The time is right for Canadian universities to make their mark on the international student market, says University of Alberta President Dr Indira Samarasekera. She is also determined to win the university a place among the 20 leading comparable universities around the world.

In the boom years, the University of Alberta derived huge benefits from the oil revenues invested in education by Canada's richest province. Now the boom is over, at least temporarily, but the university intends to enter its second century - it was founded in 1908 - by staking its claim to be considered among the world's leading public universities.

Samarasekera is capitalising on the research strengths built on oil and other natural resource revenues to attract international faculty and students. She says that Alberta offers a high quality of life with a world-renowned K-12 school system that has also benefited from the provincial government's long-term investment, good health care, low personal taxes, a safe environment and excellent leisure opportunities in the nearby Rockies.

Since she joined the university as president in 2005, Samarasekera has been instrumental in developing a renewed vision and academic plan for the university. Born in Sri Lanka in 1952, she graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Ceylon and, as a Fulbright-Hays Scholar, took an MSc at the University of California-Davis before moving to Canada to study for her PhD in metallurgical engineering at the University of British Columbia.

Samarasekera went on to join the department of materials engineering at UBC, where she researched new processes of steel production. From 2000 to 2005 she was vice-president, research, at the university.

One of Canada's leading metallurgical engineers, she was awarded the Order of Canada in 2002 in recognition of outstanding contributions to steel process engineering and has been a consultant to steel companies around the world.

As well as being Alberta's first female university president, she has made her mark at the federal level as a member of the Prime Minister's Advisory Committee on Public Service Renewal and the Expert Panel on Commercialisation. There are also seats on the boards of the Conference Board of Canada, the Public Policy Forum of Canada, the Bank of Nova Scotia and the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research.

Of Tamil descent, Samarasekera retains deep ties with Sri Lanka and is passionate in her determination to combat violence and to promote equality. She has two grown-up children, and loves the theatre, opera, and classical music concerts.

Her commitment to education as a means of achieving prosperity and wellbeing is highly appropriate given Alberta's status as a global player in oil and gas production. The province is the world's second largest exporter of natural gas and the fourth largest producer of oil so the university has a tradition of conducting strong energy-related research.

With the geosciences, petrochemicals and engineering, there is also an emphasis on agriculture but Samarasekera says the university has been careful to maintain a balance with the arts and social sciences. Located in Edmonton, it is Canada's third-largest university, with 37,000 students and 3,200 academic staff.

"This is a unique opportunity - the University of Alberta is one of a number of universities at a tipping point. We want to be among the top 20 public universities in the world by 2020," she says.

"Most Canadian universities have been asleep at the switch in terms of attracting international undergraduate students. Our universities have now decided to take on the UK and Australia. We are mounting a very aggressive campaign to attract a lot more international students from India and China. We say Canada has many of the advantages of Britain and Australia but also many of the attributes of the United States."

The university is devising its own benchmarking exercise, selecting universities sharing a small number of characteristics - they must, like Alberta, have a medical school and school of agriculture - for comparison, starting in the US but widening the circle internationally.

Among other plans, Samarasekera intends to increase the proportion of international students from 6% to 15% over the next five to six years, although the larger number could cause tensions in Alberta where competition to enrol in the university is already intense. A higher ceiling of 30-35% has been set for graduate students - up from the current 21%.

Faculty turnover through retirements of 70% in the past 10 years has made room for many younger, mid-career Canadian, US and other international academics in Edmonton.

There has been significant new infrastructure too: a C$60 million (US$49 million) National Institute for Nanotechnology and $300 million facilities for health research innovation have been completed. Construction has also begun on a $400 million Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science and a $950 million Edmonton Clinic in partnership with Alberta Health Services.

The Edmonton clinic will be an academic health centre, combining patient care with medical training and research. Samarasekera compares its potential with the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

Alberta's prominence as an oil producer depends heavily on developing the oil sands, which causes alarm among environmentalists. Estimates put these "non-conventional" reserves as equal approximately to the conventional oil reserves of the rest of the world. But until oil prices soared in the second half of 2005 they were too expensive to develop.

While the global economic downturn and falling oil prices have temporarily slowed production, Samarasekera is confident, if projected shortfalls between demand and supply from conventional sources become a reality, increased production will resume.

She sees no alternative if the looming energy gap is to be met and she places the university at the centre of the search for ways to expand production, maximise efficiency and minimise environmental damage.

"We are rapidly accelerating our quest to develop economically viable, large scale carbon capture and storage technologies and to reduce the use of water in the process," she says.

Some 80% of the oil sands are located deep below the surface, requiring different production techniques that will avoid expanded surface mining and reduce the environmental impact.

Growing up in Sri Lanka, Samarasekera focused on a career in engineering at an early stage even if she only had the haziest idea of what it entailed. And she did not even consider that being female was a barrier to a career in a male-dominated field. The same could be said for the top job in a university teetering on the brink of moving into the global league.

It is impossible to discuss Alberta without mentioning the extreme winter weather. Samarasekera agrees. "They are long," she says, drawing out the word in emphasis. "But you adjust."

david.jobbins@uw-news.com

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