The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 34

12
W.F. Shadwick
The Institute’s First Staff
With a real prospect of success at last, we finally had some
financial support to begin the final lap with a joint application
to NSERC and the Ontario Government. As I recall this
came from Arthur Carty, Waterloo’s Dean of Research, with
contributions from his counterparts at McMaster and Toronto.
Original Fields Institute group, University of Waterloo, 1992.
I began by hiring the former Waterloo Applied Math
Department secretary Liz Reidt. Then, as the project grew
ever closer to reality, I apologized to my colleagues in the
Pure Mathematics Department for hiring their Department
Secretary, Sue Embro, as the Institute’s first Business
Manager.
Sue and Liz played an enormous role in getting us through
the application process, with a mammoth research proposal
written by Jerry Marsden, John Chadam, Steve Halperin, and
me. Then they went on with me to the task of setting up