NEW IN TOWN I COUPLES
Balsillie School brings renowned scholars to Waterloo.
COMING FROM a land of eucalyptus trees and kangaroos, John Ravenhill and Maria-Stefania Wirga were surprisingly accepting of Waterloo’s blinding snow storms and freezing cold.
But then, they love travel, adventure, a new challenge. This winter, their first in Canada after a move from Australia, just happened to be the region’s coldest winter in 20 years.
Each time the temperature plummeted — dipping as low as -31.2 C — locals assured them it wasn’t typical.
“People make the comment that this is the coldest it has been. They say it’s never like this,” Ravenhill says, smiling. The weather, with its polar vortex flirtations, required the scholars from Down Under to acquire some new skills.
“We have been walking and trying not to fall; that’s quite a skill,” says Wirga, laughing. “It is a skill to walk on snow and black ice.”
The couple moved to Waterloo from Australia last September after a search committee named Ravenhill director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs.
Ravenhill is an internationally renowned political scientist, a highly respected academic and researcher whose vast scholarship is in most of the leading journals of international relations. He’s an editor of several books on international relations, and was a visiting professor at universities in Geneva, Japan, Berkeley and Singapore.
He has been a consultant to the World Bank, the U.S. Department of State, the Asian Development Bank and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Secretariat.
The Balsillie School, with three post-graduate programs and 65 faculty associated with it, is a collaboration of the school, Wilfrid Laurier University, University of Waterloo and the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
It’s a unique partnership with two leading universities and Canada’s foremost thinktank in the area of international relations, Ravenhill says.
Wirga is a clinical psychologist with a PhD in psychology and child development >>