 We are August 26, 2015 at the Fairmont Hotel in Toronto and the interviewer, as usual, will be William McCrack. I'm just going to start with a few quick questions. Could you please state your full name? Indira Vasanti Samarasekar. And your age, please? I was born on April 11, 1952. I'm 64 years old. And where were you born? I was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Okay. And as a child, what did your parents do? My father was a surgeon. He's no longer alive. He was an auto-learningologist. And my mother was a homemaker. We had four children. I have three siblings, so pretty busy. She had plenty to do. And as a child, what were your passions or what did you do for fun, your interests? I enjoyed reading a lot. And I played a lot of sports in school, as well as debating teams. I participated in debating, so that kept me pretty busy. And so where did you, in school, I guess, at a young age, what subjects were your strengths or interests? Yeah, I was good at math and physics. So that started at a very young age. Physics, I started thinking physics. I think it was in grade eight, perhaps, but then really significantly in grade 10 and 11 and 12. Okay. So when you went to university, it was just obvious that you were going to go into the sciences? Well, no, yeah. I went straight into engineering. Okay. Yeah, so that was pretty, I knew I wanted to do engineering very early on, so there wasn't a lot of uncertainty around that. I did worry about the potential that there would be no women in the class. Yes. And so the last one day, I was getting a little bit of cold feet, but my father and my mother said, well, let's go find out whether there are women in the class. Then you don't have to worry about that. And it turned out that he had about 12 out of 150. Okay, so still small, but still significant. Most of the time there used to be one or none or two or something like that. Yeah, what kind of engineering? I did mechanical. Okay, because I know chemistry, for example, usually has more women. Yeah, mechanical, there were no women. So when I went into engineering, there were 12, and then we streamed into second year. So when I went into mechanical, there were no women. But by then I was used to being around guys. Yeah, I know even when I was not that long ago, when I was looking at universities, I'm from New Brunswick, and the University of Monkton, I don't know if they still do, but a few years ago they would give scholarships just for being a woman for engineering to encourage numbers, essentially, in the department. So yeah, tell me a bit about your education and what you did afterwards. Is that your first job? Yeah, so I did most of my education in Sri Lanka. Basically those days I was not co-ed, so I was in girls' schools all my life. Then I worked for the Petroleum Corporation Refinery. It was a small refinery. I was a mechanical mentor and engineer. But I always knew I wanted to do graduate work, so I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship, which is an American exchange scholarship, which I received. And then I got married. My husband and I went to the University of California in Davis, California, for about 18 months. And then after that he was lucky to get a job in Canada. We were looking to move somewhere where we could maybe stay long term. And so we got immigration to Canada and came to Canada in 1977. Why Canada specifically? Well, you know, it's interesting. My father always had a great admiration for Canada. He'd say, you know, it's a beautiful country. It's a big country. It's a country where immigrants seem to be welcome. They seem to integrate well. Pierre Trudeau was prime minister and he was well known around the world. So he always encouraged me to think about Canada as a destination. So maybe that affected my decision. So then you made it to Canada? And then I did a PhD at the University of British Columbia from 1977 to 80. It was at that time that I switched from mechanical engineering to metallurgical engineering. And what was your thesis? It was mathematical modeling of continuous casting of steel, which was a very new process at the time. It had been commercialized in the mid-60s, but it was still quite underdeveloped, I would say. So I was doing more research. So a lot of research beginning to happen in that field. And so I did research in that area. And then after you finished your doctorate, what became your first or you consider your first job? So at that time jobs were somewhat hard to come by in academia in the 80s, believe it or not, because they had done a lot of hiring in the 60s. So not many people were retiring. I was hired as a lecturer for two years on a temporary basis at the University of British Columbia. And then when that was over, there was a semi-permanent job as assistant professor, which I took. And I was in that position for about nine years before someone retired and I got a permanent job. And when teaching, are there any standout or memorable classes? I enjoyed teaching mathematical modeling of processes, because that's what I did for my PhD. And computers, believe it or not, at that time were just becoming useful. Just to give you a sense, people don't realize that the entire mainframe, because we basically had mainframe computing, there were no mini computers or even PCs were not yet developed, was eight megabytes, the entire machine for the entire university. So today you have eight megabytes just on your own. That's just a few word documents. So you began to develop tools and techniques to use the computers to solve large-scale problems. Throughout your career, did you join any organizations or committees? Yeah, well I joined the metallurgical society of CIN quite early on. I think I was on the membership committee or something. And whenever there were conferences I would help with organizing symposium. I also joined the iron and steel society of the AIME and also TMS, which is the metals, minerals, materials society also of AIME. And I was on committees and things like that. Any of those help you early in your career? I would say becoming the president of MAPSOC in 1995, which is now almost 20 years ago, was a really important turning point for my career, because I was quite diffident about leadership positions, particularly with mostly male colleagues. But I was encouraged to take that on and I'm really glad I did, because I had to organize a conference, I had to run the society for a year. It really helped me develop my confidence. And you're talking about roles as a leader. Tell me a bit more about that, because eventually you became quite a leader. Well, after the metallurgical society CIN presidency, I began to participate even more so on various university committees. This was sort of routine perhaps as part of their job. But I was invited to serve on, you know, search committees for deans and committees for research and this and that. And then about 1998, the university was looking for a vice president research. Now at that time, I had not had much administrative experience. I was an academic, but I hadn't become a dean or department chair. I was department chair for six months. And interestingly, some colleagues of mine, one of whom was Ray Medecraft, who used to be the VP at Stelco, he was my department chair, encouraged me to put my name in for this job. And I was mostly convinced I wouldn't get it, because I didn't have any sort of traditional experience. It turned out they offered me the position. And so that was really a big step up for me. I mean, I went from being a professor, director of a small center to being the vice president of research for the whole university, reporting to a president. So that was my first really big executive position. And then five years later, I became president of University of Alberta. So it was a fairly rapid set of promotions. And you were, if I'm not mistaken, the first woman president in any Alberta university in history. So how was that? By that time, one stops thinking about the first woman business, because the first time you think about it is when I became a woman, a mechanical engineer. After that time, it's not very noble to me personally, maybe to others. But I never found that a particularly remarkable thing. There were many other women who were presidents of universities. Martha Piper, my boss, had been president of UBC. Heather Monroe Bloom had just become president of McGill. Shirley Tillman had become president of Princeton. She's a Canadian. She's becoming university president. So I didn't see that as particularly remarkable. Yeah. And now there's more women in the public world than now. Exactly. What would you consider to be the big bulk or the important aspects of your work as a president, but also when you were working in research as well? Yeah. Well, let me speak about the research first. Arche2 have got into, as a mechanical engineer, into continuous casting of steel, because the big issues of the day were making high quality, steel casting going from liquid to solid in this relatively new process and not having cracks and defects. And so the work that I did with my supervisor and mentor, Keith Premakom, who was an unbelievable giant in the field, was some of the, I would say, fairly pioneering work to understand the relationship between the design and operation of the machine and the defects in the steel product. So very proud of that work. We worked together as a team for pretty much 20 years because he died prematurely in the 1997 heart attack. And over those 20 years, the work that we did really became, I would say the gold standard for industry in terms of making billets which are small sections and casting them without defects. So that was perhaps a wonderful development to be a part of and to help drive. So it enabled us to do consulting around the world. We were giving courses in different countries, consulting with companies who were having problems, trying to help them solve them. So it was a good innings. And your work as president, could you elaborate a bit on that? Yeah, running a large university is a highly political job because unlike the CEO of a company, we have technically what is called shared governance, which means everybody's in charge and nobody's in charge. And so you have to really lead the institution by consensus. And you have a lot of stakeholders. You know, you obviously, your number one job is to ensure that the student experience is the best it could be, that you hire the best faculty, and ensure that they can do their best work and that staff feel challenged. And then you have to deal with the government who funds most of the universities and alumni. You have to be in the business of fundraising. And then you have to work with other stakeholders like the city and the province and of course the federal government. So I would say my time at University of Alberta, there are a couple of things that I'm particularly proud of. First of all, the University of Alberta is one of Canada's leading research universities. I mean, if you look at all of the indicators at the time that I took over, we might have been ranked about fifth or sixth on a lot of them, but also relatively unknown in Canada. People knew University of British Columbia, they talked about Toronto and McGill, but U of A was never really mentioned in that league. So one of my goals was to ensure that the reputation gap between University of Alberta and its peers, who are basically UBC, Toronto, McGill, and University of Montreal was closed, and I think we did that. Secondly, we worked on creating a vision that brought the university community together, and it was called Air to Discover. And that vision basically set up some very high-level goals like increasing the percentage of international students, which was about 4% when I arrived. It's now close to 15% building international partnerships around the world, and renewing the physical infrastructure that had not... We had very few new buildings over the 90s because of the oil prices and recessions and whatnot. So we added about a billion and a half of new buildings while I was president, and hired probably about 400 professors from 200 additional to what we originally had. So it was a very satisfying time, but a challenging job, highly demanding, and not one you could do forever. Yeah, I'm not kidding. And then you, after that, you moved back to UBC? Yeah, so I've gone back to Vancouver, which is where my children live, because obviously they were born and raised there. At this point, I call myself busily retired because I don't have a job and I don't want a job, but I have a portfolio of projects that I'm involved in. I have an appointment at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, which is a think tank located on the campus of the University of British Columbia. I'll probably spend a day or a week there. I'm also going to be an advisor for a law firm called Bennett Jones. That's an Alberta firm that's in the energy industry, and they've opened an office in Vancouver, and I'm going to be in that office as a policy advisor a couple of days a week. And then I'm on a couple of boards, for profit and non-profit. I'm on the board of Bank of Nova Scotia, which is a very exciting place to be because the bank is one of the most international banks. We are in South America, so a lot of strategic planning. How do you get on a bank board? Well, it was interesting. It goes back to my steel connections. John Mayberry, who used to be the president of Defasco, I got to know because I held the Defasco chair in steel processing at Vancouver at the University of British Columbia. And I wouldn't say I got to know John that well, but of course his company was funding the chair and I'd meet him occasionally, and I'd send him Christmas cards, and we kept in touch. He was on the board of Bank of Nova Scotia, and they were looking for a board member from Alberta at the time because Alberta was growing rapidly and they obviously must have wanted more women. So he called me up and asked me whether I was interested, and then I went through the process where you have to be interviewed by the governance committee and there was a headhunter involved. So that's how I got on. So yeah, so semi-retired but still pretty much full-time. And then I'm on the board of Magna International, which is again back to my steel processing roots. Magna, of course, is one of the largest auto parts manufacturers in the world. It's number three. Canadian Company, started by Frank Stronach in Aurora, Ontario, run by a great engineer called Don Walker. And Magna supplies auto parts to the Detroit three and the German three. And we also have plants in China. We're growing rapidly in China. And Magna is very much at the frontier of the move to make cars lighter, smarter, you know, and more fuel efficient. So it's a very exciting time to be on a company like Magna. So I'm on that board as well. And then I'm on the board of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, as well as a couple of other small boards. Oh, there you go. Yeah. You also served as both board member and chair of the National Institute of Nanotechnology. That's correct. Could you explain a bit more what that is and what you do? Yeah, the National Institute of Nanotechnology is a joint venture between the University of Alberta and the National Research Council. And this was a lab that was started just before I became president. I think around 2004, and it was completed during my time as president, 2006. And as part of that, either the president of the university or position as a result of the fact that I was president of the University of Alberta, the chairmanship of the National Institute of Nanotechnology was a position that was held either by the president of UOB or the president of NRC. And so we rotated every two years. And so basically you provided oversight and direction for NINT as we called it. And I thought this was interesting. So I thought I'd ask, you served on the Prime Minister's advisory committee, right? Yes, yes. So how did you go from, I guess, your science background to the Prime Minister's advisory committee and what was your role in that? So the Prime Minister's advisory committee was on the public service. And Kevin Lynch was the clerk of the private council at that time. I'd like to know Kevin very well because Kevin had been Deputy Minister of Industry Canada and Deputy Minister of Finance. And as Vice President of Research at UBC, I did a lot of lobbying, really going to Ottawa and making the case for investments in R&D. So when Kevin became the clerk and created this council, he wanted people in the public sector who understood humans. It was really about helping to modernize and streamline the public service and new ideas around performance management and direction. So I was one of, I can't remember, 10 or 12 members. And the two co-chairs of the council were Darnas and Kowsky, who was the former Deputy Prime Minister and the Malroni government, and Paul Telly, who had been also a clerk of the private council. And I knew Darn quite well because he's an Albertan. So probably all of those things led to being on that committee. And we'd meet the Prime Minister once in a while, I would say, once every couple of meetings. He would come, he'd join us for dinner and give us his sense of why he thought this was important, how the world was changing and how the public service needed to be providing the kind of thought leadership to the government. Were there specific goals the committee had to reach in regards to the public service? Yeah, I mean the goals largely were around, in my recollection, was around ensuring that the public service broadly represented Canadians and attracting more people into the public service from outside Ottawa and ensuring that the government of Canada's public service had a presence across the country as well as ensuring that there were more young people coming into the public service and that the public service dealt with the rapid changes taking place in technology. So there were some specific goals in some of those areas that we were to meet. I asked the next question once in a while. I like the different answers and I find it quite interesting but with you it will be interesting because you have the science background but then you also have, you worked a lot basically in many, many other facets of Canada. The question being do you think there is still today a disconnect between the natural resource world, whether it be metallurgy, petroleum, mining and the general public? I would say yes, there is a disconnect. I think the disconnect is because the general public first of all doesn't understand that natural resources have been an important part of Canada's prosperity and history. Secondly, natural resources require high technology to advance whether it's oil and gas or steel or mining, metallurgy, all of these things. Huge amounts of technology and innovation have taken place. Many of them have been driven by Canadians and underappreciated, there's no question. That's the first thing. The second thing I think Canadians don't understand there's a sort of a gap in the science literacy in Canada and unfortunately the environmental movement while an important group, climate change is for real. This is not something we can just ignore. There's been a lot of hype around greenhouse gases and pollution and all of that and unfortunately many Canadians rightly or wrongly point to the natural resources as being responsible for the large amounts of greenhouse gases and not being good stewards of land, air and water. I think what people forget is that all human development has an impact on air, land and water and all human development has attempted to mitigate it to some extent and perhaps we absolutely do need to do more but I think the natural resources has gone through periods in which they've been very negatively perceived by the Canadian public. There was a time when acid rain and all of that stuff, big news and now we're in this business where the oil and gas sectors are taking a lot of negative publicity. It's unfortunate because if you ask any single Canadian whether they're willing to give up their car, their heat, air travel all of the modern conveniences they won't and yet they are the first to sort of criticize other people. So there's a high degree of hypocrisy around the whole question of who the villain really is. The villain is a consumer. Yeah, I had asked that answer to someone else who had worked a lot, Mellige, but a lot in mining as well and his point was you often hear people or the media criticizing a new mine or something but you never hear about because it ruins the force of the land it's around but you never hear about them criticizing a new housing development that ruins an entire forest or a new shopping centre I guess it's because it's also so exoteric for most people, it's not something they understand how it works down to the core it doesn't relate to them one really absolutely everything they touch comes from the natural resource industry Now a question as a woman we've seen now today and we talked about it a bit there are many more women and even more women than men in academia who go to university as well there's a steady incline in the STEM department for women as well but there still seems to be even though there are many many women in school who take STEM there seems to be still less women who end up in the natural resource industry I guess could you able to give some insight on that? I think there's a couple of things first of all I think there's no question there are more women doing science in many disciplines and yet women seem to gravitate towards what I call the sort of caring professions they tend to want to do medicine and nursing and well there's quite a few more women in law but engineering still is stuck at about 20-25% and those numbers haven't changed a lot so that's point one secondly I think women even when they do go into these fields tend not to go into the natural resource sector if it requires them to move a lot or go out into the field or into areas where remote locations field work partly because they have families who's going to take care of the kids even if their husband is willing to share the workload you need two people to have jobs so it makes it more difficult and women tend to be less reluctant to be the person that says we're going to up and relocate somewhere else so I think those are some of the reasons and of course the natural resource sector from time to time does do a recruitment of trying to attract women but generally speaking back to the question of the public a lot of young people don't actually know what the Korean natural resource sector would look like and so more outreach continues to be necessary good answer looking back throughout your career so not necessarily directly having to do with your career per se but with your experience and expertise in your opinion are there definite changes or advancements or anything really that you think has improved or advanced Canada for the better in your field oh yeah there's many yeah sure like notable ones fairly notable you know in Canada certainly you know Bob Lee we were talking about Bob Lee earlier you know the submerged two year which enabled certainly enhance the ability to make steel at high temperatures you know increase the productivity because you could run these things longer it was a huge breakthrough for the worldwide steel industry the second one that people may or may not know is the work that was done a long time ago by Jerry Heffernan and Lake Ontario Steel and the whole electric furnace steel making which is the recycling of scrap and making steel by re-melting scrap was a huge innovation and led the way to what is called the mini-mail industry all over North America Jerry is still alive you know I hope you'll interview Jerry I mean he is you know unbelievably you know an entrepreneur in that sense of the word the work that was done by my late colleague Keith Bramocom was a pioneer in the mathematical modeling business and really I think was one of the world leaders in design mathematical modeling to many processes not just steel but he worked in just about all the metals you know that really advanced Canada's stature and also the industry both nationally and internationally those I would say are the ones that come to mind Alex McLean again did some pioneering work in the business of tundish design which is in the still continuous casting business using a fluid flow models again a pioneer better understanding how steel flows and how defects are captured so Canada had many academics who were working in the sort of steel industry which was really thriving in the 80s and the 90s and a lot of new developments were taking place globally and Canada making I would say significant contributions and we'll finish with a few questions first what would you consider to be your biggest challenge throughout your career I think the biggest challenge really was really changing fields and then trying to juggle so I changed from mechanical engineering to materials and metallurgical engineering so I was very difficult because it was a whole new discipline that I had to grasp and then trying to develop a research area that was not my PhD thesis but something else in order to be an independent academic since I was in the same department so my colleague I couldn't keep doing the same things but the other big challenge was really juggling family and career it was very very challenging I mean I have two children who are very little and my ex husband a wonderful man it's been a great parent so we shared the parenting but it's very demanding trying to travel the world consult publish stay on top of your field and ensure that your two children grow up to be successful I think that problem is still there today for most families very engaged I watched my daughter my grandchild is only three years old and it's challenging for her parents and what would be the proudest moment in your life and if you want we can split it into it could be the proudest part or moment in your life and also your professional life I think my proudest moment is the two my son and their daughter my son and daughter have done very well they both pursued interesting paths to their careers my son did engineering first and then went into medical school which surprised me and of course he's today a urologist practicing surgeon in British Columbia my daughter went into biochemistry which was kind of an odd choice then she became a lawyer and now she's working on becoming a writer and proud of she spends many hours just on her writing career in addition to her legal career she works for the BC Securities Commission as a litigator basically inside of trading I would say by far that's given me the most pride I mean my career is great I've had a great career but ultimately it's your children and your relationships that really are lasting absolutely and last if you were speaking to someone much younger for example you were surrounded by students for a while so let's take students for example what would be the the biggest most important piece of advice for life lesson you could give them looking into the field I would say to be uncompromising in pursuing and focusing on something you really love but doing it at a very high standard I mean to succeed you have to focus laser like on excellence you can't do anything in half measures and just because you love it that doesn't mean you'll be successful there's a huge amount of hard work and relentless I mean there are days when you almost want to give up but if it's something worth doing you really have to put the time in I mean Malcolm Gladwell's notion it takes 10,000 hours is absolutely right and it's not just 10,000 hours of sloppy work it's 10,000 hours of diligent pushing the frontier so that's my advice to people you have to decide what it is you want to do you can change your mind as my kids did many times but once you've got to something you have to pursue it with 1,000% well thank you good honest answer is there anything else you'd like to add to that well I think I'd like to say that you know the Canadian metallurgical industry that I was part of was a great industry to be part of as a woman they were very encouraging I think I was certainly a great debt of gratitude to many leaders who have mentored me over the years as I mentioned you know Keith Bramaco, Alex McLean, Bob Lee people like Jerry Heffernan Jerry Hatch colleagues like Chris Twig-Molsey Sam Mccusen Carlos Diaz all these people who were colleagues you know they all probably never realized that they had a profound influence on my career by first of all being very inclusive and enabling me to succeed as a woman in a group of men so I just wanted to say this opportunity to say thank you to the community of mostly men who were great friends and colleagues and I'm very indebted to all of them for having had an extraordinary career all these years well thank you appreciate it