The Kelowna Chamber’s Top 40 Program has returned for 2024. The program recognizes and honours individuals in the community who take leadership, philanthropy, and business to the next level.
Honouree: Jennay Oliver
Paynter’s Fruit Market
“I shall pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.” – Stephen Grellet
Jennay Oliver is owner/operator of Paynter’s Fruit Market. She studied Aircraft Maintenance Engineering at BCIT (improving her machinery fixing ability), but most of her knowledge was obtained from information passed down through generations of local farming.
She is proud to keep the family farm operating and mark their 100th anniversary.
Jennay spends time each year on continuing education for herself and staff, focusing on leadership, marketing and HR/workplace safety courses. All of the items sold in the store are made from local producers, makers or bakers. Most staff live in the Central Okanagan, and they have high seasonal staff retention. Jennay believes in leading by example, as you can often find her driving tractors, picking fruit or helping in the store in the busy summer months.
Jennay’s most memorable achievement was speaking at the 2023 Women in Agriculture conference, addressing more than 400 of her peers who own large farms across Canada. She was part of the West Kelowna Agricultural Advisory Committee to review land planning applications and an on-call firefighter for eight years. Paynter’s grows extra crops to have produce to donate locally, they give farm tours for students, and make numerous donations to non-profits.
Honouree: Jeff Andrews, Honours BSc, MSc, and PhD
The University of British Columbia Okanagan campus, associate professor and principal co-director of the Master of Data Science program
“Life operates on a gradient. The goal is to aim for the ‘better’ side of that gradient, while always having imperfect information on both the inputs and outputs of life’s underlying function. Be skeptical of those who suggest otherwise with absolute confidence.”
Jeff Andrews is UBCO associate professor and principal co-director of the Master of Data Science program.
He’s the lead researcher of the Statistical Machine Learning Laboratory, established with funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and has since attracted over $4.2 million in research funding.
Jeff leads by example, describing himself as a reluctant leader, often asked to put his name forward. Program enrolment has increased nearly 30 per cent since 2020, with his student researchers going on to study at internationally renowned universities like Stanford, Columbia, University of Toronto.
Jeff’s most memorable achievement was receiving the 2017 Chikio Hayashi Award for Young Researchers form the International Federation of Classification Scientists, where he gave a research talk in Tokyo.
Jeff volunteers for societies in his academic community and is on the Brachytherapy Chair Research Advisory Board for the BC Cancer Centre for the Southern Interior. He has volunteered as a board director, served as a panel reviewer for the Degree Quality Assurance Board, and appointed a committee member for the Statistical Society of Canada.
Jeff has published dozens of journals, co-authored a book, and is in the early stages of collaborating with a journalist using unsupervised machine learning to find patterns in unexplained disappearances across Canada.