Since 2014, the Green College Leading Scholars Program has provided opportunities for new UBC faculty members to make connections with peers and foster interdisciplinarity while sharing ideas in a convivial setting.
Green College is the home of interdisciplinarity at UBC. Our work has been praised as "an exemplary incubator of interdisciplinary research and learning that realizes in path-breaking ways the ambition to cross-disciplinary exploration and dialogue that research-intensive universities pursue but find difficult to achieve."
Those selected as leading scholars are appointed for two years. In the winter term, the new cohort of leading scholars will meet several times as a group over lunch at the college. Then, in the following year, they 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. This series may, if the cohort has interest, culminate in further collaborative interdisciplinary research and publication.
A call for applications to the 2027-29 cohort will be issued in mid-July 2027.
Karthik Akkiraju, Materials Engineering
Email: karthik.akkiraju@ubc.ca
Website
I lead a research lab that reimagines materials design through an absolute sustainability lens. Using a suite of experimental and computational tools, the Sustainable Materials Lab uses socio-environmental impact-informed materials design to design catalysts by accounting for the true costs and benefits of material extraction and usage. The research outcomes from my research offer choices for material substitution when materials are optimized for efficiency, environmental impact, and societal well-being. This framework will enable researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders to prioritize material innovation for both economic and human development objectives within the constraints of planetary material resources.
Peter Chen, Computer Science
Email: peter.chen@ubc.ca
Website
My work focuses on physics-informed AI and simulation—developing computational tools that make it easier, faster, and more accurate to model the physical world. I build methods that bridge physics, machine learning, and domain expertise, enabling applications from engineering design and robotics to biology, medicine, and digital arts. Much of my research grows through interdisciplinary collaboration: working with engineers on drones and underwater vehicles, food scientists on laser cooking, artists on film production, and scientists on efficient models for materials, tissues, and quantum systems. I’m motivated by how simulation and AI can serve society and connect people across fields.
Godwin Dzah, Law
Email: dzah@allard.ubc.ca
Website
My work focuses on international, comparative, and environmental law. I adopt a critical interdisciplinary approach to the study of natural resources law, law and environmental sustainability, climate law, and the law of the sea. I am interested in how African legal thought influences these areas of research and their impact on global legal orders.
Melissa Hunte, Language and Literacy Education
Email: melissar.hunte@ubc.ca
My background is in developmental and educational psychology, with expertise in assessment, measurement, evaluation, and mixed-methods research. My research portfolio encompasses work on fairness in educational assessment, human-centred AI, early intervention, and cross-cultural measurement. I have collaborated with computer scientists and programmers to develop digital learning platforms and AI-based scoring models, while critically examining issues of transparency, bias, and trust. I have also worked with interdisciplinary and cross-continental teams in Canada, China, India, and South Africa on early childhood development research, including harmonizing measures from preconception to age five, and evaluating the cultural appropriateness of assessment tools. My work is guided by complex systems and equity-oriented approaches.
Santiago Izquierdo-Tort, Forest Resources Management
Email: santiago.izquierdotort@ubc.ca
Website
My research explores how economic incentives and market-based approaches to forest governance contribute to livelihood, biodiversity, and climate goals. Much of my work focuses on the effectiveness and equity of public payment-for-conservation policies in tropical regions, mainly in Latin America, and the emergence of global markets for carbon and biodiversity credits. As an interdisciplinary economist, I collaborate across the social and natural sciences, and engage with policymakers, Indigenous peoples, and local communities to inform the design and implementation of forest interventions. I am co-holder of a UNESCO Chair in Socio-Economic Evaluation of Biodiversity and Ecosystems.
Bavisha Kaylan, Civil Engineering
Email: bavisha.kalyan@ubc.ca
Website
In my group, we seek to co-create engineering research with historically marginalized and underrepresented communities with the aim of improving health equity, building grassroots organizing, and ultimately working towards social and environmental justice. Throughout the research process, we aim to create equitable multi-stakeholder partnerships that enhance science literacy and build research capacity for non-academic partners. Using interdisciplinary methods, we currently focus on the intersection of health, engineered infrastructure, and toxin contamination.
Asher Leeks, Zoology
Email: asher.leeks@ubc.ca
Website
I study social evolution in viruses. Viruses are intrinsically social organisms; every aspect of the viral lifecycle can be influenced by social interactions, from replication within a cell to transmission between hosts. I use social evolution theory to understand how these interactions evolve and to predict their clinical consequences.
Lennon Mhishi, Anthropology
Email: lennon.mhishi@ubc.ca
Website
My interdisciplinary work, shaped through the prism of Zimbabwe, spans interests in Africa and its diasporas; music and migration; museums, material culture, and art practices; the afterlives of slavery and colonialism; and approaches to contemporary forms of exploitation and human rights in different African countries. My work foregrounds creative and collaborative, community-engaged research and curatorial work. I am currently working on projects exploring contestations around representations of enslavement, as well as on the intersections of museums, art practices, and the negotiation of home and belonging.
Dana-Lynn Mackenzie, Forest Resources Management
Email: danalyn.mackenzie@ubc.ca
Website
My work focuses on reconciliation, decolonization, and Indigenous peoples in Canada. As a Coast Salish person, I strive to honour my ancestors by raising Indigenous awareness and actionable goals towards reconciliation for those of settler descent, and also work towards making UBC a better place for generations yet to come.
Jennifer Moss, Creative Writing
Email: jen.moss@ubc.ca
Website
My research and teaching sit at the intersection of creative writing, new media, and audio storytelling. I teach creative writing for new media and podcasting, and I lead JAR Podcast Solutions, where theory and practice continually inform one another. I am interested in the relationship between content and form, and between artistic offering and audience experience. My academic work is shaped by cross-genre and cross-departmental collaboration, and an ongoing exploration of how emerging technologies open new possibilities for writers. I focus on immersive storytelling through sound and VR, and critical, creative engagement with the rise of AI in cultural production.
Joan Danielle Ongchoco, Psychology
Email: joan.ongchoco@psych.ubc.ca
Website
I am the director of the UBC Perception and Cognition Lab. We are especially interested in how we see and how we think, and the ways these interface with each other. To explore these questions, our work involves a broad range of stimuli—from blank grids, shadows, doorways, musical sequences, em-dashes, to countdown timers—spanning everyday objects and events that we have found to have more profound consequences for mental life than we might have initially thought.
Alberto Padoan, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Email: alberto.padoan@ubc.ca
Website
My research explores how complex systems can be understood, guided, and coordinated through feedback, data, and computation. I work at the intersection of control theory, optimization, and data-driven methods, with an interest in how algorithms interact with the physical, biological, and social world. My work develops mathematical tools to design reliable and transparent decision-making systems in settings marked by uncertainty, limited information, and large-scale interconnections. Application areas include mobility and traffic systems, and non-equilibrium dynamics in biological systems, with the broader goal of enabling safer, more adaptive, and more sustainable technologies.
CJ Park, Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education
Email: cj.park@ubc.ca
My primary line of research lies at the intersection of vocational psychology and critical psychology. I am particularly interested in the career-related experiences of students and workers with marginalized identities. My current focus is on women students in STEM, whose career development is often influenced by intersecting barriers and opportunities. Alongside my work on vocational psychology, I have developed a recent interest in the application of AI in counselling and psychotherapy. I have recently conducted a scoping review of the ethical issues related to applying AI in counselling psychology as a first step in pursuing this interest.
Sadia Shirazi, Art History, Visual Art, and Theory
Email: sadia.shirazi@ubc.ca
Website
My work draws on postcolonial theory alongside the contributions of Black and Indigenous studies to study the work of a group of peripatetic artists in the post-World War II era, amidst the concurrent movements of decolonization and Black liberation. I am working simultaneously on a curatorial project and a book project. The exhibition looks at the work of an artist and lawyer who worked across Pakistan, England, and the United States from the 1950s to 2000s, and brought the first lawsuit against Queen Elizabeth for the restitution of the Koh-i-Noor diamond. My book project is a history of decolonial, feminist artists that bridges the Indian subcontinent, the Indian Ocean, Japan, Western Europe, and the United States during the second half of the twentieth century.
Silvia Stringhini, Population and Public Health
Email: silvia.stringhini@ubc.ca
Website
My research focuses on understanding how social, environmental, and biological factors across the life course shape health and aging trajectories. I lead and contribute to large population-based cohort studies in Canada and Europe, examining how early-life socioeconomic conditions and environmental exposures become biologically embedded and influence mental and physical health from childhood through adulthood. My work integrates epidemiology, social sciences, and biomarkers of biological aging to inform prevention strategies and policies aimed at reducing health inequalities across generations.
Meaghan Thumath, Nursing
Email: meaghan.thumath@ubc.ca
Website
Working at the intersection of public health, disinformation, and crisis response, my research aims to reduce health inequities and strengthen community resilience during public health emergencies.
Kimberly Yazzie, Forestry and Conservation Sciences
Email: kimberly.yazzie@ubc.ca
Website
My research seeks to understand the impacts of climate change and ecological disturbance on the patterns and distributions of salmon-habitat relationships in freshwater systems. A second line of research explores equitable knowledge production by engaging with diverse knowledge holders to co-develop climate solutions to inform decision-making in Indigenous communities for climate adaptation strategies. I am interested in disentangling how ecosystem function and resilience intersect and respond to land stewardship at different levels of land and water governance that support water, energy, and food security.
2024-26 Leading Scholars
Tolúlọpẹ́ A Akínwọlé, 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 Resources 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 Pharmaceutical 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: biz.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: alexrod@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, 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.
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 Leading Scholars
Aleska Alaica, Assistant Professor, 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.
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.
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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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.
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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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
2022-24 Leading Scholars
Abdul-Fatawu Abdulai, Assistant Professor, Nursing
Email: fatawu.abdulai@ubc.ca
WebsiteMy program of research is on health informatics, human-computer interaction and the design and evaluation of digital health technologies. Specifically, I seek to explore how digital health technologies and trauma-informed user-centered design approaches can be leveraged to address inequities in sexual and reproductive health access for marginalized populations. Primarily, I conduct informatics-related research on endometriosis-associated sexual pains, sexually transmitted infections, and reproductive health. I apply user-centered design and integrated knowledge translation approaches by engaging patients and healthcare professionals in my program of research.
Digital Health, User-Centered Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Trauma-Informed Care
Hassan Ahmad, Assistant Professor, Law
Email: ahmad@allard.ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a legal scholar, advocate, and activist interested in how governments and courts devise laws that concern human rights and environmental harm on the part of multinational corporations. How do dispute resolution laws mimic global economic forces? In my work, I analyze legal doctrines and, at times, employ comparative and historical methods to understand how dispute resolution laws have interacted with the global economy across time and space. Currently, I am working on two projects: a monograph entitled The New Corporate Immunity: Law, Sovereignty, and Human Rights in the Third World and a project around climate change litigation.
Human Rights, Courts, Torts, Corporations, Dispute Resolution
Anwar Ahmed, Assistant Professor, Language and Literacy Education
Email: anwar.ahmed@ubc.ca
WebsiteMy current research investigates if contemporary approaches to teaching argumentative writing are supportive of democratic disposition and citizenship. My key objective is to find out if pedagogies of argumentative writing encourage students to take a combative and hegemonic approach to knowledge creation and to ignore cognitive biases while exerting their rhetorical skills to win an argument. If this is the case, then I will explore ways to de-emphasize the combative approach to academic writing and promote the idea of argument as a dialogical social practice in which the primary goal is to understand, rather than defeat, the Other.
Argument, Academic Writing, Democracy, Dialogue, Citizenship
Dominic Alford-Duguid, Assistant Professor, Philosophy
Email: dominic.alfordduguid@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a philosopher of mind and language, with a strong side interest in the philosophy of law. Much of my research concerns the relationship between perception and thought. Among the other things it allows us to do, perception enables us to think about the observable properties of objects (e.g., their colour, their shape, their size, etc.). I investigate what this fact should lead us to say about perception and thought, especially perception’s ability to inform us about the outside world. In philosophy of law, by contrast, I write on the nature of law, as well as informational privacy.
Thought, Perception, Representation, Privacy, Law
Fatema Amijee, Assistant Professor, Philosophy
Email: fatema.amijee@ubc.ca
WebsiteA primary focus of my work is the Principle of Sufficient Reason (roughly: 'Everything has an explanation'). The principle was a prime tenet of early modern rationalism, and thus much of my work in the history of early modern philosophy concerns metaphysical themes in Leibniz, Spinoza, Du Châtelet, and other early modern rationalists. I also spend a lot of my time thinking about the Principle of Sufficient Reason as a thesis within contemporary metaphysics. Aside from metaphysics and early modern philosophy, I also work at the intersection of feminist philosophy and Islamic studies, with a particular focus in Quranic interpretation.
Principle of Sufficient Reason, Explanation, Emilie Du Châtelet, Islam, Feminism
Irem Ayan, Assistant Professor, French, Hispanic and Italian Studies
Email: irem.ayan@ubc.ca
WebsiteAs a trained conference interpreter, I work at the intersections of feminist standpoint theory, settler colonialism, and theories of resistance to investigate how the implications of dominant ideologies of gender, class, and racialization affect the way interpreters perform and/or resist their task of becoming the voice of the speaker. I explore the dark side of being a marginalized interpreter, looking at the various ways in which interpreters are sexualized, harassed, discriminated, and treated as non-persons, drawing also on frameworks that analyze emotional labour and worker exploitation. My current ethnographic research explores the experiences of Indigenous interpreters in British Columbia.
Translation, Interpreting, Gender, Race, Settler Colonialism
Alifa Zafirah Bandali, Assistant Professor, Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Email: alifa.bandali@ubc.ca
WebsiteMy research and teaching prioritize social justice issues and approaches – in particular the importance of an intersectional framework. I draw on my own life histories and positionality to explore and highlight Muslim women’s representations in the media. I am interested in how artists (among others) challenge and resist dominant tropes and stereotypes that depict Muslim women as powerless, as suspects and as victims of religious oppression. I am committed to research and teaching that focuses on: Creative activism; women, work and care primarily in Southeast Asia; emotional labour; feminist and anti-racist pedagogies.
Social Justice, Feminist and Creative Activisms, Art, Anti-Racism
Ignacio Barbeito, Assistant Professor, Forest Resources Management
Email: ignacio.barbeito@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a forest scientist interested in how to balance multiple—and sometimes contradictory—objectives such as wood production, wildlife habitat management, biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration in the context of climate change. Promoting mixed-species forests could be part of the solution, as they can improve forest resilience to increasing forest fires, droughts and pest outbreaks. I use hands-on and data-driven methods involving countless measurements of tree girth and height; core samples that cut through tree rings; as well as sifting through stacks of data collected over the years. My ultimate goal is to provide forest managers guidance and tools to support their decisions.
Forest Management, Climate Change, Resilience to Disturbances, Forest Fires, Drought
Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, Assistant Professor, Chemistry
Email: nadine.borduas@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am an atmospheric chemist interested in the fate of molecules in the atmosphere. My group strives to bring a molecular perspective to atmospheric processes to address issues of air quality and climate. We use gas phase and aerosol instruments to study the emissions of wildfire smoke and indoor personal care product and to study the fate of molecules in clouds and in biogeochemical cycling.
Atmospheric Chemistry, Photochemistry, Biogeochemistry, Atmospheric sciences, Indoor Air
William Brown, Assistant Professor, Theatre & Film
email: will.brown@ubc.ca
WebsiteMy work straddles theory and practice, focusing primarily at the present time on film as a medium for allowing us to see, hear, think and feel beyond the human. While this means that there is in my work an 'ecological' engagement with the non-human world of animals, plants and matter, it also involves an investigation into how film historically has helped to construct the human in white, heteropatriarchal terms, and the ways in which to look 'beyond the human' must of necessity engage with issues of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nationality and other technologies of (de)humanisation.
Film Studies, Film-Philosophy, Posthumanism, Research-Creation, Race
Stephen Kwame Dadugblor, Assistant Professor, Journalism, Writing and Media
email: stephen.dadugblor@ubc.ca
WebsiteMy research is at the intersection of democratic deliberation, culture, and rhetoric. I study the ways in which postcolonial African societies draw upon cultural deliberative resources to refashion and decolonize their social worlds in the aftermath of colonialism. Currently, I am at work on two major projects. The first, Deliberating Electoral Disputes, investigates citizen deliberations surrounding electoral politics in Ghana. The second, Forging Peace, Cultivating Citizenship attends to the rhetorical processes by which the Ghanaian nation-state fosters an ethos of peace and non-violence across ethnolinguistic and religious differences to cultivate citizenship following military interventions in the country's politics.
Democracy, Deliberation, Memory, Africa, Decolonization
Tamara Robin Etmannski, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Civil Engineering
Email: tamara.etmannski@ubc.ca
WebsiteThe ‘Educational Leadership’ research I am interested in is connected to exploring ways to broaden engineering education by exposing students to real-world problems and multidisciplinary teams. This includes work connected to experiential and community learning practices. In parallel with this work, I am also a Co-Director of the Environmental Engineering undergraduate program and am continuing to conduct some more technical engineering research exploring the viability of up-cycling arsenic-ridden sludge (a by-product from the use of drinking-water filters) and building a business case to improve the negative impacts associated with the use of such widespread technologies.
Engineering Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Engineering Impacts and Sustainability
Tim Frandy, Assistant Professor, Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies
Email: tfrandy@mail.ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a Sámi American, born and raised on Anishinaabe Aki on the south shore of Gitchi-Gami (Lake Superior) amidst the region’s thousands of lakes and deep pine forests. My research involves traditional culture, decolonization, environments, education, and cultural revitalization, and I’ve worked with culture keepers, harvesters, ceremonial leaders, artists, and activists. My translation of Inari Sámi Folklore (2019) is the first polyvocal anthology of Sámi oral tradition published in English, and my co-edited volume with B. Marcus Cederström, Culture Work: Folklore for the Public Good (2022), on explores public arts and humanities projects today in theory and in praxis.
Indigenous Studies, Decolonization, Folklore Studies, Environmental Humanities
Christopher Hammerly, Assistant Professor, Linguistics
Email: chris.hammerly@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a linguist and descendent of the White Earth Nation of mixed Anishinaabe-Norwegian heritage. Much of my work focuses on documenting and understanding my ancestral language Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe). I use a variety of methods to understand the cognitive representations and processes underpinning human knowledge of syntax (sentence structure) and morphology (word structure), including formal theories, fieldwork, computational models, and experimental tasks. I am especially interested in what patterns of eye movements can reveal about our limits and aptitudes for learning and processing language. Recently, I have also been involved in building (psycho)linguistically-informed language technology for Anishinaabemowin learners.
Language Revitalization, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Morphology
Julia Henderson, Assistant Professor, Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy
Email: julia.henderson@ubc.ca
WebsiteI have a background as an occupational therapist and a professional actor. My research employs critical age studies and occupational justice approaches to investigate representations of aging and older age, with a focus on strategies that redress ageism in North American culture. I use qualitative and mostly arts-based methods, especially theatre, to work with older adults on projects that range from collaborative creative engagement with people with lived experience of dementia, to older adult activism, to developing creative accessibility strategies for older adult theatre artists and audiences.
Critical Age Studies, Older Adults, Theatre and Performance, Dementia, Accessibility
Sara Jacobs, Assistant Professor, Architecture and Landscape Architecture
Email: sjacobs@sala.ubc.ca
WebsiteI research how socio-ecological relations become legible through landscape to work toward just land futures. I primarily study how attending to interconnected histories of land, racialization, and settler-colonialism allows for reinterpreting contemporary environmental knowledge. As a transdisciplinary scholar of design, environmental history, and geography, I do this work by writing and drawing about how practices of care shape ideas of nature towards life-affirming relations. I often focus on infrastructural or extractive landscapes shaped by social and environmental injustices to show how entanglements between people, water, and more-than-human life refuse the ordering logic of extractive capitalism to create caring relations.
Keywords or topics of primary interests:
Sara Ann Knutson, Assistant Professor of Teaching, History
Email: sa.knutson@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a historical scholar working at the intersection of global history, archaeology, and museum anthropology with expertise in the Islamic World and its global interactions across premodern Afro-Eurasia. My teaching, research, and educational leadership bridge the premodern-modern divide in the historical discipline by exploring the enduring influence that the Afro-Eurasian past holds in contemporary constructions of cultural heritage and in practices of collection, not least in museums and archives. My current work centres the Islamic World’s role in global history as well as the contemporary communities who are important stakeholders in the construction of this past.
Museums, Islamic World, Afro-Eurasia, Middle East and North Africa, Heritage
Jillian Lerner, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Art History, Visual Art and Theory
Email: jillian.lerner@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a historian of modern visual culture with research interests in photography, media theory, and social justice pedagogies. I study the ways that art-forms and technologies of seeing shape human experience and the lifeworld. My current project considers how photographic practices perpetuate or contest imperialist modes of extraction and appropriation. Investigating diverse strategies of sense-making, storytelling, and historical retrieval, I explore how media artifacts and histories can be developed as tools for perceiving, relating, and imagining otherwise. How do we foster responsibility for the worlds (communities, ecologies, stories, futures) we create and destroy?
Media History, Photography, Pedagogy, Decolonization
Jasmin Ma, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Kinesiology
Email: jasmin.ma@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a Kinesiologist specializing in helping people with diverse physical abilities to be physically active. My educational leadership activities involve the development and implementation of experiential learning opportunities in community-based exercise settings. My research focuses on supporting strength training behaviour change and developing methods for tailored physical activity interventions among people with chronic disease and disability. Meaningfully engaging community and clinician partners throughout the research process is at the core of my lab’s research approach, with the intention to help ensure that our work gives back to those who the research is intended for.
Physical Activity, Disability, Behaviour Change, Exercise Prescription, Work Integrated Learning
Alexis McGee, Assistant Professor, Journalism, Writing and Media
Email: alexis.mcgee@ubc.ca
WebsiteDriven by Black studies, history of composition and rhetoric, cultural rhetorics, and Black feminist rhetorical theory, my research intentionally brings historical moments in conversation with contemporary Black expressions of being. Largely, my scholarly activities investigate ways Black women’s rhetorical, sonic ecologies document survival, agency, and resistance so that Black women and girls may apply it to our everyday realities across time, place, and media. My first monograph, From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Sonic Rhetoric (forthcoming with SUNY Press) examines how Black women operationalize language, voice, and rhetoric across media as generational strategies for survival.
Black, Feminist, Rhetoric, Theory
Keunhyun Park, Assistant Professor, Forest Resources Management
Email: keun.park@ubc.ca
WebsiteWith an interdisciplinary background in urban planning and design and landscape architecture, I conduct behavioural research in urban nature through the use of spatial data analytics and digital technologies. My Urban Nature Design Research (UNDER) lab examines 1) urban nature design and planning and its social, behavioural, and health outcomes and 2) technology-driven research for public space monitoring (e.g., sensors, drones, smartphone-based big data). Ultimately, my research aims to understand how to design healthy, just, and resilient cities through urban nature. These projects require interdisciplinary collaboration with experts from forestry, geography, transportation engineering, computer science, and more.
Urban Forestry, Public Space, Urban Design, Behavioural Research, Environmental Justice
Thomas Pasquier, Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Email: thomas.pasquier@ubc.ca
WebsiteI work on computer systems constructed broadly. My main research focus is to devise means to observe computer systems and to act on the collected information. Applications include security, accountability, and transparency. For example, I work on applying machine-learning techniques to automatically detect anomalous behaviors that indicate that a computer system is under attack. I also work on techniques to automate and facilitate the reproducibility of scientific computational results. Finally, I have worked for several years on questions at the intersection of computer science and law.
Computer Science, Systems, Accountability, Security, Transparency
Ethan Raker, Assistant Professor, Sociology
Email: ethan.raker@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a sociologist-demographer studying the consequences of climate change for community and individual well-being. I focus particular attention to the role of social contexts and political institutions in creating the conditions for disasters and responding or changing in ways that exacerbate inequality. My work often relies upon the application of novel administrative and climate data to address theoretical questions about the relationship between the environment and society. I joined UBC as an assistant professor in 2021.
Climate Change, Health, Disasters, Neighbourhoods
Andrea Reid, Assistant Professor, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries
Email: a.reid@oceans.ubc.ca
WebsiteMy name is Andrea Reid, and I am a Nisg̱a’a citizen who was raised on Epekwitk (PEI). I now live in Nisg̱a’a Territory, and work both remotely and in-person as an Assistant Professor in the UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. With a wonderful team, I am helping to launch and lead the Centre for Indigenous Fisheries, committed to the study and protection of culturally significant fish and fisheries. In strong and equitable partnership with Indigenous Peoples and organizations, the Centre undertakes interdisciplinary research, collaborative teaching, and youth-centered outreach that responds to partner-identified needs and priorities.
Indigenous Fisheries, Indigenous Science, Aquatic Conservation
Mohammad Shahrad, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Email: mshahrad@ece.ubc.ca
WebsiteI am broadly interested in improving the efficiency of cloud computing systems and have worked across the computing stack toward this goal. So far, this has included building novel scheduling solutions for cloud systems, modeling user-provider interactions to propose new pricing models, and building a new processor for efficient off-chip scalability of cloud workloads. I lead the Cloud Infrastructure Research for Reliability, Usability, and Scalability (CIRRUS) Lab at UBC. My team is currently working on a range of projects to improve the performance and cost efficiency of emerging cloud services.
Cloud Computing, Software Systems
Elif Sari, Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Email: elif.sari@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a queer feminist anthropologist, an uninvited immigrant on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nation, and a new faculty member in the UBC Department of Anthropology. Currently, I am working on my first book manuscript, which offers an engaged ethnography of LGBTQ asylum from the Middle East to North America by focusing on the experiences of Iranian queer and trans refugees waiting in Turkey. I am also excited to start two new research projects, one focusing on private refugee sponsorship programs in Canada, and one exploring the connections between migration, sexuality, and art (particularly drag).
Asylum, Borders, Diaspora, Gender and Sexuality
Rosanne Sia, Assistant Professor, Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Email: rosanne@mail.ubc.ca
WebsiteI do historical research at the intersection of performance studies, critical race theory, and gender & sexuality studies. My first book project, Fantasy in Motion: Performing Racial Imaginaries in the early Cold War, looks at women of Asian and Latinx descent who danced and sang on early Cold War nightclub circuits. I was lucky enough to meet a number of former nightclub entertainers who were in their eighties and nineties. I felt an urgent need to share what I had learned about lives that I found so extraordinary, daring, and brave in the face of racism and sexism. My book draws on both oral histories and archival research to explore how entertainers crossed boundaries of genre, nation, language, race, and sexuality that exceeded Cold War narratives of racial integration.
Transpacific, Latinx, Gender and Sexuality, Performance, Cold War History
J. Logan Smilges, Assistant Professor, English Language and Literatures
Email: logan.smilges@ubc.ca
WebsiteWith commitments to trans feminism and disability justice, I understand my work in queer & trans disability studies, rhetorical studies, and the history of medicine as a means to advocate for gender-expansive equity and anti-ableism. I am particularly interested in writing genealogies that reveal how ideas related to sexuality, gender, and disability are mutually entwined. For example, my first book Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (2022) charts the foundational role of disability in the field of queer studies, and my current book project Neurotrans Intimacies dials in on the cultural and political entanglements of transness and mental disability.
Disability, Gender, Sexuality, Theory
Giulia Toti, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Computer Science
Email: giulia.toti@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the computer science department. I have a variegated background (a Master's degree in Biomedical Engineering and a PhD in Computer Science, specifically in Machine Learning), but now my focus is on computer science education. I am currently designing a new course on responsible use of data science: given its wide applicability and popularity, I believe it is important for students to understand their role not only as technical experts, but as future decision-makers. I am also interested in alternative grading systems, such as Mastery Learning.
Data Science Ethics, Alternative Grading, Mastery Learning
Desiree Valadares, Assistant Professor, Geography
Email: desiree.valadares@ubc.ca
WebsiteMy research theorizes repair in the context of landscape preservation. I study the aftermath of redress movements that coalesce around the preservation and stewardship of Second World War confinement landscapes in Hawai’i, Alaska, and British Columbia. I work alongside community organizations, cultural heritage professionals, and policymakers and draw insights from archival research and place-based methods including architectural drawing, photography, and participant-action research. Broadly, my research contributes to ongoing debates on war reparations, Asian-Indigenous relations, land tenure in settler colonial contexts, and infrastructural and environmental histories of Second World War prison camps in former US territories and in western Canada.
Redress, Social Movements, War Reparations, Landscape, Preservation, Land Claims
Katherine Wagner, Assistant Professor, Economics
Email: katherine.wagner@ubc.ca
WebsiteMy work focuses primarily on Environmental and Energy Economics. I study how economic policy can prevent further climate change from occurring and encourage adaptation to its effects. On the first topic, I have ongoing work on the costs of delayed action on carbon pricing. We show that manufacturing plants that open when energy prices are low consume more energy throughout their lifetime, regardless of subsequent prices. On the second topic, I’m analyzing the equity implications of natural disaster insurance reform; my previous work studies why homeowners’ willingness to pay in this market is puzzlingly low even when insurance benefits are high.
Environmental and Energy Economics, Public Economics, Climate Change, Natural Disaster Insurance
Tina E. Wilson, Assistant Professor, Social Work
Email: tina.wilson@ubc.ca
WebsiteMy work explores how scientific and social justice knowledges combine within helping professions and human welfare systems. On one hand, I am interested in broad cultural shifts in the enduring trifecta of need, help, and who is to blame in relation to perceived social problems. On the other, I engage the “new” for how it creates possibilities for change within established ways of life. My current research explores how the environmental turn challenges modern professions like social work to revisit our human-centric units of analysis and intervention, including how we imagine and attempt to enact social justice.
Helping Professions; Social Justice, Environment, Academic Disciplines, History and Philosophy of Social Science
Kwang Moo Yi, Assistant Professor, Geography
Email: kmyi@cs.ubc.ca
WebsiteI work in the area of Computer Vision, with a focus on reconstructing and understanding the 3D geometry and the appearance of objects observed as 2D imagery. My methods often consist of novel deep learning methods/frameworks for this purpose.
Computer Vision, 3D Vision, Deep Learning-Based Vision, Keypoints, Correspondences
Shoufu Yin, Assistant Professor, History
Email: shoufu.yin@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a historian of Chinese and Inner Asian political cultures and thoughts in global historical contexts. I specialize in areas where social/institutional history meets literature and philosophy. My publications show that it is productive to engage the intellectual world of hitherto overlooked and marginalized groups—including peasant women who fought in wars, Manchu translators who processed imperial documents, anonymous typesetters behind the production of books. Ultimately, my scholarly passion lies in writing new kinds of global intellectual histories that foreground the theoretical contributions of both “canonical” and “everyday” thinkers of different traditions.
Global History, Intellectual History, Political Culture/Thought, Literary Culture, China and Inner Asia
Keren Zaiontz, Assistant Professor, Theatre & Film
Email: keren.zaiontz@ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a performance studies scholar committed to profiling oppositional art practices. My research focuses on contemporary performance, the spaces and places of artistic production—including the city and its sites of redevelopment—the politics of festivals and mega-events, and the global currents of art-activism online and in the streets. My current book project, Authoritarian Intimacies, is a cultural examination of global north authoritarian power from the perspective of its “refuseniks”—dissident artists and satirists, independent reporters, and oppositional proletariats—who risk everything and model perseverance in the face of repressive rule.
Performance Studies, Performance and the City, Art-Activism and Social Movements, Festivals and Mega-Events, Socially-Engaged Art and Performance
Helena Zeweri, Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Email: helena.zeweri@ubc.ca
WebsiteMy scholarship lies at the intersection of global migration studies, the social impacts of policy, and diasporic identity, with a focus on Australia, the Afghan diaspora, and the US. Grounded in ethnographic methods, my first project examined how migrant sociality becomes an object of moral concern and legal intervention for the Australian state in the wake of increased maritime migration from post-war contexts. My current project looks at the political life of Afghan diasporas in the US and Australia since the Global War on Terror, with a focus on first and second-generation community leaders.
Migration, Political Life, Empire and Settler Colonialism, Australia, US, Afghan Diaspora
Lily Wenya Zhou, Assistant Professor, Neurology
Email: lily.zhou@alumni.ubc.ca
WebsiteI am a stroke neurologist and do health services research looking at cost-benefit analysis in health care and stroke epidemiology. Currently, my main research focus is on using data generated during healthcare delivery on a population level (called administrative data) to study and predict health outcomes and to improve the cost-effectiveness of healthcare delivery. The use of administrative data allows us to study and improve the health of people previously under-represented in research, to track health outcomes over decades and to see how treatments work outside of clinical trials.
Health Services, Epidemiology, Stroke
Mila Zuo, Assistant Professor, Theatre & Film
Email: mila.zuo@ubc.ca
WebsiteI work on global film stardom, transnational Chinese and Asian cinemas, film-philosophy, and critical studies of race, gender, and sexuality. My book Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (2022) explores the ways in which Chinese women film stars perform oppositional stances against white supremacy, Chinese colonialism, heteropatriarchy, gender and sexual normativities, and capitalist work. My current and future research focuses on representations of ancient magical beliefs in global film and media, and cinema as a divinatory and spell-binding phenomenon.
Film and Media Studies, Esotericism, Philosophy, Embodiment, Stardom
2021-23 Leading Scholars
Kimberly Bain, Assistant Professor, English Language and Literatures
Email: kimberly.bain@ubc.ca
Website
In my scholarly and critical-creative work, my most pressing and urgent concerns have consolidated around questions of the history, theory, and philosophy of Blackness. I am currently at work on two scholarly monographs. The first, entitled On Black Breath traces a genealogy of breathing, Blackness, and racial capitalism in the United States. My second book, Dirt: Soil and Other Dark Matter, turns to dirt for understanding how Blackness has shaped global considerations of the Anthropocene and refused the extractive relations of racial capitalism.
Samuel Beswick, Assistant Professor, Law
Email: beswick@allard.ubc.ca
Website
I am a private law scholar with primary research interests in the areas of torts, unjust enrichment, limitations, remedies and privacy. My current research concerns the temporal scope of judicial changes in the law. Does, and should, new “judge-made law” serve as precedent to past circumstances? I am also the editor of an open-access coursebook Tort Law: Cases and Commentaries (2021 CanLIIDocs 1859), which explores the law of civil wrongdoing through the themes of the rule of law (equality of officials and ordinary people under law) and comparativism (common law development through judicial conversations over time within and between jurisdictions).
Anna Blakney, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Email: anna.blakney@msl.ubc.ca
Website
My laboratory is a multidisciplinary group of engineers, immunologists and molecular biologists seeking to engineer the next generation of RNA vaccines and therapies. We seek to gain a deeper understanding of how the components of gene delivery formulations interact with the immune system to improve potency and enable clinical translation. We use a type of RNA called 'self-amplifying RNA', which is able to replicate upon delivery to a cell and requires a ~100 times lower dose than normal messenger RNA.
Benjamin Bryce, Assistant Professor, History
Email: ben.bryce@ubc.ca
Website
I am a historian of migration in the Americas. At UBC, I teach courses on the Americas and global history. I am working on two SSHRC-funded projects. Healing the Nation examines the role of immigrant-run hospitals and mutual aid societies in providing healthcare in Buenos Aires. Grounds for Exclusion highlights the many ways that bureaucrats, politicians and nationalist agitators in Argentina developed both formal and informal methods to exclude a range of groups based in race, gender, health and ability. I am also a co-editor of the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association.
Annie Ciernia, Assistant Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Email: annie.ciernia@ubc.ca
Website
My research focuses on understanding the molecules and processes that control how our brains develop during childhood and what goes wrong in the cases of brain disorders such as Autism. I specifically focus on immune cells in the brain and how they interact with the rest of our body and environment. We use mouse models to test how genetics combine with early life experience to shape brain function and our behaviour. The ultimate goal is to understand these mechanisms and leverage them to develop new therapeutics for brain disorders.
James Connolly, Assistant Professor, Community and Regional Planning
Email: james.connolly@ubc.ca
Website
I am an urban planner specialized in the intersection between environmental planning and social justice. Broadly, my work asks how cities can be made greener and more socially just at the same time, without forcing one goal to be traded off for the other. My published works thus far explore this topic through a highly interdisciplinary and decidedly mixed methods approach with a focus on contemporary cities. I examine the issues at stake within several topics including urban climate planning; green gentrification; urban environmental stewardship; urban social-ecological justice; urban greening policies; and critical urban sustainability and resilience politics.
Megan Daniels, Assistant Professor, Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies
Email: megan.daniels@ubc.ca
Website
I research social, political, and religious developments in the eastern Mediterranean world in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages (1500-500 BCE) through ancient texts and iconography. My current book project explores the long-term ideologies that undergirded divine kingship in this region to articulate the religious mechanisms behind the emergence of the Greek city-states. More generally, I research the social functions of religion in human societies. I also have interests in ancient migration across Eurasia and in particular the historiography of migration studies in archaeology. I will be heading up the Mobilities Cluster next year at the Centre for Migration Studies, so I am excited to see how these interests intersect with the opportunities at Green College!
Igor Drljaca, Assistant Professor, Theatre and Film
Email: igor.drljaca@ubc.ca
Website
My work deals with memory, diaspora, trauma, ideology and dystopias. My award-winning films have screened at hundreds of festivals including Berlinale, Locarno, Toronto, Telluride and Rotterdam. My recent work includes the feature documentary The Stone Speakers (2018), which examines the intersection of ideology and post-war tourism in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the short The Archivists (2020), a sci-fi dystopian musical. The White Fortress (Tabija, 2021), my most recent feature, is the first co-production between Canada and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and had its world premiere at the 71st Berlinale this year. It is also Bosnia-Herzegovina’s selection in the 2022 International Feature Film Oscar race. I am currently developing a VR project about the Canadian citizenship ceremony, The Oath, and a docufiction film, Park Europa, about Bosnia-Herzegovina’s future admission into the European Union.
Olivia Michiko Gagnon, Assistant Professor, Theatre and Film
Email: olivia.gagnon@ubc.ca
Website
I work at the intersections of performance studies, critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and critical Indigenous studies––with additional specific interests in archives, experimental form and performative writing. I’m currently working on a book manuscript about closeness as a minoritarian method of doing history otherwise, through art & performance and beyond archival stricture. My next project takes on a more experimental (at-times dialogic) form, and explores the weave of (classroom) pedagogy, performance (studies) and critical questions of race, gender and sexuality.
Friedrich Martin Götz, Assistant Professor, Psychology
email: friedrich.goetz@ubc.ca
Website
I am a social-personality and geographical psychologist, pursuing an interdisciplinary Big Data approach to investigate the causes and consequences of spatial differences in psychological characteristics (e.g., personality traits and values). Applying classic interactionist theories from social and personality psychology to real-world settings, I adopt two integrated streams of research: On the micro-level, I study how distinct regional psychological profiles emerge and shape individual cognitions, behaviours and emotions (e.g., personal spending and well-being). On the macro-level, I research how regional psychological profiles shape an area’s social, political and economic climate and affect relevant macro-level outcomes (e.g., suicide prevalence, election results and start-up rates).
Ayasha Guerin, Assistant Professor, English Language and Literatures
email: ayasha.guerin@ubc.ca
Website
I research Black social life and ecology in New York City’s floodplain and I write about how abolitionist activism on urban waterfronts has been shaped by diasporic relationships and inter-species entanglements. As an artist, I am invested in art practices that are also forms of activism and believe a responsibility of the research profession is to make knowledge accessible through public actions and exhibitions. My second research project is focused on transnational Black feminism and arts activism in Berlin, Germany, where I have ongoing collective work with CCC (Curating through Conflict with Care) and Black Art Action Berlin.
Kristen Haase, Assistant Professor, Nursing
Email: kristen.haase@ubc.ca
Website
My research program centres on supporting older adults as they manage cancer, chronic disease and wellbeing, in domains of symptom science, self-management and technology-enabled interventions. I am committed to conducting my research with people with lived experience (often called patients, but not necessarily always accurate). I aim to partner with community groups who play an integral but often overlooked role in supporting seniors’ wellbeing. While my research is health focused, I am also interested in how older adults manage wellbeing and socialization as they age. I aim to leverage all the tools available to support older adults–not just healthcare resources but technologies and community services.
Nina Hewitt, Assistant Professor, Geography
Email: nina.hewitt@ubc.ca
Website
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.
Manu Madhav, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Email: manu.madhav@ubc.ca
Website
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.
Matias Margulis, Assistant Professor, Public Policy and Global Affairs
Email: matias.margulis@ubc.ca
Website
My research centres on the global governance and politics of food security. Food is recognized by the United Nations as a fundamental human right, yet nearly one billion people suffer from hunger and that number is rising. The impacts of climate change on food production, a new global land rush, and the rising use of foodstuffs to produce renewable energy are all transforming the global food economy and creating new challenges for ensuring equitable access to food. I seek to understand the role of global economic and political institutions in facilitating food insecurity as well as providing potential solutions.
Kelly McCormick, Assistant Professor, History
Email: kelly.mccormick@ubc.ca
Website
I am a historian of modern Japanese visual and material culture. My book project, The Cameraman in a Skirt, traces pivotal women who broke into the highly gendered sphere of the photography world to understand the changing relationship of Japanese women and the camera from the 1930s through 1970s. I am the lead investigator on "Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography," a collaborative digital humanities project on the history of Japanese women in photography from the mid-nineteenth century to today.
Leora Morris, Assistant Professor, Theatre and Film
Email: lmorri01@mail.ubc.ca
Website
As a theatre practitioner, my research focuses on the role of the director in creating new works of performance, and is rooted in my view of theatre as a social practice in which the director serves as a kind of “societal acupuncturist.” In addition to developing and directing new texts with playwrights, I direct adaptations, musicals, devised works and theatre for young audiences at theatres across Canada and the US. Most recently, I have begun to create sensory works for children under five and their caregivers, an emerging practice known as Performance for Early Years (PEY).
Priti Narayan, Assistant Professor, Geography
Email: priti.narayan@ubc.ca
Website
My research and teaching interests center around urban processes and politics, particularly in South Asia. In my primary research project, I use ethnographic and archival methods to investigate how residents negotiate with local politicians, bureaucrats, and activists to preserve citizenship in urban landscapes marked by violent, large-scale slum evictions. All aspects of my academic work are informed by my decade-long association and work with Pennurimai Iyakkam (“Women’s Rights Movement”), a 40-year-old organization that mobilizes female residents of urban poor settlements around the rights to land and housing and access to basic services in Tamil Nadu state, India.
Anaïs Orsi, Assistant Professor, Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science
Email: aorsi@eoas.ubc.ca
Website
I am a polar climate scientist, or perhaps I should say a climate detective. Today, the Arctic is the region that is warming the most in the whole planet, but we do not have direct measurements of what the preindustrial climate was in vast areas of this largely un-inhabited region. My work is about finding clues in the natural environment to reconstruct past climates so that we can understand what polar environments looked like before the recent warming period. The tools can be esoteric but the aim is clear: What is the baseline that we measure climate "change" from?
Chris Patterson, Assistant Professor, Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Email: c.patterson@ubc.ca
Website
My friends call me Kris. I’m a gender/genre fuzzy dad, a taro-and-potato mash of Filipino and white, and the agnostic grandson of two fervent Christian preachers. My research on race, literature, queer erotics and video games manifested in the books Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers 2018) and Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (NYU 2020). I also write creative works under my matrilineal name, Kawika Guillermo, like the novels Stamped (2018) and All Flowers Bloom (2020). I've lived in Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae, Nanjing, Hong Kong, and now I’m here.
Julia Schmidt, Assistant Professor, Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy
Email: julia.schmidt@ubc.ca
Website
My research aims to understand and improve everyday life for people after brain injury. I am focused on areas including self-awareness, identity, roles and resiliency. I hope to develop health delivery methods and programs to improve the experience and quality of life after brain injury, and build knowledge of the factors that facilitate engagement in life after brain injury.
Elise Stickles, Assistant Professor, English Language and Literatures
Email: elise.stickles@ubc.ca
Website
I am a cognitive linguist specializing in metaphor analysis; in particular, I study variation in metaphoric usage across linguistic varieties and genres by applying methods from corpus and computational linguistics. Currently, I am focusing on a comparative analysis of metaphors for cancer and COVID-19 in American and Canadian Englishes. I maintain the MetaNet metaphor database, which documents metaphors used in American English and Spanish, and am now expanding it to include Canadian English and French. I obtained my MA and PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley and then completed a postdoctoral teaching fellowship at Stanford University before joining UBC as an Assistant Professor in 2019.
Bronwen Tate, Assistant Professor, Creative Writing
Email: bronwen.tate@ubc.ca
Website
My areas of interest and accomplishment include poetry, literary criticism, creative nonfiction and scholarship on the teaching and learning of creative writing. I’m currently at work on a book of creative nonfiction that explores the power and traps of stories and storytelling against the backdrop of the final years of an experimental college in crisis. As faculty in UBC’s Educational Leadership stream, I’m also investigating teaching strategies that invite students to experience the deep process and sustained attention necessary for art-making, which are often in tension with social pressures towards efficiency and distraction.
Ori Tenenboim, Assistant Professor, Journalism, Writing and Media
Email: ori.tenenboim@ubc.ca
Website
I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism, Writing and Media. My main areas of interest include digital journalism, political communication and media economics. I investigate how journalists and news organizations blend older and newer norms, behaviours and forms on different platforms, and what elicits user engagement with the news. I also seek to better understand how news organizations can connect with communities to promote shared benefits, such as knowledge gains and increased trust.
Hannah Turner, Assistant Professor, Information
Email: hannah.turner@ubc.ca
Website
I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Information, where I research the connection between cultural heritage and technology. I examine systems of classification and categorization in museum ethnographic collections, and experiment with how emerging technologies are used to represent cultural heritage.
Daniel Vigo, Assistant Professor, Psychiatry | Population and Public Health
Email: daniel.vigo@ubc.ca
Website
I am a psychiatrist, clinical psychologist and public health specialist originally from Argentina. I am an Assistant Professor at UBC, a Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, an Advisor to the PAHO and the WHO, as well as the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Mental Health Systems. I have worked in clinical, research, teaching and leadership positions across the public and private sector, in Buenos Aires, Boston and Vancouver. My expertise is in public health, health systems, global mental health, psychiatric epidemiology, psychopharmacology, psychotherapy and e-mental health. I currently work closely with Health Authorities, the BC Ministry of Health and Health Canada to deliver evidence-based mental health and substance use services, with a focus on the most severely ill population with concurrent disorders.
Meike Wernicke, Assistant Professor, Language and Literacy Education
Email: meike.wernicke@ubc.ca
Website
I am a settler scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at UBC. My research is situated at the intersection of teacher education and language learning and teaching. In my work I focus on the ideological and discursive workings of language, culture and educational policy, and the impact of these on the identities and practices of language learners and teachers. My work involves drawing on critical perspectives and decolonizing approaches to examine how we can prioritize equitable language practices in both initial teacher education and teacher professional learning.
Lydia Wytenbroek, Assistant Professor, Nursing
Email: lydia.wytenbroek@ubc.ca
Website
Health and medicine is a lens through which I analyze the global circulation of medical knowledge and power. My research explores American women surgeon and nurse missionaries in twentieth-century Iran and I argue that mission nurses' efforts to promote American nursing in Iran intersected with Reza Shah's modernizing initiatives in a way that served Iranian nationalism and state building. My work is locally grounded, but I use transnational medical encounters in Iran to explore larger issues of global migration, nursing imperialism, the often false dichotomy between religion and professionalization, gender liberation and the power and politics of global health initiatives.
Renren Yang, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies
Email: renren.yang@ubc.ca
Website
I do research on 20th and 21st-century Chinese literature, film and popular culture, with a focus on the intersection between critical literary and media studies. My work centers on celebrity authorship, interface design, time-travel imagination and surveillance cinema in modern China.
Ayaka Yoshimizu, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies
Email: ayaka.yoshimizu@ubc.ca
Website
I am Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Asian Studies, and I also teach arts courses for the UBC-Ritsumeikan Academic Exchange Programs. My research is concerned with transpacific migration and cultures, memories and senses, and performance ethnography. I teach Japanese studies in Asian Studies, and Canadian and transpacific studies in the UBC-Rits Programs. My position makes my curriculum development work uniquely multidisciplinary, as I constantly move across national borders as I teach two distinct audiences in the two programs. My pedagogical projects are centred around decolonializing teaching and learning and promoting social justice in and beyond classroom.