research Professor at UNB; and being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, considered Canada’s most prestigious academic accolade. Most recently, she was named to the prestigious Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics and the Department of Human Ecology at Alberta.

Lemire is renowned for her innovative economic, social and gender analyses of the changing material world. “I do a lot of comparative history, which is of great interest to me,” she says.
She has published books on the English clothing trade and consumers; edits the journal Textile History; serves on the Council of the Canadian Historical Association; and co-edited a comparative volume analyzing women’s use of credit around the globe from the past to the present. Her latest book, The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600 to 1900, will be published later this year.

“My research interests developed out of my experiences at Guelph,” says Lemire. “I received a lot of support from faculty for the way I wanted to approach history and for being creative in my writing. I really evolved as a student there.”

How Lemire ended up at U of G is a story in itself. Originally from Montreal, she and her husband, Morris, were living in Toronto with their two-year-old daughter, Shannon, and finding it hard to “fit in” with what universities had to offer there.

“We heard Guelph had a mature-student program, a married-student residence and a co-op day care,” says Lemire, “so Morris took a trip up there and said: ‘You’ve got to come and see it.’ It was a very friendly environment for those who weren’t the stereotypical straight-out-of-high-school students. It really distinguished Guelph at the time.”

When she first started at U of G, Lemire took a wide range of courses. “But something about history just clicked with me.” She earned her BA in 1979 and MA in 1981.

Her current research explores the transition from traditional to modern society. “I still have more questions to ask,” she says.

Understanding muscle power
Tom Irving paired one of the world’s most powerful X-ray machines with one of nature’s tiniest creatures to solve a mystery of the insect kingdom — how do winged creatures manage to fly?

His groundbreaking research on the beating wings of the fruit fly received worldwide attention. Someday, it may also aid in understanding the workings of the human heart.

“The way in which the wing muscles in insects generate enough power for flight was not completely understood,” says Irving, a biology professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) who earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in biophysics from Guelph in 1978, 1984 and 1990, respectively.

Unlike animal muscles, insect muscles don’t require a nerve impulse from the brain to contract, he explains. Instead, they’re activated by “stretch” — one set of muscles automatically turns on when the contraction of the opposing muscle group causes it to stretch. But how insects manage to turn those muscles on and off at such high rates of speed (one wing beat takes 5/1,000 of a second) was unknown. Irving set out to discover the processes of stretch activation using X-ray images of fruit flies in flight.

To do so, he used the Western Hemisphere’s most brilliant X-rays, from the Advanced Photon Source located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. To build a single image, he and his collaborators had to take hundreds of exposures of the tiny insects at various stages of muscle contractions. Each exposure could last only 0.3 milliseconds or the powerful rays would kill the flies.

The insects also had to be tethered to a wire. To get them to beat their wings, the researchers had to build a flight simulator to fool the flies into thinking they were moving through the air.

The X-ray images revealed that, as a fly’s muscles stretch and contract, various proteins are interacting, something that was previously unsuspected. “We could actually see the movement of molecules,” Irving says.

The research, which was first published in Nature magazine, may also provide new ways of studying how molecular changes affect human muscle performance, such as the beating heart.
“The heart is a regulatory machine that we still don’t fully understand,” he says. “At the very least, this research suggests new questions we can ask.”

It was the opportunity to work both as a biology professor at IIT and at the sophisticated Argonne National Laboratory that drew Irving to Illinois. Previously, he was a staff scientist at Cornell University and had worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

A third-generation Guelphite, Irving grew up always wanting to be a scientist. He was the first and only member of his family to go to university.

“When I started, what I really wanted to study was cellular biology, but at the time, I didn’t know what it was called. So I took microbiology, but it really wasn’t for me.”

It was in graduate school that he discovered his love of muscle biophysics. U of G is also where he met his wife, Linda, who earned her B.Sc. in 1985.

Irving visits Guelph frequently. “My family is interested in what I’m doing and they try to understand it. But we all speak the same language while sitting around in the morning having cornflakes.”

Protecting animal welfare
Nora Lewis came to Guelph in the mid-1970s with her sights set on becoming a veterinarian.
“It was what I wanted to be for as long as I can remember,” says Lewis, adding that, as a child in Mississauga, Ont., she was always caring for the family’s dogs and cats.

She started out at Guelph studying biology, thinking she’d apply as soon as possible to the Ontario Veterinary College and eventually work with small animals.

“To be accepted to veterinary school, you had to take certain prerequisite courses, so I went to see a professor of agriculture one day,” she says. “He started talking to me about animal behaviour, which was a very new field then, and I became extremely interested.”

That professor was Frank Hurnik, who was the only applied ethologist in Canada at the time. A faculty member at U of G from 1971 to 1997, he initiated behavioural studies at Guelph and developed the first course in animal welfare.

“I was really lucky that I went to talk to Frank that day because it changed my career path entirely,” says Lewis.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1976, she completed an M.Sc. and a PhD in applied ethology with Hurnik, publishing articles on poultry and swine behaviour. She went to work as an ethologist for the University of Saskatchewan, where she continued her research on swine behaviour and introduced students to animal behaviour through her teaching. The field was still emerging, and Lewis’s work was considered innovative and timely. She returned to Guelph in 1987 as a research associate in the Department of Animal and Poultry Science, working mostly with cattle and poultry.

“I had reached a point in my life when I could consider my future options,” she says. “So I thought I would pursue my dream of becoming a veterinarian.”

When she enrolled in the DVM program in 1990, Lewis was the only person in her first-year class with a PhD.

“I planned to open a practice dealing with the behavioural problems of cats and dogs, so I could use the skills and knowledge from all my degrees,” she says.

But a year after earning her DVM, she saw a position advertised at the University of Manitoba. The university was looking for a veterinarian to care for research animals, and the Department of Animal Science needed an applied ethologist.

“It was perfect for me,” says Lewis. “I could continue studying animal behaviour and also work as a veterinarian.”

She was recently promoted to director of Manitoba’s animal-care and -use program and will oversee and provide direction for the welfare and health of research animals. She also continues to do research, publish and teach as an associate professor of animal science.

Lewis has cared for and studied all sorts of animals: cows and chickens, rodents and rabbits, snakes and birds. But her “species of choice” is swine. “Pigs are very intelligent and, like most animals, have a lot to teach us once we learn how to listen, watch and understand them,” she says.

When not at work, she looks after her own animals — two dogs, a cat and three horses — and lives with her husband, Keith, on 160 acres of land. “It’s a bit more than we can handle sometimes,” she says with a laugh.

Photos by Marcus Bence; Alliance Atlantis Communication; Martin Schwalbe; Joy Cummings, University of New Brunswick; George Joch, Argonne National Library; and Bob Talbot, University of Manitoba
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