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Change in store for U of L administrator |
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Written by Caroline Zentner
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Friday, July 03 2009, 9:45 PM |
After 10 years as vice-president of research at the University of Lethbridge, Dennis Fitzpatrick has decided to swap one fruit for another.
On Canada Day, instead of rising at 5:30 a.m. and turning on his Apple laptop, Fitzpatrick went into the kitchen and whipped up some blueberry pancakes.
After a decade of a driven career pairing eager researchers with funders, Fitzpatrick figured it was time for a change.
“I would just like to find greater balance in my life,” he said. “I have a number of quite interesting projects in the works but I’m taking six weeks off. I haven’t had a decent vacation in a number of years.”
In 1997, Fitzpatrick left his position as head of the foods and nutrition department at the University of Manitoba to come to a very small research development department consisting of himself and an office administrator. Researchers would drop off their proposals for the necessary signatures. Now they come into the research development office early on to discuss their proposals and get help securing grants. While the U of L was successful in getting funds from the three major federal research councils, Fitzpatrick wanted to diversify the funding sources available to researchers.
“We didn’t have that history of large grant success and we had to build it,” he said. “We also took on the role of what I would call shameless promotion.”
The U of L has several areas of science excellence, neuroscience, molecular biology, water and environmental science and earth observation, as well as research into gambling and gaming and demographics, but some researchers are better known internationally than they are in Alberta. But for a small university, the U of L’s research reputation is growing. For example, the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience and the Water and Environmental Science Building provide the infrastructure that fuels research, which in turn brings more researchers and graduate students.
But Fitzpatrick has always been a man with a plan. For example, when he heard Alice Hontela and Joe Rasmussen present papers at a Canadian Society for Zoology meeting, he thought they’d be good for the U of L.
“I took (then vice-president academic) Seamus O’Shea out for a cup of coffee and said ‘I want to recruit them,’” Fitzpatrick recalled. “They are two stellar scientists.”
They were both working in Montreal at the time, one at McGill and the other at the University of Quebec. Fitzpatrick managed to negotiate a deal.
“If you sit back and wait for the people who are stellar scientists you’re going to have a long wait. Joe and Alice wouldn’t have come here if we didn’t have the Stewart Roods and the Cam Goaters. What it took from me was a commitment to work as hard as I could to build a water building.”
Even though it took a few years, Fitzpatrick accomplished his goal. Another success story is husband-and-wife molecular biologists, Olga and Igor Kovalchuk. They were recruited to the U of L eight years ago and each now has a research budget of more than $1 million.
Fitzpatrick is confident the nine-member research development department will do just fine without him.
“I feel really good because when I walk out the door I know the infrastructure is here for the university to succeed,” he said. “We have some of the best people you can imagine in this office. They’re hard-working, innovative and creative and they’re really hungry to succeed.”
Fitzpatrick estimates the amount of research funding coming to the U of L has increased a thousandfold in the last 10 years.
“It’s been a real heady time for that office,” said U of L president Bill Cade. “I’m real proud of what he’s accomplished and I’m real proud of Dennis. His shoes are going to be hard to fill.”
After a holiday to Eastern Canada and the United States, Fitzpatrick intends to do some volunteer work, work on a book he started 14 years ago and pursue his interest in a water project in the Northwest Territories. He has two years of administrative leave due to him and no firm plans after that, as yet.
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