Meeting Invitation
Dear Chairs and Heads:
It is my pleasure to invite you to the 54th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Council of University Biology Chairs (CCUBC) to be held in Le Nouvel Hotel, Montreal, QC on November 6 to 8, 2025.
Building on the success of the 53rd Annual Meeting that was held in Ottawa, it was decided to host the 54th Annual Meeting in Montreal, Quebec. This central location should provide easy access to all wishing to attend (basically, a single flight from just about anywhere in the country). Montreal is a vibrant city with a long and rich cultural history, and should prove to be an exciting city to host our next annual meeting. Please stay tuned for further details.
I would like to encourage you to come and join us in Montreal where you will be met with friendly faces who understand the many challenges that we all experience as leaders in our respective academic units. The CCUBC should provide an excellent forum to learn from and make connections with peers who experience similar challenges of the many facets of academic leadership, including institutional challenges and pressures, and provincial and federal hurdles. This peer community is extremely supportive, and I promise that you will encounter many with whom you can network, and more importantly can learn from as they offer sage advice from their own learned experience.
Personally, my first CCUBC meeting was in Halifax (November, 2022), only 3 short months after I was appointed Head of Botany at the University of British Columbia. As I departed for the annual meeting, I vividly recall being somewhat overwhelmed with a number of departmental challenges and difficulties, and the significant daily/weekly demands on my time. However, at the annual meeting, I was pleasantly surprised to hear this was not unique to my own situation, and was not a function of years in position. Moreover, great advice was received on how to navigate the challenges ahead. Equally important was the opportunity to connect with a fantastic group of peers who have helped with cyclical reviews, curricular changes, post-pandemic fall-out, the need for and strategies to increase graduate stipends, indigenizing and decolonializing the curriculum, and an array of other pressing issues common to Biology programs around the country. The meeting and interaction with my peers also helped to inform and shaped the conversations. I now navigate my department around policy, equity, curriculum, and performance evaluation, to name only a few. These annual meetings have been truly informative and helpful.
For those of you who are new to their role and to the CCUBC, we are an organization that was established in 1971 that is comprised of the Heads and Chairs of the Biology (and biology-related) departments from Canadian Universities, coast to coast. We have a long history of connecting with each other about issues, processes, and the many challenges that we all face in our academic units.
Please join the CCUBC as a member and meet with us in November! I look forward to seeing you there!
If you are not yet a member and have questions, I encourage you to reach out to me for more information and I would be happy to have a conversation about the benefits that CCUBC provides. Thank you.
With warm regards,
Shawn Mansfield
CCUBC President,
Professor & Chair
Department of Botany
University of British Columbia