Banff Centre

Megan Thomson is the sales manager for Banff Centre Conferences’ corporate, government, and post-secondary markets in Calgary and the southern Alberta region, and she will also handle US corporate accounts. She is based in Calgary, Alberta. Growing up in Calgary, Megan is no stranger to the Canadian Rockies and Banff, and for part of her working career, she was a trip leader for Backroads cycling and hiking tours in the Canadian Rockies, as well as in France’s Loire Valley. Just prior to joining the Centre, she worked as a sales manager at the legendary Calgary Stampede. Megan has traded in cowboys for artists, and is delighted to represent The Banff Centre throughout Calgary and Southern Alberta. Megan can be reached by email: Megan_Thomson@banffcentre.ca or by phone: (403)762-6442.

Ryan Young is the sales manager for all Banff Centre Conferences’ markets coming out of Eastern Canada. He is based in Ottawa, Ontario. He is very excited to once again be back in the Canadian Rockies representing one of his favourite destinations. He began his hospitality career in the mountains, working at Moraine Lake Lodge near Lake Louise, Alberta, and Kicking Horse Mountain Resort in Golden, British Columbia. Since moving back to Ottawa, Ryan has fully integrated himself into the local meetings and events community where he currently sits on the Meeting Professionals International (MPI) Ottawa Chapter Board of Directors as the Vice President of Finance. With his passion for mountain culture, and his enthusiasm for the hospitality industry, Ryan is committed to bringing inspired and creative meetings and events to Banff. Ryan can be reached by email: Ryan_Young@banffcentre.ca or by phone: 403-762-6234.

The Banff Centre has always hosted big thinkers, but the ideas it develops just took a quantum leap forward.

That was the news Wednesday when the Banff Centre announced a collaboration with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), a virtual think-tank that includes some of the finest scientific minds around the world.

The two institutions are teaming up to create a physical home for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, with the hope being that their big brains will cross-pollinate with some of 4,000 artists and innumerable business leaders who spend time each year at the Banff Centre to find innovative approaches to the 21st century and all of the challenges it presents.

“What we are wanting to do,” says Banff Centre President and CEO Jeff Melanson, “and this really fits with the founding principles of the Banff Centre — is create an environment here where we have thought leaders from arts and culture, business, social sectors, science collaborate and interact with each other.”

The partnership kicks off Thursday with a roundtable discussion featuring Melanson, Bernstein and researchers and practitioners from both the scientific and arts community.

For Canadian Institute of Advanced Research CEO Alan Bernstein, the Banff Centre will provide a place to gather — and not just any place.

“The Banff Centre is special,” Bernstein says. “I’ve always really quite loved going to Banff for various meetings over the years when I was a scientist.

“One of the groups we particularly want to keep meeting there (at Banff) are our young CIFAR Global Scholars.”

That group, made up of scholars from across Canada and the world, specialize in everything from quantum physics to economics in broad institutions to human health issues such as genetic networks.

What’s interesting is that rather than siloing themselves off into different areas of research, the group will coalesce around a single issue and tackle it from different scientific angles.

“There’s one on child development,” says Bernstein, “which is called experience-based brain and biological development, which we’re changing next week to child and brain development.

“That one deals with, for example, on the impact of a person’s first three years of life on their whole lifelong trajectory.

“What we kind of know anecdotally,” he says, “is that the first three years of your life are important in terms of your physical and mental well-being, for the rest of your life. Why is that? What we do in that program, just as an example, is bring together child psychologists and psychiatrists, molecular biologists, brain scientists, epidemiologists — a whole melange of really top people from across Canada and the whole world to talk about the issue.”

Where the Banff Centre has the potential to take the conversation to a whole other level is by bringing dancers, playwrights, actors, opera composers, jazz musicians, filmmakers and fine artists into the conversation.

“That’s one of the main reasons we’re forming a strategic partnership with them,” says Bernstein. “Science — or research — and the arts are both creative processes. They’re both different ways of looking at the world, and yet people in the arts and sciences tend to live in two different worlds. But they’re both really just different manifestations of human creativity.”

For Melanson, bringing artists and scientists together to brainstorm is an old idea that’s new again.

“It sounds like a really new idea,” Melanson says, “but if you look back, it’s sort of the foundations of our society. In the western world, the idea was that you had creative collaborators across disciplines. It’s only been the last half of the last century that we’ve become so niche concerned in terms of how we train people and how we focus on big challenges that face the planet.

“What we’re finding, in business, economic and artistic practice, (is that) the more cross-disciplinary collaboration (you engage in), the better.

“And in fact,” he adds, “when we’ve seen transformative breakthroughs in any sort of discipline, typically it’s been almost an accidental or unanticipated collision of bright minds coming together and sharing things.”

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/Banff+Centre+partners+artists+with+thinkers/7928589/story.html#ixzz2L0o3oGvR