Academics and scholars from around the world will descend on Brock University’s Goodman School of Business - in the heart of Ontario’s wine country - for the international Academy of Wine Business Research (AWBR) conference June 12-15.

This is the first time the event has landed in Canada, having been held previously in Australia, California, France, Italy and New Zealand.

The AWBR is a global body focused on research into economic, social and management aspects of the wine industry. The conferences attract top wine business researchers and wine industry leaders engaging in critical discussions in a friendly and open atmosphere.

Besides visiting Niagara wineries, delegates will take part in group discussions and workshops examining a range of issues related to wine business. The sessions will be led by experts from around the world, including Brock/Goodman marketing professors Antonia Mantonakis and Carmen Cullen, and sensory scientist Isabelle Lesschaeve of the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre.

Topics up for discussion include branding, tourism, consumer behaviour, sustainability, strategy, innovation and packaging/labelling. For instance, Mantonakis will team up with University of Miami researcher Keri Kettle to reveal their new findings that, in some circumstances, labels bearing a winemaker’s personal signature enhance the wine’s perceived quality and value.

Don Cyr, Dean of the Goodman School of Business, will open the conference with welcoming remarks, and delegates will also hear addresses from several industry leaders from Niagara, including Chateau des Charmes Winery president Paul Bosc Jr., Henry of Pelham Winery president Paul Speck; and wine writer Linda Bramble.

Chris Armstrong

Since graduating with a Bachelor of Sport Management (BSM) at Brock University in 2005, Chris Armstrong has embodied a level of excellence worthy of a number of prestigious achievements.

As senior vice-president at Wasserman Media Group, Armstrong has expanded Wasserman’s global sports and entertainment accounts, while rightfully raising his own profile in the sport industry.

This week, Armstrong added to his list of achievements when he was recognized as one of Canadian sport business’s “5 to Watch.” The awards are presented by George Brown College and The Globe and Mail.

Winners are selected by a panel of leading sports marketers and influencers tasked with identifying the next generation of sport industry leaders.

In 2009, Armstrong was the youngest person on the National Post’s list of Canada’s 25 most influential people in Canadian golf. The following year, he made The Globe and Mail’s Sports Power 50 list and received Brock University’s Faculty of Applied Health Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award. He was also recognized at the Brock University Alumni of Distinction awards in 2012.

Armstrong credits Brock’s sport management department with influencing him “in one way or another,” but particularly professors Hilary Findlay and Craig Hyatt.

“They both took a particular interest in my career pursuits,” he said. “And they’ve continued to be great supporters.”

View the list of “5 to watch” winners

Corey Lehman works with a student on the Rick Hansen Secondary School robotics team Theory6.

If you ask Corey Lehman, he may just tell you that he teaches the coolest subject offered at Rick Hansen Secondary School in Mississauga: Robots.

While the class is technically called Manufacturing Technology, Lehman, a recent Brock technological education graduate (TCTD ’12), has enjoyed teaching the complexities of a subject that goes beyond just “shop class.”

“At most schools (manufacturing technology) means machine shop,” he said. “However, at Rick Hansen Secondary School … it is a specialist high skills major program.”

Specialist high skills major programs let students focus on a career path that matches their skills and interests while meeting the requirements of the Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD).

Teaching the course also gave Lehman the chance to be the lead mentor of the school’s robotics team - one that joined forces with a team in Texas to win the FIRST Robotics Championships in St. Louis last month.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was founded in the U.S. in 1989 to inspire and mentor young people in science, engineering and technology.

Lehman, a former tool and die maker, and welder, began his involvement with the Rick Hansen robotics team, Theory6, during his second teaching practicum last year and hasn’t looked back.

“It was the middle of the robotic team’s build season and I offered to help mentor in the machine shop,” he said. “A couple of weeks later and I was hooked. I travelled all over North America with the team and had quite the positive experience.”

So when the opportunity to work at Rick Hansen arose, Lehman jumped at it.

“I never could have seen myself teaching robotics,” he said. “Now that I am, I know it is the right career path for me.”

Lehman not only has the knowledge to help his students achieve greatness, he also knows when to sit back and let them take the lead.

With 85 students on the RHSS robotics team, Lehman said he prefers to simply facilitate the process, allowing the students to plan, design, build and program the robot. Students are able to learn the most this way, he said.

Such programs offer experience and skills that continue to prepare the next generation of students for the proverbial real world.

“FIRST Robotics gives students a chance to work together in real world situations,” he said. “They learn time management, how to communicate effectively with others, budgeting, design process, networking, building (and) hands-on skills and confidence.”

And much like those who taught Lehman during his time in the technological education program, he feels the same pride seeing his students succeed.

“I am so very proud of my students and truly feel they deserve everything they achieved this year.”

Visit Theory6 online

Want to swap that hosta in your garden for a more colourful aster?

The DIG Brock Community Garden is hosting the University’s annual perennial exchange event on Tuesday, May 28. Everyone is welcome.

Here’s how it works:

8:15 to 9:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m - noon
Drop off up to five perennials (in pots, labelled with name of plants and sun/shade preference) to the front of the Schmon Tower. You will receive a ticket for each plant that you bring to be used at the plant exchange.

12 noon to 1:00 p.m.
Return to the front of the Schmon Tower and use each ticket to redeem a different perennial.

1 p.m. to 2p.m.
Leftover plants from the exchange will be available for purchase. Proceeds going to materials for the Brock Community Garden.

If you have seedlings or additional perennials that you would like donate to the community garden you can bring them at any time through the day.

For more information, please contact Garden@YourBrock.org or visit the DIG Brock Community Garden online.

The Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, an affiliate of the Council of Ontario Universities (COU), consists of deans of graduate studies at each university in the province. Together they strive to ensure quality graduate education and research across Ontario.

Artist's rendering of the future Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts.

Brock University will host a celebration event next week to mark the start of construction on its new Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts in downtown St. Catharines.

The celebration happens Friday, May 31 at 11 a.m. at 198 St. Paul St., on the school grounds. Parking is not available on site.

When it opens, the school will bring 500 students, faculty and staff into the city’s core when it moves from Brock’s main campus. The new school will be adjacent to a new Performing Arts Centre and Spectator Facility, which are being built by the City of St. Catharines.

Researches discuss grants strategies and other issues during SSHRC Day on May 13.

The Office of Research Services (ORS) is setting up a voluntary “peer support” structure for researchers to turn to their colleagues for direction, advice and other support during the application process for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funding and grants.

ORS has also hired students to put together the Common CV for researchers applying SSHRC funding.

And, researchers who received a “4A” ranking on their funding applications are eligible to get a $2,000-grant if they re-apply to the upcoming Insight Grant Competition.

These are among measures announced at SSHRC Day, a workshop held May 13 for researchers to discuss strategies for applying for SSHRC and other research funding.

Kevin Kee, Associate Vice-President of Research, says SSHRC Day’s main message is that there’s “strength in numbers.”

“We are our own best resource,” Kee said. “Reading through the comments (evaluating the SSHRC Day event), what came out again and again is that people overwhelmingly want a mechanism that will allow us to support one another by looking at each others’ grant applications and showing how these might be strengthened.”

Kee said that the common CV, a highly detailed list of a researchers’ activities and accomplishments that will be required with applications starting in early 2014, is a challenge that can take 20 hours or more to create.

SSHRC represents a major, but very competitive, pot of funding for Canadian researchers in the social sciences and humanities through its connection grants, partnership grants, insight grants and talent grants, each with their different focuses and requirements.

ORS office manager Carrie Kelly shared highlights of SSHRC’s current strategic plan and said there’s an increasing focus on longer-term projects of four to five years that address complex challenges and benefit society.

“They are giving fewer scholars more money,” she said. “They are really taking an all-or-nothing approach.”

A panel of researchers who had been involved in SSHRC funding committees, along with ORS staff, shared tips on how to apply for SSHRC and other funding.

Pascale Lapointe-Antunes from the Department of Accounting, who sat on SSHRC’s Insight Development Grant committee in 2011 and 2012, stressed the need for applications to be written clearly and simply.

“So if I take this proposal and I read it and I have absolutely no idea what you’re taking about, then it’s very likely to end up being not funded, so the language is very important,” Lapointe-Antunes said.

Phrasing concepts into easily digestible sentences will go far in a situation where each application has limited discussion, suggested Elizabeth Sauer, with the Department of English Language and Literature.

“So give them the soundbites: highlight the key questions, the key issues that you want them to be able to take away from the application and present to the committee,” Sauer told the gathering.

She noted that creating a website to make research accessible to the broader community would also be very helpful.

And, while keeping SSHRC program officers in mind, make sure to write for your peers, as they have key influence, says David Siegel, with the Department of Political Science.

But he cautioned researchers not to mould themselves and their research into what they think the reviewers want to see, but rather pursue the line of research according to their own interests and plans.

“You can write a better grant if you’re comfortable with this and if this is what you want to do,” Siegel said. “If you try to contort yourself to do something that you’re not particularly comfortable with, that’s going to show in the grant.”

Other advice and tips shared at SSHRC Day include:

• Don’t merely re-purpose an old application
• Don’t over-inflate budgets, as SSHRC is only allowed to cut a budget to a maximum of 30 per cent
• If you are a new scholar, apply for the Insight Development Grant. Seventy per cent of those grants went to “emerging scholars”
• Ensure that your literature review is recent and relevant
• Build alliances with community or non-profit organizations as a way of spreading the influence, impact and “knowledge transfer” of your research on society
• Do not write your application like a “thesis proposal” where everything has been done except for the data collection or running the model.

Research officer Josie Reed said researchers should start thinking about their research plan at least one year before the deadline and suggested coming to ORS for support at least six months before the funding deadline.

“We are your advisers on these matters,” she said. “We are your best cheerleaders. We facilitate your grants. We’re like midwives delivering your research application to the agency.”

Research officer Tressie Dutchyn, whose docket includes SSHRC applications, urged researchers to be persistent with their applications, noting that, on average, it might take two or three times before an application is funded.

“I was once told by an extremely successful researcher that he applies to more competitions than anyone he knows, he gets rejected from more and he is more successful, so the key is not to give up - to keep applying - because eventually you will be successful,” she said.

Jane Koustas is gearing up to head to Victoria next month.

There, the professor of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures will take in Congress 2013, the flagship event for Canadian social sciences and humanities scholars.

But Koustas will also be hard at work promoting next year’s Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

As the academic convener of Congress 2014 - hosted by Brock University and organized by the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences - Koustas will be wooing thousands of academics, researchers and policy makers to Niagara for the next edition of the conference, Borders without Boundaries.

“What we’re trying to showcase is research and the fact that Brock is moving toward, if it’s not already become, a comprehensive university,” Koustas said, noting Brock’s growth in arts, science and graduate research.

“I think anyone who was here in 1996 (when the University last hosted Congress) will see Brock has grown in all directions, not just student population.”

Still, Koustas will need some help to get the word out about Congress 2014.

So an informal meet and greet for faculty and staff involved with the conference, and those heading to Victoria will be held on Monday, May 27 from 10 a.m. to noon in Sankey Chamber.

During that time, there will be two drop-in information sessions about Congress 2014 and promotional materials will be provided to participants to hand out in Victoria and elsewhere.

“If people have questions about what’s happening here, before they go to Victoria they can have their questions answered,” Koustas said.

Congress 2014 will bring 70 learning societies and associations to Brock from May 24 to 30, 2014. During the course of the week, 8,000 people will be on campus and in Niagara.

“Part of this is to encourage people to visit the community as well and turn it into a holiday opportunity, too,” said Koustas, whose efforts are supported by several Brock departments, including Community and Ancillary Services. “It’s also the idea of celebrating the region and Brock’s 50th anniversary and how very different it is from the Brock people would have seen (at Congress) in 1996.”

Visit Congress 2014 online.

Professors David DiBattista (psychology) and Lorne Adams (kinesiology), who retired last month, presented their last lectures on May 1 at the annual Spring Perspectives event hosted by the Centre for Pedagogical Innovation.

Videos of their talks, the concept of which is based on the New York Times best-selling book The Last Lecture, are now available online.