UPEI's Dr. Alaa Abd-El-Aziz is our 2020 Innovator of the Year
“Wow, you can do a lot with chemistry,” thought 10-year-old Alaa. His experiment—making light from lemons, wires, a lightbulb and a few other supplies found around his home in Cairo, Egypt—had worked. But it was the unintended reaction that proved to be Alaa’s real eureka moment: the science lesson sparked his lifelong passion for chemistry. That passion was cemented in the classroom eight years later. By then a second-year undergraduate student at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Alaa had accepted his professor’s challenge to deliver a two-hour lecture to his peers on a relatively new theory in his field. Alaa took a month to prepare, practicing his lecture at least 20 times. “I wanted to show my classmates that I can take this idea and put it simply,” says Alaa... Read more

Businesses can't do business at a distance forever
We can go cashless, shop online, automate customer service and populate warehouses with robots. We can make phone calls, send emails, type texts and video chat all the live-long day. But—and this is likely going to be a call-to-arms for all the gadget geeks out there—there is no tech equivalent for human-to-human interaction. As I’m writing this, I’m looking at a Globe and Mail op-ed with the provocative title-query: Has COVID-19 quietly killed Canadian Confederation? Equating protective travel bans with the balkanization of Canada, author Michael Bryant of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association asserts (ridiculously, in my opinion) that mobility rights trump public safety. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, as well as all-too-uncommon common sense, tell you that physiological health is the most fundamental necessity of life. You must have heard the adage: if you don’t have your health, you have nothing. Guess what? It’s an adage for a reason...
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