News and Announcements

The SICB Digital Library

Killam Prizes for 2005

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The SICB Digital Library

By Trish Morse, SICB Past President

Our Society is establishing an electronic library whose mission is to provide peer-reviewed instructional materials, resources and activities in integrative and comparative biology for faculty; the material should enhance undergraduate education at two- and four-year colleges and universities. SICB is one of the founding professional societies whose libraries will be brought together on the AAAS Bioscience Education Network ("BEN"). The Library is organized under the SICB Education Council, and is overseen by the SICB Digital Library Advisory Board.

Materials are being solicited for the library with the following principles: Undergraduate education in integrative and comparative biology should take advantage of current pedagogical and scientific research. Peer-review will ensure material of dependably high quality Effective learning requires clear expectations of what students are expected to learn together with reliable assessments of outcomes. Student-initiated and -directed inquiry typically underlies effective learning. Hands-on activities, collaborative investigations, and innovative uses of technology improve the learning environments for both students and faculty.

At the annual meeting in San Diego, a framework for the Digital Library (SICB-DL) was presented to the Executive Committee and to the membership at the Divisional Business meetings. The Advisory Board has established the architecture of the web-based submission and review system under the guidance of Ruedi Birenheide, SICB webmaster.

Websites for a series of topics with an editor and board of reviewers are currently under development. The first topic is biomechanics and the co-editors are Rachel Merz (Swarthmore College) and Steve Vogel (Duke University). Active solicitation of materials is underway, and several items have been posted. We invite you to go to the site (http://www.sicb.org/dl) and to consider submitting material. Sites for two other topic areas, environmental endocrinology and evolution-development ("Evo-Devo") are currently being organized. These sites should take advantage of the unique strengths of SICB, in particular the heavy involvement of its members in undergraduate teaching and, concomitantly, the development of instructional material. It should go far to ensure that such material serves more than local needs and to encourage members to invest time and energy in developing new material.

Luc Devroye, Brian Hall, Linda Hutcheon, Margaret Lock and Nahum Sonenberg to receive $100,000 Killam Prizes for 2005

Ottawa, March 30, 2005 - Five prominent scholars from McGill University, Dalhousie University and the University of Toronto will be honoured with the 2005 Killam Prizes, Canada's most distinguished annual awards for outstanding career achievements in engineering, natural sciences, humanities, social sciences and health sciences.

The $100,000 awards to Luc Devroye, Brian Hall, Linda Hutcheon, Margaret Lock and Nahum Sonenberg were announced today by the Canada Council for the Arts, which administers the Killam program.   [Read more]