Academic Appetizer Hour with Green College Leading Scholars

Bite-sized research presentations by recently appointed UBC Faculty Members across disciplines. Faculty presentations in this fifth session by the 2021-23 Leading Scholars Program cohort include:
 

Integrating Biogeographic Research and Teaching with Digital Technologies
Nina Hewitt, Assistant Professor, Geography

I am a biogeographer specializing in plant dispersal, migration and disturbance ecology in temperate forests and alpine ecosystems, with research in Ontario, BC and the Karakoram-Himalaya. I am interested in human impacts associated with ecosystem fragmentation, altered disturbance regimes, introduced invasive species and climate change, and how to manage these impacts. I also research and develop digital tools for experiential field learning, including virtual and augmented reality tours of alpine, forest and other ecosystems that bring the field to the student (virtual reality) or the student to the field (augmented reality) and complement my own ecological research.

Rats, Robots and Roamers
Manu Madhav, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering

My work investigates how the brains of animals, including humans, create maps of the external world and represent them as neural activity, how we use these ‘cognitive maps’ to navigate, and how this ability to represent and navigate degrades due to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Our lab (NC4) designs and builds experiments where rats or humans navigate physical or virtual-reality environments. We record neural activity from rats and behavioural responses from both rats and humans. Using analysis techniques from control theory, robotics and machine learning, we extract structure hidden within neural and behavioural data.