Tutor Biographies

Lama Mark Webber:

Lama Mark's passion for science goes back to childhood when he likely purloined his brother's chemistry set and began experiments. For many years, with his father they grew beautiful single crystals out of aqueous solutions. By his early teens he had a chemistry lab at home and was immersed in experiments. Lama Mark had the good fortune in his teens to have studied organic chemistry for about 8 months in Dr. Wright's (Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, University of Toronto) private lab. Soon after, he began a project of synthesizing acrylic salts, original experiments in molecular biology with E. coli and lambda phage (supervisor Dr. Andy Becker) and working on the organic synthesis of a novel dye molecule, all at the Ontario Cancer Institute, University of Toronto. Although Lama Mark has been formally trained in Buddhist meditation since his late teens, and has been practicing and teaching meditation for over thirty years, which he continues to teach worldwide (see: markwebber.org) his interest and passion for science has continued throughout most of his life. At the University of Toronto he took some undergraduate courses in science, including the History of Science and Technology and later obtained his Master's degree in Anthropology, under Dr. Charles Laughlin, Professor Emeritus, Carleton University, Ottawa; a study of meditation and ritual symbolic systems and their interrelatedness with neurophysiology. With Charles Laughlin he was a founding member of the Meditational Science Research Institute and for a number of years taught natural history, science and the history of science and technology at the Kinmount Seminary at the Dharma Centre of Canada in Ontario. In the last few years he has begun collaborating with the BioMedia Facility at the University of British Columbia on producing an extensive image (light microscopic and SEM) database of marine and freshwater algae with taxonomic-ecological information (see the BioMedia database collections at www.emlab.ubc.ca/ and https://www.biomedia.cellbiology.ubc.ca/cellbiol/ ). Mark is currently conducting a long term study on the ecology and morphology of the marine diatom Ditylum sp. in Akaroa Harbour, New Zealand and other locations around the world.