The University of Prince Edward Island is helping create an economically sustainable Island through knowledge and a commitment to excellence

Wade MacLauchlan remembers the date May 31,1997, well. Along with 75,000 other people, he travelled on foot from New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island to celebrate the opening of the Confederation Bridge. It was the first time anyone had been able to walk to the Island. “My father was involved in the building of the Confederation Bridge, and I knew that I was returning home,” he says, after being away from P.E.I. for 23 years. “Bridges are important to communities, both physically and metaphorically, as we make connections here at home and to the larger world.”  

Today MacLauchlan is the president of the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI). Now in his final year of a 12-year tenure, he has been relentlessly building bridges between the university and the Island, and between the Island and the rest of the world, in an effort to create economically sustainable communities on P.E.I.

Courtesy UPEI

Located in Charlottetown, UPEI is home to 4,500 full-time and part-time students from more than 50 countries; it employs more than 200 educators and researchers, including seven Canada Research Chairs and one Canada Excellence Research Chair. Over the last 40 years, its history and standard for academic innovation and economic sustainability has earned it a reputation of excellence. In fact, the university is one of the top 10 research-intensive undergraduate universities in Canada. Although it’s best known for its Atlantic Veterinary College, a world-leading research institute, UPEI is also recognized as a global leader in biosciences, supported by its close partnership with the National Research Council’s Institute for Nutrisciences and Health.

In an effort to further its mission to build an economically sustainable community on the Island, last year UPEI unveiled a “University Island” platform, a web-based dataset that tracks the relationships between UPEI and the province, plus its regional, national, and international partnerships. Already the results are impressive and include partnerships with almost every community in Prince Edward Island, in every province of Canada, and in almost every country in the world. “The concept of University Island is simple,” says MacLauchlan. “A healthy university means a healthy Island, and a healthy Island means a healthy university.”

In addition to its Atlantic Veterinary College and bioscience research, UPEI is becoming a leader in the nutritional food science sector through its collaborative work with the PEI Healthy Eating Alliance (HEA), an organization dedicated to improving the eating habits of and reducing obesity in children and youth. Jennifer Taylor is a founding member and the president of the alliance, as well as an associate professor in UPEI’s department of family and nutritional sciences. For a decade she has been studying what Islanders eat; specifically, what youth eat at school. “The work we’re doing is in prevention,” she says, “so we’re talking about a long-term potential benefit on health care costs.”

Taylor’s current research initiative, the School Nutrition and Activity Project (SNAP), is the first of its kind in Canada since 1974 to investigate whether school nutrition policies can have an impact on childhood obesity. “What we’ve found is that here on the Island, student intake of milk, fruits, and vegetables is low, while their intake of junk food is high,” she says. “Local data created by local people has a big impact on the Island,” adds Taylor, “because most national studies leave P.E.I. out.”

Taylor credits the University Island philosophy for enabling her to spend the significant time it takes to establish good working relationships with schools, government, and health charities that are necessary to conduct her research. “Community-based work is a strange animal to a lot of academic institutions because [those institutions] value different things,” she says. “At UPEI, I’ve been able to successfully integrate my research and community work.”

That’s critical, because it takes a village to improve childhood nutrition. From advertising unhealthy snacks to serving hot dogs in schools and “rink fries” at hockey arenas, solutions require action at both a societal and governmental level. “There needs to be a shift in the culture and mentality,” says Taylor, who is developing a healthy-eating plan for students on the UPEI campus. She says that the lessons she has learned while developing school nutrition policies have taught her to use a consultative approach involving students, staff, faculty, and food services—an approach that has been effective in creating sustainable change.

For Mark Hemphill, UPEI offered a new take-off point after a career in the software industry. Raised in Summerside, about an hour west of Charlottetown, he got an undergraduate degree at UPEI before leaving the Island in 1995 to work in the high-tech world on the mainland. When the dot-com bubble burst, UPEI lured him back to teach at its business school, which was looking to develop a technology and entrepreneurship department. “The timing was right,” says Hemphill of his homecoming. “I always knew I was destined to return to the Island someday, and the whole package had great appeal to me.”

As a professor of media and communications, Hemphill spent five years teaching students to develop real-world business and IT skills. By 2007, however, the urge to innovate and return to the software industry propelled him to launch a community-based digital signage service that combines digital poster-style advertising with the content-sharing attributes of social media. He brought the idea to the university; with support from UPEI’s Three Oaks Innovations, a not-for-profit UPEI corporation that helps researchers transform innovations into commercial products, business opportunities, and public knowledge, Screenscape Networks Inc. was born.

Today Hemphill is the chair of Screenscape, which has 35 full-time staff, 21 of whom are based in Charlottetown with another 14 in Oakville, Ont., New York City, and Dallas. The company was recently named a Top 25 Up and Coming technology company by the Branham’s Group. “This is the type of work I would have loved to be able to do when I graduated,” says Hemphill, “but there weren’t any opportunities like this for me back then.” 

When asked what drives him, UPEI president Wade MacLauchlan pauses, then responds: “Those of us who have benefitted from a period of sustained growth have a responsibility to ensure that these advantages are carried forward for our next generation.” MacLauchlan left the island in 1976, after receiving an undergraduate degree from UPEI, to study law at the University of New Brunswick (UNB). He then moved to New Haven, Conn., to complete his graduate studies at Yale Law School. In 1983 he returned to Atlantic Canada to become a professor at Dalhousie Law School in Halifax, and in 1991 he became dean of law at UNB. 

In spite of his personal and professional commitment to the Island, MacLauchlan understands that some young people need to leave the provincial nest and spread their wings; in fact, he encourages them to do so. “I don’t mind if they go away,” he says. “I’d like to sign them up as a kind of buccaneer to bring back lots of knowledge and contacts and new ideas about how we can do things better. I don’t think bungee cords are the answer.”

Michael Mayne is one of those buccaneers. Born and raised in Emerald, P.E.I., he received his bachelor of science from UPEI before attending the University of Toronto, where he got a PhD in molecular biology and biochemisty. In 2000 he joined a research team at Winnipeg’s University of Manitoba, where he focused on neurological-based disorders, specifically neurodegenerative disorders. 

In 2003 MacLauchlan called Mayne at the University of Manitoba to tell him that he would be the ideal person to lead the National Research Council Institute for Nutrisciences and Health, a $20-million federal research facility located at UPEI that focuses on the impact bioactives have on human and animal health. Mayne returned with his wife, a P.E.I. native and clinical psychologist, and their young daughter. As founding director, Mayne handpicked the facility’s research team, which is composed of the brightest minds from P.E.I. and around the world. 

Today Mayne is a deputy minister in the provincial Department of Innovation and Advanced Learning but remains a key member of the Island’s expanding bioscience sector. “The NRC institute is playing an important role in linking the modern technology of biotechnology with our traditional sectors of farming and fishing,” he says. “UPEI is the key reason the province has the institute. Our biotech resources are the best resources we have outside of our people. Diversification of our economy is vital, yet we remain linked to the land and sea.”

After a decade of building a bridge between the Island and the university, MacLauchlan is shoring his legacy before his stint as UPEI’s president ends in the summer of 2011. During his final year, he will focus on fundraising so when he leaves, the school will have no unfunded debt. “We’ll be approaching leading donors in the Atlantic region and beyond to help us ‘burn the mortgage,’ ” he says. This will include completing the funding for an expansion of the Atlantic Veterinary College and building a new school of nursing, as well as digitizing a huge archive of P.E.I. heritage. He plans to keep living on the Island in the community he grew up in, Stanhope, and to work in a private capacity. 

In MacLauchlan’s opinion, the secret to P.E.I.’s future success lies in telling a story everyone wants to be part of. For him, it’s University Island. “By lighting up our community here at home through knowledge and a commitment to excellence, we ensure that UPEI and the province have a strong national and international brand,” he says. It’s part of his vision for a University Island that stretches from Murray Harbour to Tignish, from North Rustico to Charlottetown, and from P.E.I. to the rest of the world.