Leading Scholars Program

Since 2014, the Green College Leading Scholars Program has provided opportunities for UBC faculty members newly appointed at the rank of Assistant Professor or Assistant Professor of Teaching (tenure-track) to make connections with peers and foster interdisciplinarity while sharing ideas in a convivial setting.

Those selected as Leading Scholars are appointed for two years. In 2024-25, the new cohort of Leading Scholars will meet several times as a group at events and over dinner at the College. In 2025-26, Leading Scholars will plan and run an academic series as part of the College’s public interdisciplinary programming. We provide a budget for the purpose of bringing visitors and fostering academic communities through this series. They are encouraged to involve members of the College's resident community of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in their planning for events.

Recruitment for 2025-27 Green College Leading Scholars cohort will begin in the summer of 2025.

 2024-26 Green College Leading Scholars Cohort

  • Tolulope Akinwole, Department of English Language and Literatures
    Email: tolulope.akinwole@ubc.ca
    Website

    My teaching and research coalesce around African literatures, African screen media, cultural and critical theory, global Black literatures, urban studies, infrastructure studies, and Black geographies. My current book project, Moving Parts: Automobile Aesthetics in Postcolonial Africa, examines cultural expressions of spatial anxieties through literary and artistic representations of the public bus in African cities. I study the archives of literary, artistic, musical, and filmic texts that have formed around the public bus in order to offer the bus as a key material through which to reorient current understandings of the global Black city.
     

  • Ji-yoon An, Department of Asian Studies
    Email: jiyoon.an@ubc.ca
    Website

    My research, broadly speaking, explores trends and patterns in Korean visual culture as a means of examining the symbiotic relationship between society and culture. My overarching approach can be encapsulated in the question: how does Korean culture document, fictionalize, or influence the micro-level changes that are occurring in Korean society? Adding to the rapidly growing canon of scholarship on Korean popular culture, I engage mainly with the study of films and television, while also touching on other mediums such as webtoons and experimental video artworks.

  • Katelynn Boerner, Department of Pediatrics
    Email: katelynn.boerner@bcchr.ca
    Website

    My research focuses on making pain research and care more accessible and equitable for young people. We do this by understanding the developmental, individual, and social factors that are involved in pain, and by thinking creatively about how to use this information to change practice. I am especially interested in understanding the role of sex, gender, and neurodiversity on pain, and have projects looking at the experiences of chronic pain in gender-diverse and autistic youth.

  • Tahia Devisscher, Department of Forest Resouces Management
    Email: tahia.devisscher@ubc.ca

    In my research I focus on how to manage forests and other greenspaces in and around cities to support human well-being and build social-ecological resilience to climate change. I am also very interested in developing practical strategies to address the increasing disconnect between people and nature caused by rapid urbanization. The findings coming from my team aim to inform nature-based solutions to climate change and improve nature recovery initiatives that foster clear synergies between climate resilience, biodiversity enhancement, and human health in greener urban and peri-urban landscapes.

  • Scott Franks, Peter A. Allard School of Law
    Email:franks@allard.ubc.ca
    Website

    My research focuses on the imposition of Canadian law on Indigenous peoples, their legal orders, and forms of governance. One line of research relates to the construction of Indigenous peoples' legal identities in Canadian law, while another focuses on anti-Indigenous racism in criminal jury trials.

  • Alexandra Hoffman, Department of Asian Studies
    Email: alexandra.hoffmann@ubc.ca

    I am a scholar of Classical Persian Literature interested in gender & sexuality, embodiment, the history of emotions, and race/ethnicity in premodern Persianate literature and Perso-Islamicate culture. My current book project, Men in War, Men in Love: Masculinities in Premodern Persianate Poetry, 1000-1700 CE, examines the construction of masculinities in long narrative poems (masnavis). A main concern of my research is to engage with current scholarship in premodern Global Studies in order to incorporate Persianate Literature into Medievalist scholarship for a more diverse and less Eurocentric view of the Global Middle Ages.

  • Germaine Koh, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory
    Email: germaine.koh@ubc.ca
    Website

    I am a visual artist and organizer whose work crosses disciplines to explore connections between humans, technological and natural systems. I am bringing to UBC ongoing interdisciplinary research-creation projects, including the Home Made Home initiative to research, design-build and advocate for low-impact building forms; the League project focused on play as a form of creative practice; technological experiments and public activities looking at Circular Textiles, Sustainable Fibres and Slow Fashion; and projects using interactive electronics which bring into relationship the human, built and natural environments.

  • Nicole Krentz, Department of Pharmaceutucal Sciences
    Email: jayanicole.krentz@ubc.ca
    Website

    My research focuses on understanding how genetic factors contribute to diabetes risk. I am particularly interested in genes and mutations that impact how cells and tissues normally develop and how defects in these processes may lead to diabetes. By understanding the underlying genetic component of diabetes, my research strives to pave the way for improved strategies in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of this complex disease.

  • Anabel Maler, School of Music
    Email: anabel.maler@ubc.ca
    Website

    My scholarship centers deafness, Deaf culture, and sign language in music studies, questioning how and why Deaf knowledge has been historically excluded from music research, and developing new, cross-disciplinary methodologies for analyzing the musical outputs of Deaf culture. By centering marginalized Deaf perspectives, I challenge existing definitions of music, ultimately redefining music as movement. In doing so, I not only diversify our current understanding of music and musical experience, but I bring to light new repertories for analysis and develop new analytical techniques and notation systems for engaging with these repertoires.  

  • Elizabeth "Biz" Nijdam, Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies
    Email: hbiz.nijdam@ubc.ca
    Website

    My work focuses on the intersections of popular media and social change, with a particular emphasis on memory cultures, visual storytelling, and critical historiography. I research how comics, graphic novels, and other media engage with historical narratives, foster public discourse, and challenge dominant ideologies. My book manuscript, Graphic Historiography: East German Memory Cultures in Comics & Graphic Novels, examines how comics reinterpret East German history and memory. Through teaching, research, and community engagement, I explore how popular media can facilitate understanding on complex social issues, fostering multilingualism, and promote decolonization and reconciliation.

  • Jac Nobiss,School of Social Work
    Email: jax.nobiss@ubc.ca

    My research delves into Indigenous identity regarding intersectional dynamics. Many of these intersections include challenges that affect the health and well-being of Indigenous Peoples. Applications of pan-identity often conflate history, experiences, and circumstances that are piecemeal understandings of only one nation but are assumed to be the same for all. My work has focused on bringing cultural stories, teachings, and traditional ways of being and knowing to light and bridging these pieces with contemporary use and understanding of nation-specific identities.

  • Alexi Rodriguez Arelis, Department of Statistics
    Email: alexalexrod@stat.ubc.ca
    Website

    I'm an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Statistics, primarily focused in the Master of Data Science. I have taught graduate-level courses on probability, frequentist and Bayesian statistical inference, classical regression, advanced regression techniques, causal inference, and experimentation. My pedagogical interest focuses on advancing statistical outreach across various disciplines, emphasizing the development of engaging and accessible learning materials. Concurrently, my research interests lie in computer experiments that simulate physical and engineering systems using Gaussian stochastic processes. This represents an intersection of two fields that form the foundation of data science: statistics and machine learning.

  • Kiran Sunar
    Kiran Sunar, Department of Asian Studies
    Email: ksunar@mail.ubc.ca
    Website

    My work examines literature, religion, and culture in Punjab across its borders and into its diasporas, exploring questions of gender, sexuality, and ecology. My current major project traces the transformations of narrative and performance within the tale "Sohnī Mahīnwāl," a ubiquitous, riverine legend about two lovers who die tragically in their quest to unite. I take a special focus on the intersections of religious transformation (across Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu continuities). I am also working on a project on Punjabi feminist soundscapes, and on gender, sexuality, and equality in the Sikh tradition. My scholarship often blends critical and creative modes. Green College Leading Scholar for 2023-24.

  • Alexandra Tavasoli, Department of Mechanical Engineering
    Email: alex.tavasoli@ubc.ca
    Website

    My research group at UBC, the Laboratory of Future Industry (LoFI), is focused the challenge of designing hyper-localized manufacturing systems that use locally available materials to make essential supplies such as soap, alcohols, and fertilizers for communities in the event of climate-change and disaster-related supply chain disruption. LoFI’s highly transdisciplinary research also engages in participatory methods to explore how communities can leverage collective action to lead the construction of these systems using locally available resources.

     

     

     2023-25 Green College Leading Scholars Cohort


     
    Aleksa Alaica, Department of Anthropology
    Email: aleksa.alaica@ubc.ca
    Website

    My work examines human-animal relationships in the Andean past. As an anthropological archaeologist, I investigate the way that multispecies worlds are co-constructed through the affordances and constraints of animal lives. My key interests involve understanding how the management of animals, such as llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs and dogs, in the south-central Andes provides opportunities for the influence of sociopolitical networks, economic exchange, and ideological genesis. My research program investigates how animal resources were involved in sustaining food security, and also how the care of animals reflects embedded worldviews about the natural and non-human world.

     

  • Alisabath Ayers
    Alisabeth Ayars, Assistant Professor, Philosophy
    Email: alisabeth.ayars@ubc.ca
    Website

    I'm interested in morality and human psychology. I want to know what moral thought is, how it is related to emotion, how we are motivated by moral ideas, and how we should be motivated by them. Green College Leading Scholar for 2023-24.

  • Green College
    Laura Yvonne Bulk, Assistant Professor, Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy
    Email: laura.bulk@ubc.ca
    Website

    I am a daughter, friend, cousin, tante; I am a Dutch settler to W̱SÁNEĆ territory. I am also a first-generation university student, a disabled scholar, and an occupational therapy educator. As an Assistant Professor of Teaching in Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy at the new site located in Surrey, I have the opportunity to engage in educational leadership activities. My work focuses on promoting justice (right relationship) in academia, interprofessional education, and in distributed health professions education specifically. I am particularly interested in the power of creative techniques and solidarity in anti-ableism, decolonization, and other equity-focussed work.

  • Rubee Dev
    Rubee Dev, Assistant Professor, Nursing
    Email: rubee.dev@ubc.ca
    Website

    I am a global women's health researcher with a primary focus on their reproductive and cardiovascular health. I am well-versed in using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. My work entails extensive research to identify the data gaps and opportunities for action in meeting the needs of women's health, nationally and around the world. My program of research aims to address health inequities and promote timely access to quality, culturally safe care.

  • Joel Finbloom
    Joel Finbloom, Assistant Professor, Pharmaceutical Sciences
    Email: joel.finbloom@ubc.ca
    Website

    My research is at the intersection of chemical biology, nanomedicine and microbiology. By taking inspiration from dynamic biological systems such as viruses and bacteria, my lab creates synthetic nanoscale materials that interact with microbial communities to advance human health. We are leveraging this bioinspired approach to better study and treat antibiotic resistant bacterial infections with nanoparticle drug carriers. In a separate project, we are working to improve the encapsulation, oral delivery and microbiome integration of probiotics to treat gastrointestinal disorders.

  • Shawn Forde
    Shawn Forde, Assistant Professor, Curriculum and Pedagogy
    Email: shawn.forde@ubc.ca

    My research is concerned with the ways that sport and physical activity have historically been, and continue to be, used for the purposes of health education, community development, and political mobilization. My approach to research has involved historical, ethnographic, and arts-based methods. My current research, through a SSHRC IDG, is concerned with using comics to tell stories about health, physical education, and sport. Underpinning this work, is an interest in health narratives, masculinity, and social change. Green College Leading Scholar for 2023-24.

  • Nikki Georgopulos
    Nikki Georgopulos, Assistant Professor, Art History, Visual Art and Theory
    Email: nikki.georgopulos@ubc.ca
    Website

    My research concerns European painting in the nineteenth century, particularly focusing on realism and its intersections with histories of science, philosophy, and cultural constructs of gender. My book project traces representations of mirrors in nineteenth-century French painting, examining the confluence of mechanical and chemical advances in mirror-making technology with the mirror’s rise to prominence as an artistic motif in the age of realism. Moreover, I am interested in speculative methodologies and their application in art history; I am currently collaborating on an edited volume on the topic of counter-archives, critical fabulation, and expansive writing practices in art and art history.
     

  • Torsten Jaccard
    Torsten Jaccard, Assistant Professor, Economics
    Email: tjaccard@mail.ubc.ca
    Website

    My research is in international trade, which I approach from an empirical perspective. I make use of detailed micro-data to understand demand for imported goods and the various economic forces that shape consumer gains from trade, such as: local retail markets and the expansion of dollar stores to rural communities, the role of immigrant communities in shaping consumption of goods from their origin country by non-immigrant households, and the role of multinationals and off-shored production.

  • Jaya Joshi
    Jaya Joshi, Assistant Professor, Wood Science
    Email: jaya.joshi@ubc.ca
    Website

    I am a synthetic biologist, and my research program is focused on making sustainable carbon farming and a circular economy a reality by 2050. My research delves into the design space of enzymes and involves harnessing microbes and plants as green factories by using designer catalysts. We reconfigure metabolism through the utilization of genomics, enzyme evolution, metabolic engineering, and machine learning approaches. Our objective is to engineer microbes with tailor-made catalysts, aiming to convert biomass-derived feedstocks (waste) into fuels, valuable commodities, or pharmaceutical products, thereby paving the way for sustainable chemistry.

  • Tarun Khanna
    Tarun Khanna, Assistant Professor, Public Policy and Global Affairs
    Email: tarun.khanna@ubc.ca
    Website

    I am the Assistant Professor of Energy and Climate Policy at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, and a visiting researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Climate Change in Berlin. I am interested in the economics of the energy sector and the incentives needed to create low carbon energy systems. My wider research interests include evidence synthesis, policy evaluation, electricity markets, and the role of clean energy in development. Before turning to academia, I was a policy practitioner. I worked with regulators, governments, and utilities in the design and implementation of electricity policy in South Asia. I am excited to see the variety of interdisciplinary initiatives advancing the research on climate change at UBC. It is excellent that students, faculty, and administration are committed to placing climate research and clean energy at the center of learning. I hope to work in partnership with colleagues to further our understanding of what it takes to create the low carbon energy systems of the future while providing equitable access to clean energy to all world citizens.  

  • Kim Hyosub
    Hyosub Kim, Assistant Professor, Kinesiology
    Email: hyosub.kim@ubc.ca
    Website

    My research program aims to shed light on fundamental principles of human motor learning. Towards this end, I combine behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and Bayesian inference. I now lead the Computation, Cognition, and Movement (CCM) Lab at UBC, where ongoing projects involve modeling and testing how the brain combines motor prediction and sensory feedback to guide reaching movements, and how our recent movement history shapes future motor decision-making. 

  • Caroline Lebrec
    Caroline Lebrec, Assistant Professor, French, Hispanic and Italian Studies
    Email: caroline.lebrec@ubc.ca
    Website

    My Educational Leadership research is situated at the crossroads of language studies, gender studies and social justice. It explores ways to express gender identity when speaking a language without having to endorse gender bias when using language forms. Beyond the binary expression of gender identity (masculine/feminine), the current debate about non-binary forms of language (pronouns, adjectives and verbs) allows us to look at languages in a new perspective. Are language professors equipped to teach it? Are we to teach a norm or are we to introduce students to the possibilities a language has to offer in terms of gender equity?

  • Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
    Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Assistant Professor, Creative Writing
    Email: alex.marzanolesnevich@ubc.ca
    Website

    I am a creative nonfiction writer, working primarily in hybrid forms that allow me to mix memory, history, archival research, and imagined renderings to create work that transes the historical and the personal. My training is in both writing and law, and much of my writing concerns questions of what narratives we place on the body and the self and how to resist simplification in those narratives. I am currently at work on two projects: Both and Neither, a transgender and trans-genre inquiry into life beyond the binary, and Body of Knowledge, about selfhood and medical epistemology.

  • Cecily Nicholson
    Cecily Nicholson, Assistant Professor, Creative Writing
    Email: cecily.nicholson@ubc.ca

    My research and writing involve the practice of poetry and other creative writing forms as they interrelate with ecology, geological time, and social movement—centering poetry itself as a place that can enact liberation, refuge, and belonging. My writing involves poetic research and technique as a mode of embodiment and critique that engages documentary forms, as well as collective organizing and archival practices. My recent projects have involved studies of site-specific labour, industry history, land-use, and resource extraction. Green College Leading Scholar for 2023-24

  • Alexandra Peck
    Alexandra Peck, Assistant Professor, Art History, Visual Art and Theory
    Email: alexandra.peck@ubc.ca
    Website

    I am the Audain Chair in Historical Indigenous Art and Assistant Professor within the Department of Art History, Visual Art, & Theory. As an anthropologist and material culture specialist, my scholarship examines historic Coast Salish art, landscape, and cultural change, as well as Northwest Coast Indigenous art more broadly. My past research explored the 20th century adoption of totem poles into Coast Salish artistic repertoire, Coast Salish public art in urban settings, and Coast Salish mortuary practices. My current projects range from ancient Coast Salish stone carvings and Kwakwaka’wakw repatriation claims to Haida depictions of fungi and sexuality via argillite. 

  • Katharina Piechocki
    Katharina N. Piechocki, Assistant Professor, French, Hispanic and Italian Studies
    Email: katharina.piechocki@ubc.ca

    My work focuses on 17th-century opera librettos and the joint question of poetic production and bodily reproduction which I explore through the figure of Hercules, often associated with the institutionalization of the arts and questions of procreation and filiation. Drawing inspiration from recent gender, masculinity, women and queer studies—often focused on the present times—and conducted against the backdrop of the affective turn and the history of medicine, this project redirects literary, opera and performative studies as it challenges common assumptions about early modern representations of absolutist power, gender politics and medical conceptions of the body.

  • Jonathan Proctor
    Jonathan Proctor, Assistant Professor, Land and Food Systems
    Email: jon.proctor@ubc.ca
    Website

    I am an environmental economist and scientist with a background in agronomy, climate science, remote sensing, and machine learning. My group develops and applies new methods to empirically estimate anthropogenic impacts on climate and, in turn, on global socio-environmental systems. I am particularly fascinated by how light, water, and temperature jointly determine crop growth and how high resolution imagery can be used to measure socio-environmental conditions. Green College Leading Scholar for 2023-24.

  • Supriya Routh
    Supriya Routh, Assistant Professor, Law
    Email: routh@allard.ubc.ca
    Website

    My research develops an empirically-informed theoretical account of the law of work justified through the logic of fair treatment of workers for their social contribution, thereby overcoming the conventional narrow lens of labour law, which imagines work as a private contract. Such expansive conceptualization will promote innovative regulatory interventions for an extensive range of working arrangements, including unpaid care and socio-ecologically beneficial work such as sustainable agriculture, water management, and waste recycling. In conceiving work as a socio-political idea meriting workers’ social citizenship for their social contribution, I also investigate the role of divergent participatory deliberation in the lawmaking process.

  • Elizabeth Shaffer
    Elizabeth Shaffer, Assistant Professor, Information
    Email: elizabeth.shaffer@ubc.ca
    Website

    My research interrogates how information policy, practices and systems emerge and evolve in digital spaces and infrastructures, particularly in collections that document traumatic human events. Informed by anticolonial research and pedagogies, my current work examines how Blackness is constructed from the absences, erasures and violence of colonial archives and narratives of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

  • Kiran Sunar
    Kiran Sunar, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies
    Email: ksunar@mail.ubc.ca
    Website

    My work examines literature, religion, and culture in Punjab across its borders and into its diasporas, exploring questions of gender, sexuality, and ecology. My current major project traces the transformations of narrative and performance within the tale "Sohnī Mahīnwāl," a ubiquitous, riverine legend about two lovers who die tragically in their quest to unite. I take a special focus on the intersections of religious transformation (across Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu continuities). I am also working on a project on Punjabi feminist soundscapes, and on gender, sexuality, and equality in the Sikh tradition. My scholarship often blends critical and creative modes. Green College Leading Scholar for 2023-24.

  • Felix Wiesner
    Felix Wiesner, Assistant Professor, Wood Science
    Email: felix.wiesner@ubc.ca

    I am a fire safety engineering researcher, meaning on good days I get to burn things for a living. My research focuses on fire safety in engineered timber buildings. I explore the complex relationship between fire dynamics and structural fire capacity, i.e., how long will a structure last in a fire where the structure itself is made of fuel. My research can be both restrictive or enabling and I explicitly try to build bespoke experimental configurations to obtain data that can be used in performance-based engineering models in lieu of standardised testing.

  • Helena Wu
    Helena Wu, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies
    Email: helena.wu@ubc.ca
    Website

    With my background in comparative literature, film studies, and cultural studies, I am keen on developing cross-disciplinary approaches to textual and visual narratives, popular culture, and creative practices. My primary area of research is Hong Kong, with a focus on cinema, literature, and culture, while I am also interested in exploring cross-cultural dynamics and inter-Asian connections at large. My first monograph examined the relationship between cultural icons, thing, and place. Currently, I do research on spectators and spectatorship, with a view to critically examining the changing interactions between cultural expression, memory, affect, and identity.

  • Ron Yang
    Ron Yang, Assistant Professor, Business
    Email: ron.yang@sauder.ubc.ca
    Website

    I am an economist specializing in industrial organization, transportation, and urban economics. I am interested in how firms compete with each other in spatial settings, and how competition shapes transportation costs. My ongoing projects study long-haul drivers’ preferences to return home, returns to scale and congestion in freight railroad operations, and the entry incentives of truckstops

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