Movers & Shakers MORE ABOUT SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES For APEGA Member Greg Christenson, P.Eng. , homebuilding crosses his family’s generations. In the 1940s Mr. Christenson’s grandfather built homes in the Camrose area. The building tradition carried on with his father, Lloyd Christenson, who helped build and relocate Founder’s Hall at the University of Alberta’s Augustana Campus in Camrose. Today, Christenson Developments focuses on much more than the construction part of the equation. Influenced by his father’s affinity for not-for-profits, the company engages in local partnerships to drive community development and engagement. “We don’t just turn over the keys and walk away,” Mr. Christenson told the University of Alberta’s engineering alumni magazine, The Builder . “We’re partners. We stay in that micro-community, and the buildings are focal points and gathering places for the community.” This includes working on seniors’ housing and becoming involved in wellness and community care models. And it now also includes the Christenson professorship, a part of the Nasseri School of Building Science and Engineering in Edmonton.
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assess conditions under which the tracking didn’t perform well. He was also tasked with providing recommendations to improve performance. “We knew the technology had limitations,” Dr. Lachapelle told the university’s online news service, UToday . “Offenders live indoors, for example, which can throw off GPS.” Dr. Lachapelle and his team worked indoors and outdoors, going through, as he called them, “catch-me- if-you-can scenarios.” They discovered that adding self-contained sensors that do not rely on external electromagnetic signals can offer new metrics — ones that help portray what people are doing and not just their location. Incorporated into an ankle bracelet, the sensors show, for example, whether a person is standing, moving, lying down, or running. TRANSFORMING THROUGH CONSTRUCTION Greg Christenson, P.Eng., believes in creating environmentally friendly construction practices. -photo courtesy Jason Franson, University of Alberta Faculty of Engineering The professorship will support research into environmentally friendly construction practices. “I want to see our industry move from doing transactional work to doing transformative work,” Mr. Christenson said.
SOCIOLOGY MEETS ENGINEERING IN STUDY OF OFFENDER MONITORING
Almost three years ago, criminologist Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot, now head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary, began studying the merit of GPS-monitored offender tracking. Do the monitors decrease the likelihood of reoffence? Are certain types of offenders better suited than others for monitoring? But she needed help with the technological aspects of her research. That led her to geomatics pioneer Gérard Lachapelle, P.Eng., PhD . She went to the right place: Dr. Lachapelle is a two-time APEGA Summit Award recipient. In 2000, he received the Frank Spragins Technical Award, and in 2007, the Research Excellence Award. Dr. Lachapelle, a professor emeritus in the Geomatics Engineering Department at the Schulich School of Engineering, was brought on board to
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