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.

The 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.
     

  • Frances Koncan, School of Creative Writing
    Email: fkoncan@mail.ubc.ca
    Website

    As a writer, I am primarily active in the world of theatre, with occasional forays into the strange but better-paying world of television. My writing is typically described as comedic, although I personally take it very seriously and wish others did too. My background is primarily in industry rather than academic, so in my role as an Assistant Professor, I am confused about 84% of the time. When I'm not writing plays or scrolling TikTok in bed, I keep busy by participating in theatre in a variety of other ways, including as a director, producer, and audience member.

  • 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..