Tom Jenkyn wasn’t selected as Team Canada’s flag bearer for the upcoming Olympic Games in Vancouver, but his research may very well influence results in curling.
A Health Sciences and Engineering professor, Jenkyn was commissioned by the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) to conduct research for the Own The Podium initiative, studies that were veiled by its five-year, $8-million ‘Top Secret’ Fund. When Jenkyn was finally allowed to pull back the curtain (after some results were revealed in Maclean’s) on his research which dealt primarily with sweeping and ice temperature, the national media descended on Highland Curling Club for the news. Local outlets, Rogers TV, A News, the London Free Press and XFM were joined in London by Global National, CTV National, CBC News: The National and CHCH. National Post and Canadian Press also covered the research.
Following the devastating earthquake that affected an estimated three million people in Haiti, the media was looking for an engineering expert to discuss the structural damage caused to buildings and houses and how it could have been prevented, managed or at least minimized. Hesham El Naggar, Western’s Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Engineering, spoke with Canwest, CHCH, the London Free Press and A News, and traveled to Toronto to join Steve Paikin on the set of TVO’s The Agenda.
Brock Fenton, a professor in Western’s Department of Biology, and Robarts Research Institute imaging scientist David Holdsworth led an international and multi-disciplinary study that sheds new light on the way that bats echolocate. (With echolocation, animals emit sounds and then listen to the reflected echoes of those sounds to form images of their surroundings in their brains.) Once the research was published in the prestigious journal Nature, Fenton and Holdsworth conducted interviews with Scientific American, Discovery Channel and the London Free Press. The study was also covered by FOX News.
When JD Salinger, the author of “Catcher in the Rye,” passed away in January, Global National turned to Thomas Carmichael, dean of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, for his reflections on the long-time recluse. Interviewed for the day’s top story, Carmichael said of the novel’s protagonist Holden Caulfield, “He’s as iconic as Huckleberry Finn and in terms of his narrative voice, as important as Jay Gatsby in ‘The Great Gatsby.’ He’s a figure whose preoccupations and concerns with individual integrity resonates with this culture and has resonated with more than half a century.”
While Bob Barney has a keen interest in the athletes representing Canada at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, his academic curiosity is for Olympic athletes from a century ago – the members of Canada’s first Olympic team in 1908. Barney, the founder of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at The University of Western Ontario, has been working for almost a year to put a name to nearly 40 athletes and officials shown in a “one-of-a-kind” photograph the centre received last year. And hard work has been paying off. He needs to match just three more names to the faces. Barney was featured on CTV’s two flagship news programs, Canada AM and CTV National News, to discuss his findings. CTV and Rogers Communications hold the broadcast rights to the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and the 2012 Summer Games in London.