ENVISIONING
THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE EDUCATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA
PHOTOS BY JOHN ULAN
EARLIER THIS FALL, we met with Dean Jonathan Schaeffer and President David Turpin (whose academic home department is biological sciences) to learn about how their backgrounds as science students and professors inform their roles as administrators and what they envision for the future of science education at the University of Alberta.
Dean Jonathan Schaeffer and President David Turpin tour the Geoscience Garden.
THE EXCITEMENT OF DISCOVERY DT ⁄ My favourite experience as an undergrad was working with a profes sor on my honors project. He was an expert in red tides. He wanted me to see whether we could elucidate a life cycle in these toxic red tide organisms. I was in the lab looking at these cultures one day, and I see this big globby structure. And the professor said, “Oh my god, they’re fusing gametes. Wow! Let’s start taking pictures.” I sat there saying, “Oh my goodness, I just discovered something.” It was my first paper, “Life Cycle of Toxic Dinoflagellates.” It’s one of my top
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ten most cited papers, and that experi ence—that two minutes of a professor literally jumping up and down at the result of one of my experiments as an undergrad—that was pretty exciting. JS / My favourite learning experience was almost accidental. I was taking a third-year course in artificial intel ligence, and the professor presented us with some optimization algorithms to solve. His description was really complex. When I started thinking about how to solve this little puzzle rather
than the complex problem, all the com plexity went away, and the algorithm at the heart was actually very simple and elegant. The solution turned out, from my point of view, to be beautiful. Although it was a simple puzzle, it was incredibly motivating to me. I thought, if there’s so much beauty in solving puzzles, what about solving games? This led me a year later to apply to grad school when I had not ever in tended to go. Who knew that would lead to a master’s and then a PhD and now an academic position at the University of Alberta? DT ⁄ That’s the great thing about research. There’s an elegance to it. It’s asking the right question in the right way. When it works, there’s a beauty that is indescribable.