Ladies and gentlemen, this year the SIA ASEUJE board struck a Nominations and Awards Committee, or NAC, consisting of Susan McCann, Jillian Seniuk-Cicak, and me, Sean Ma. The NAC has two purposes. The first is to ensure that we have nominations for all board positions each year.

That went well this year. The second is to manage awards. This past year we initiated two awards for SIA, and with great pleasure we're giving out the first of them this morning. The board is pleased to announce the inauguration of the SIA ASEUJE Lifetime Service Award.

This award recognizes an individual who has, over the span of at least 15 years, contributed significantly to SIA ASEUJE and to the development of engineering education in Canada. Winners of this award will have their conference fees waived for the year the award is given,

and their SIA ASEUJE membership fees waived for life. They will receive a plaque, they will have their name ensconced on our website, eventually, and they will be invited to give a talk during the next SIA ASEUJE conference. The bar is being set high for this award. It will not be awarded every year, but it is being awarded this year.

It will come as no surprise to many of you, I'm sure, to hear that the first and most worthy recipient of the SIA ASEUJE Lifetime Service Award is Ron Britton from the University of Manitoba. Ron, come on up.

For those of you who know Ron, and I'm assuming by your applause that a lot of you do, you'll know that he spends considerable amounts of time thinking about engineering students, engineers, engineering, design, and education.

Ron was an NSERC design chair and is a mentor to many other Canadian engineering education leaders. Ron came to his career early as an engineering educator by the way of University of Saskatchewan, the University of Manitoba, and Texas A.M. University.

Born and raised in Lang, Saskatchewan, Ron learned early in life the value of hands-on experience. Although he claims that the only reason he is an engineer is that an injury prevented him from becoming a professional football player, for those who know him, you will confirm that Ron is a natural educator.

But Ron is so much more than that. Ron practiced engineering for both Shell Oil, where he built service stations, not oil wells, and Beaver Lumber, where he honed his design skills in one of the most difficult engineering materials, wood. Ron eventually took his skills he learned as an engineer and brought them into the classroom to help future engineers understand exactly what being an engineer means.

When the NSERC chair was initiated, Ron was one of only a handful of engineering academics in Canada who could claim to have made a living as an engineer before they moved into academia. This career path has enabled Ron to influence the lives of generations of engineers, and

now, through his involvement in SIA, ACG, to influence the development of engineering education across Canada. Here are some excerpts from Ron's writing to demonstrate his thinking. As an academic engineer, I spend significant amounts of time trying to help

students understand the professional world they will one day be a part of. There is no singular solution to the problem of accessing students who feel uncertain about a career in engineering, but we need to broaden our approach. As a profession, we take pride in finding solutions to complex problems. While this is a complex problem, if we don't recruit engineering students, we won't have engineering graduates.

Students need mentors to encourage them to become engineers. An article on the Canadian Consulting Engineer Electronic Message Board, Recent Studies Raised Concerns Over Champlain Bridge, caught my attention. The article caused me to feel an affinity for the old bridge.

Thanks to updates and modifications, we have both responded to the requirements of a 50-year design life. One does not learn to swim in lectures or theoretical analysis. To learn to swim, you must be allowed to get in the water and thrash around. During the thrashing around, most of us need the assistance, encouragement and advice

of someone who has mastered the art of staying alive in the water. Similarly, one does not learn to design in lectures or by answering closed-ended questions from the back of a book. Again, one must be allowed to thrash around under the tutelage of someone who has survived that particular pool of sharks.

Design is what engineers do, and the world is better for it. Engineering education provides the foundation upon which professional careers can and will develop. And finally, being a professional engineer does not define what I do. It defines who I am.

Please join us in congratulating Ron Brittain again on a lifetime of service to the CEA ACG to the Engineering Education in Canada. We're going to keep Ron up here for a few more moments, as we want to tell you about the second CEA ACG award.

This one will not be a surprise to Ron. He knows about this one. Starting next year, we will present the first Ron Brittain Engineering Education Vanguard Award.

Championing the field of engineering education through innovation and research is both important and courageous. It's important because it's critical to the development of the profession, and it's courageous because in Canada the field is still nascent. As in, it's not quite sexy yet. Innovation and research in engineering education are the agents of change.

Innovation in the classroom and dedication to research in a fledgling field at the beginning of an academic career will grow the field of engineering education in Canada. People on the frontier need to be supported and celebrated. So this award will go to a person who early in their career has committed to the development of engineering education in Canada through practice and or research.

This person will be contributing to the field in a way that demonstrates her or his commitment to innovation change and improvement in engineering education, is making significant differences in engineering education practices through innovation in the classroom and or through research,

and has demonstrated support for SIA ASEOGE through membership and conference participation. There was never a more apt name for an award than this one, the Ron Brittain Engineering Education Vanguard Award. He wouldn't let us just call it the Ron Brittain Award. It's named after the man who epitomizes SIA ASEOGE's mission to enhance the competence

and relevance of graduates from Canadian engineering schools through continuous improvement in engineering education. Ron has been and remains a leader of our community. Please join us in once again congratulating Ron for being the first recipient of the SIA ASEOGE

Lifetime Service Award and for being the namesake of the new Ron Brittain Engineering Education Vanguard Award.

It's amazing how history can be distorted. Thank you. As it happens, this is my 50th anniversary of being an academic. 50 years ago at a meeting of the Canadian Society of Agricultural Engineers in Saskatoon,

I was given the opportunity to go back to school as a part-time instructor and in order to make up the difference in salary between being a part-time instructor and running the farm buildings division for beer, I was told that I could get my master's degree.

My wife and I over a pizza and a bottle of wine made that decision, the dumbest economic decision I've ever made. But it's overwhelming to be honoured this way.

I can't help but think back to the point where CWA was a telephone connection between Queen's University and the University of Manitoba, where Dave and I, Dave Strong and I, mutually commiserated on what we'd gotten ourselves into.

I don't think either one of us believed at that point in time that we'd be where we are. Engineering education seems to be recognised as something that's real. We all know it's damned awful important. And thank you for making the digging around that we did many years ago into something like this today.

One request to UBC. Will you please arrange that we get to go into and look around the new, I think it's seven-storey, all-wood residence building. I mean, I'm still selling wood. Thank you.