Awards
Museum of Anthropology
University of British Columbia |
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- Thematic Programs
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- Distinguished Professor
- Distinguished Visiting Professor
- Distinguished Scholars in Residence
- Early Career Scholars
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Distinguished Scholars in Residence
Browse Awards by Year:
Barbara Dancygier, Professor, English
Thomas Grigliatti, Professor, Zoology
Eric Margolis, Professor, Philosophy
Guy Dumont, Professor and CRC, Electrical & Computer Engineering View Bio
Fabio Rossi, Associate Professor, MD, and CRC, Medical Genetics View Bio
Rena Sharon, Professor, School of Music View Bio
John Steeves, Professor, ICORD View Bio
Richard Unger, Professor, History View Bio
Janis Sarra, Professor, Law View Bio
Margaret Schabas, Professor, Philosophy View Bio
Ilan Vertinsky, Professor, Institute for Asian Research, Institute of Resources, Environment & Sustainability, and the Sauder School of Business View Bio
Mark Warren, Professor, Political Science View Bio
Trevor Barnes, Professor, Geography View Bio
Michael Doebeli, Professor, Mathematics and Zoology View Bio
Leah Edelstein-Keshet, Professor, Mathematics View Bio
Harvey Richer, Professor, Physics & Astronomy View Bio
Stephen Sheppard, Professor, Forest Resources Management and Landscape Architecture View Bio
Margery Fee, Professor, English View Bio
Anthony Pitcher, Professor, Fisheries Centre View Bio
Alan Mackworth, Professor, Computer Science View Bio
Judy Segal, Associate Professor, English View Bio
Anthony Sinclair, Professor, Zoology View Bio
Andrew Macnab, Professor, Pediatrics View Bio
Catharine Rankin, Professor, Psychology View Bio
Mark Zacher, Professor, Political Science View Bio
Dominic Lopes, Professor, Philosophy View Bio
Olav Slaymaker, Professor, Geography View Bio
Lawrence Ward, Professor, Psychology View Bio
Murray Isman, Professor, Agroecology View Bio
Patricia Vertinsky, Professor, Human Kinetics View Bio
Michael Whitlock, Associate Professor, Zoology View Bio
Kenneth Craig, Professor, Psychology View Bio
Sherrill Grace, Professor, English View Bio
David Ley, Professor, Geography View Bio
Dennis Danielson, Professor, English View Bio
David Jones, Professor, Zoology View Bio
Dianne Newell, Professor, History View Bio
John Foster, Professor, English View Bio
Dale Rolfsen, Professor, Mathematics View Bio
Linda Siegel, Professor, Educational & Counselling Psychology, and Special Education View Bio
Patricia Marchak, Professor, Anthropology & Sociology, Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability View Bio
Peter Suedfeld, Professor, Psychology View Bio
John Willinsky, Professor, Language Education View Bio
Professor
Political Science
Max Cameron has taken a deep interest in the political challenges taking place in Latin America, particularly the challenges to democracy. Along the way, he has taken productive detours into such topics as the global campaign to ban land mines. Dr. Cameron is a committed communicator who blogs on the Peruvian elections, gives an impressive number of media interviews on a wide range of subjects, and speaks at major international meetings.
Dr. Cameron spent his graduate years at the University of California, Berkeley, after which he taught at Carleton University in Ottawa for ten years before coming to UBC as an Associate Professor in 1999, becoming a full professor in 2002. He has headed up two Wall Exploratory Workshops, on “Threats to Democracy in Latin America (2000) and on “Latin America’s Left Turns?” (2007), both of which led to edited collections.
His ambitious project at the Institute this year is developing a book, “Between Rules and Practice: Why We Need Practical Wisdom in Politics.” To this end, he has launched a seminar series by the same title with outstanding speakers from a variety of disciplines, co-sponsored by Green College. The series asks what moral skill and personal will we need as citizens, professionals, parents, and friends to know how to act in particular circumstances—a question that is intended both to deepen his own analysis and stimulate discussion across the campus. He also organized, in his capacity as Director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a high-powered public forum on the topic: Why Don’t More Good People Enter Politics?” which featured former Prime Minister Paul Martin and a host of other influential Canadians.
Dr. Cameron’s Scholar in Residence talk "Between Rules and Practice: Practical Wisdom in Constitutional Democracies" will be given February 29, 2012 and will be available after that date as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor and CRC
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Guy Dumont is an expert in Process Control Engineering who developed and implemented one of the first successful industrial adaptive control schemes in the world in 1976. Several of his technologies have been successfully transferred to industry over the years. Motivated by a Wall Exploratory Workshop he co-directed, Dr. Dumont switched topics a decade ago to the field of biomedical engineering, where he researches physiological monitoring and control in critical care, most especially anesthesiology.
Dr. Dumont took his engineering diploma at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers, Paris. He obtained his doctorate in Electrical Engineering at McGill University in 1977 and then spent over twenty years in private industry before being recruited to UBC in 1989. From 1989 to 1999, he held the senior Paprican/NSERC Industrial Chair in Industrial Process Control and worked closely with pulp and paper companies and suppliers. He has also served as Director of the Pulp and Paper Centre at UBC. He is, among other achievements, an elected fellow of both the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the IEEE, and a two-time winner of the NSERC Synergy Award.
During his year at the Wall Institute, Dr. Dumont is focusing on global health, particularly on affordable technology for mobile health based on mobile phones for underdeveloped countries. Towards this goal, he and his collaborator at the BC Children’s Hospital have contributed $250K of their recently-awarded Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research In Science and Engineering to developing the Phone Oximeter. This device is a smartphone-based pulse oximeter for respiratory disease and management in the developing world. His aim is to make the Phone Oximeter universally available.
Dr. Dumont’s Scholar in Residence talk, “Comfortably Numb: Cruise Control for Anesthesia,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Associate Professor, MD, and CRC
Medical Genetics
The overarching theme of Dr. Rossi’s research is the investigation of the mechanisms underlying tissue responses to damage and degenerative disease. His research has highlighted the need for a different approach to tissue regeneration: namely, one that focuses not on individual components studied in isolation, but rather on the whole complex regenerative mileu. He and his lab have developed a number of techniques aimed at rare stem cell identification and purification, leading them to pioneering techniques such as high-content flow cytometry at UBC; Dr. Rossi is at present directing the shared flow cytometry facility serving nearly fifty labs on campus and a number of local companies.
Dr. Rossi earned his MD at the University of Genoa and PhD in Molecular Biology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratories, University of Heidelberg in 1996. Following a few years spent as a Research Scientist and post-doc at Stanford University, and a Visiting Junior Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute, he was recruited to UBC as an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in 2001, becoming a full professor in 2011. Dr. Rossi is known for his remarkable ability to simultaneously maintain productive, well-funded programs in diverse fields, which is rare in his hyper-specialized scientific community.
At the Institute this year, Dr. Rossi will lead two workshops. One will be a small, interdisciplinary exploratory meeting on bone regeneration to discuss how to integrate multidisciplinary expertise aimed at formulating a coherent approach to bone regeneration that is also in line with the recent and foreseen progress in personalized medicine. The other is a planning workshop to create a multidisciplinary regenerative network in Vancouver and organize an international symposium on this topic.
Dr. Rossi’s Scholar in Residence talk, “The Hype About Stem Cells: Ethical and Practical Implications of Recent Advances in Stem Cell Research,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
School of Music
Rena Sharon is a pianist who is one of Canada’s leading collaborative performing artists and piano chamber musicians. She also stands out as one who is deeply interested in knowing what science can offer to an understanding of creative processes. She is known for her personal commitment to the relevance of music to the widest range of human conditions and endeavours. She is collaborating with lawyers to explore the keys found in music making that open doors to better interactions between people dealing with differences that require mediation and conciliation. She is also working with neuroscientists on the theory that what is being learned in the study of the brain gains much from how the process of music making can be tracked to reveal unusual combinations of neural pathways. Recently she founded and now directs the Vancouver International Song Institute, a multidisciplinary entity with an annual festival committed to exploring all aspects of texts and musics of the song literature, and how the study and performance of song literature serves the human need to connect one to another.
Dr. Sharon received her undergraduate degree in Music from the Eastman School of Music and her Master of Music in Piano Performance at Indiana University. She taught at the Department of Music, Oklahoma State University, and at the Victoria Conservatory of Music, where she was Head of Collaborative Music before taking up her UBC appointment in 1982. In 2007, she led a Wall Exploratory Workshop, “Art Song Anima.”
Dr. Sharon is planning a series of meetings at the Institute to begin identifying problems of image, perception, translation, and communication within the ranks of artist faculty. She hopes this will lead to a more formal workshop to consider ways of including artists in the expanding global interdisciplinary dialogue.
Dr. Sharon’s Scholar in Residence presentation will be given on January 25, 2012 and will be available after that date as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
ICORD
John Steeves is a neuroscientist whose research interests focus on the mechanisms essential to facilitate functional repair after Spinal Cord Injury using a range of approaches. He recently stepped down after fifteen years as the Founding Director of ICORD, an interdisciplinary centre with 300 researchers and over 40 faculty investigating a broad range of issues and research questions in the field of spinal cord injury.
Dr. Steeves was educated at the University of Manitoba, with a BSc in Zoology and Psychology and a PhD in Neuroscience and Physiology (1978). After his post-doctoral training in Physiology at the University of Alberta, he was appointed to UBC as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Zoology and the Graduate Program in Neuroscience. Since 1987, he has been associated with several departments and programs in the Faculty of Medicine. He became a full professor in 1992 and was the inaugural appointment to the BC Leadership Chair program in 2002. He is also a co-investigator on the Wall Major Thematic Grant project on Sensorimotor Computation (2008-2011).
At the Institute, Dr. Steeves is examining the interdisciplinary integration of computer-guided, robot-assisted rehabilitation strategies for arm and hand function after neurological injury. This topic integrates engineering, computer science, biology, and medicine. He is also continuing to develop lectures and publications on the translation of basic science discoveries to an applied setting. This latter topic has potential for development as a Peter Wall Institute workshop and would attract a broad audience from UBC and beyond.
Dr. Steeves’ Scholar in Residence talk, “Traversing Clinical Trials,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
History
Richard Unger specializes in medieval and early modern economic history, the history of medieval technology, maritime history, and environmental history. Within these various fields, he concentrates chiefly on north-western Europe, the Netherlands in particular, and has developed an unusually broad chronological range, covering both the medieval and early modern eras.
Dr. Unger completed his master’s degrees in History and Economics and a doctorate in History at Yale University in 1971. His many awards and distinctions since joining the UBC Department of History in 1969 include the Donnelley Family Fellowship, National Humanities Center; Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, University of Oxford; Fellow, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study; Visiting Research Fellow, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; Visiting Fellow, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; John Lyman Book Award of the North American Society of Oceanic History; UBC Killam Research Prize, and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
Dr. Unger’s research agenda at the Institute involves two new and interrelated publication projects on historic energy systems: on energy sources used in Canada since 1800, and on energy carriers in early modern Europe (1500-1800), site of the world’s first fossil-fuel energy revolution. These two projects begin to demonstrate how different energy sources, not just fossil fuels, have driven modern economic growth and how various energy sources (fossil, wind, water, biomass, etc.) have distinctive advantages and negative environmental impacts. In October, Dr. Unger headed a Peter Wall Institute Colloquium Abroad "Continuity in Energy Regimes" on the topic of energy sustainability in early modern Europe at one of our three partner institutes, the Technical University of Munich, Institute for Advanced Studies, co-hosted by the Deutsches Museum.
Dr. Unger’s Scholar in Residence talk, “Energy Consumption and the Environmental Impact of the Black Death,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Associate Professor
Computer Science
Since the mid-1990s, starting with his PhD work, Holger Hoos has pursued an ambitious and successful research program that is centred on methods for constraint reasoning, search, and optimization, and their application. His work has influenced many others in the field, not only through specific research findings but also by providing an example of how experimental studies can guide the development of new methods and algorithms. His co-authored book Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications is considered the best in the field; it establishes taxonomies and tools for analysis that can be the basis for an engineering framework.
Dr. Hoos completed his doctorate in Computer Science at the University of Darmstadt in Germany in 1998 and then took up a post-doctoral fellowship at UBC, followed by an academic appointment in 2000. In recognition of his contribution to scholarship, he has won several best paper awards from top journals and conferences in his field and has been elected vice-president of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies in Intelligence. He was a 2001–2002 Peter Wall Early Career Scholar.
At the Institute, Dr. Hoos spent time in his pursuit of three research directions: The study of the 3D structure of RNA, which is a key problem in computational biology. He has already published several promising results in the area. Another research direction is the automated design and optimization of algorithms. This is a core problem in computer science with significant practical impact. As a third direction, he is working on a new open media environment. This is a joint project with colleagues from the UBC School of Music.
Dr. Hoos’ Scholar in Residence talk, “À la recherche de l’intelligence artificielle: Machines That Think, Create and Play,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Law
Janis Sarra is a specialist in corporate law, commercial law, commercial insolvency, corporate finance, and securities law. As the leading scholar in commercial law working in Canada, she has gained international renown for developing a unique approach to research that combines theoretical frameworks drawing from the social sciences with a great understanding of practical issues. In particular, her work on insolvency has helped shape how we think about corporate restructuring, which is one of the reasons why she is in international demand as a speaker and advisor.
Dr. Sarra received her degrees from the University of Toronto: first, a BA in Political Science and Public Administration and MA in Political Economy. After positions as Executive Assistant of Metro Toronto, Research Associate with the Ontario Legislative Assembly, Human Rights Director of the Ontario Federation of Labour, and Member of the Ontario Relations Board, she returned to the University of Toronto for her LLB, LLM, and SJD and was admitted to the Ontario Bar. She joined UBC Faculty of Law in 2000 and was an Early Career Scholar at the Institute in 2001–2002.
Dr. Sarra’s project at the Institute was an interdisciplinary, multi-stage initiative that explores the basic values of fairness. She believes that an exchange of understandings of ethics and values such as fairness, with colleagues in the arts, may serve to deepen our understanding of the concept of fairness and explore its meaning through a different lens. In December she held a jazz concert and discussion, “Jazz as the Medium: Informing Notions of Fairness.” In the spring of 2011 she directed a “Dance Atelier” on “Articulations of Fairness Through Dance, Dialogue, Space” and chaired a public forum she organized, titled “Creating New Landscapes in Notions of Fairness.” (www.fairness.pwias.ubc.ca)
Dr. Sarra’s Scholar in Residence talk, “The Pragmatic, Prescient, and Prudential: Corporate Governance of Banks in the Wake of Financial Crisis,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Philosophy
Margaret Schabas’ achievements in the philosophy and history of economics have straddled the humanities and social sciences in an admirable fashion, with important refereed contributions in journals and edited books as well as two substantial monographs, on the economist-scientist William Stanley Jevons, A World Ruled by Numbers (1990), and Natural Origins of Economics (2005). Out of her study of the emergence of classical political economy, Dr. Schabas has moved on to the major and challenging task of re-thinking Hume for twenty-first century scholars in a way which speaks to economists, historians, and philosophers.
The international respect in which Professor Schabas is held is evident in the prestigious grants and fellowships she has held outside of Canada. She has held fellowships at Stanford University, a Mellon at Harvard, a Dibner at MIT, a Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, and a Lachmann Fellowship at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Schabas was educated at the University of Indiana, with an AM in History and Philosophy of Science; the University of Michigan, MA in Economics; and the University of Toronto, PhD in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. She held academic appointments at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and York University before joining UBC as Professor in 2001. At the Institute, Dr. Schabas spent time researching and writing articles on the historical and philosophical foundations of bio-economics and held two one-day workshops.
Dr. Schabas’ Scholar in Residence talk, “Hume on Happiness,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Institute for Asian Research, Institute of Resources, Environment & Sustainability, and the Sauder School of Business
Ilan Vertinsky’s work is widely known for its excellence, rigour, relevance, and interdisciplinary breadth. A common focus of his research to date has been the intersection of uncertainty, resilience, and environmental discontinuities. Much of his research on systems resilience is concerned with specific episodes and is explicitly “event-centric” in its methodology. These event-centric case studies work effectively as instrumental research arguments. However, unlike most scholars who do case research, Dr. Vertinsky uses the cases to build computational models of the real processes and mechanisms that he and his colleagues have observed—models that can be systematically varied to identify more or less robust/resilient institutional designs.
Dr. Vertinsky received his BA in Economics from Hebrew University and a PhD in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley. He held an appointment at Northwestern University before joining UBC’s Institute for Animal Resource Ecology and the divisions of Management Science and Policy Science in the Faculty of Commerce & Business Administration as Assistant Professor in 1970. A prolific author, he has published eight books to date and has received many awards for his research achievements, including the UBC Killam Research Prize.
At the Institute, Dr. Vertinsky spent time drafting a book on the foundation of systems resilience and crisis management that will articulate the fundamental relations that influence crisis prevention, crisis management, and post-crisis dynamics. He also organized an international workshop on the topic in 2011.
Professor
Political Science
Mark Warren is one of the leading scholars of democratic theory in the world, having made groundbreaking and innovative contributions through his work on representation, deliberation, and participation. Although he began his academic career as a Nietzsche scholar, publishing Nietzsche and Political Thought (1988), his most visible contribution at the moment is via democratic theory. He is especially interested in studying and understanding new forms of democratic representation that can be found in such institutions as citizens’ assemblies and global social movements. Recently, he led a group of scholars who produced an influential study of the Citizens’ Assembly in BC, a novel experiment in democratic governance that is attracting international attention in the academic as well as political world.
Dr. Warren holds a BA in Political Science from Lewis & Clark College, an MA in the Philosophy of Social Studies & Statistics, University of Oregon, and an MA and PhD in Political Science, University of Toronto. He established his academic career at Georgetown University, and joined UBC in 2004 as the Harold and Dorrie Merilees Professor in the Study of Democracy.
Dr. Warren is recognized for being one of the first to talk about the essential role that trust plays in the democratic public sphere. His book on the topic, Democracy and Associations (2001), won the 2003 Elaine and David Spitz Book Prize, awarded by the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought, as well as the 2003 Outstanding Book Award, Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).
At the Institute, Dr. Warren spent time completing his book manuscript on the very timely and important topic of democracy and corruption and co-organized a workshop on the subject.
Dr. Warren’s Scholar in Residence talk, “Voting with Your Feet: Exit-Based Empowerment in Democratic Theory,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Mathematics
Martin Barlow is a leading figure in probability theory and one whose work has shaped research in the field of stochastic analysis, a field in which it is not easy to make an impact. He began his career by developing profound ideas in the area of stochastic calculus, making a number of important contributions to the theory of stochastic processes, especially in the realm of Brownian motion on fractals. He also has close connections with the theory of “disordered media” in physics and has explored a number of related topics in stochastic analysis in Euclidean space, manifolds, and graphs. Dr Barlow is the leading international expert in the behaviour of diffusions on fractals and other disordered media.
Dr. Barlow holds a Bachelor of Mathematics and a diploma in Mathematical Statistics from the University of Cambridge; he received his PhD from the University of Wales in 1978. Since his appointment as Associate Professor of Mathematics at UBC in 1992 and Professor in 1994 he has lectured worldwide, including most recently the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Medallion Lecture at the World Congress of the Bernoulli Society, and has received many international fellowships. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Royal Society (London).
At the Institute, Dr. Barlow prepared a book manuscript on the topic, “Random Walks on Graphs,” and initiated research on topics of long-standing interest that are broadly connected with the history of science.
Dr. Barlow’s Scholar in Residence talk, “Random Walks and Random Structure,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Geography
Trevor Barnes is a prominent human geographer who specializes in the economic geography of contested zones. From his early work focusing on an analysis of the capitalist space economy, which was the title of his first book, he has expanded his approach to incorporate issues affecting rainforest ecosystems and industrial geography. In his Logics of Dislocation (Guilford Press), he emphasized the role of social and institutional relations in the development of economic geography, an approach that the Canadian Association of Geographers has referred to as “visionary.” He then explored post-structuralism, co-editing two influential studies, Writing Worlds (Routledge) and Reading Human Geography (Edward Arnold). For the past several years, he has been investigating his own field of economic geography from a historical perspective.
Dr. Barnes received a BSc in Economics from University College London with MA and PhD degrees in Geography from the University of Minnesota. Since joining UBC as Assistant Professor in 1983, he has distinguished himself as a leading and highly innovative interdisciplinary scholar. Among his many honours are the Canadian Association of Geographers Award for Scholarly Distinction and the Presidential Award for Distinguished Achievement from the Association of American Geographers, and from UBC a Killam Memorial Fellowship, Killam Research Prize, and a UBC Distinguished University Scholar appointment.
At the Institute, Dr. Barnes explored the connections between the Second World War and the Cold War within the discipline of geography and the knowledge it produced. Dr. Barnes’ Scholar in Residence talk, “Two Men of War and Their Big Idea: Walter Christaller, Edward Ullman, and Central Place Theory,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Mathematics and Zoology
Michael Doebeli is a specialist in the origin of biological diversity and has pioneered the study of speciation through the approach of mathematical biology. He was the co-author on one of the most widely cited speciation papers ever, “On the Origin of Species by Sympathetic Speciation,” in Nature 1999, and is engaged in integrating his work on species diversification to develop an evolutionary understanding of cooperation.
Dr. Doebeli received his MA and PhD in Mathematics from the University of Basel, Switzerland with a special emphasis on dynamical systems in zoology. Since joining UBC as an Assistant Professor in 1999, becoming Professor in 2007, Dr. Doebeli has taught advanced courses in Ecology and Mathematical Biology. He is past director of the Integrated Sciences Program in the Faculty of Science. In addition to his notable publication history, his work has been honoured with such national awards as the NSERC Steacie Fellowship, the UBC Charles S. McDowell Award for Excellence in Research and a UBC Killam Memorial Fellowship.
Given his prior history as a Peter Wall Early Career Scholar in 2000, and 2009 Scholar in Residence appointment, the Institute was pleased to support the completion of Dr. Doebeli’s book monograph addressing the evolution of diversity in biology, language, and culture for Princeton University Press. The mathematical and experimental models he addressed will be expanded further as he follows his interest in the origin of diversity in language and religion, approached from an evolutional perspective.
Dr. Doebeli's Scholar in Residence talk, “Evolution of Diversity,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Mathematics
Leah Edelstein-Keshet’s career is dedicated to using mathematics as a tool for research in the life sciences. She has become recognized as one of the world leaders in the area of mathematical biology, in which she has been at the forefront for 25 years. Her work spans many topics, from the sub-cellular to the ecological. For the past decade, she has focused on biomedical research, including autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes. She also researches Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Edelstein-Keshet earned her BSc and MSc degrees in Mathematics from Dalhousie University and received her PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel in 1982. She held teaching positions at Brown University and Duke University before joining UBC as Associate Professor in 1989, becoming Professor in 1995. Her book Mathematical Models in Biology (Random House) is regarded as the definitive textbook in the rapidly growing field of mathematical biology. She has been awarded the Canadian Mathematical Society’s Krieger-Nelson Prize, which recognizes outstanding research by a female mathematician, and, at UBC, the Faculty of Science Award for Leadership. She has also served as President of the Society for Mathematical Biology.
As a 2009 Scholar in Residence, Dr. Edelstein-Keshet applied her interdisciplinary approach to an understanding of cellular mechanics, biochemistry, and the molecular biology of cell processes. Her work on cell motility and the cytoskeleton addresses such fundamental questions as changes in cell shape following stimulation by chemoattractants, crawling motion and turning of the cell in response to external cues. Such processes are important regulators of cellular dynamics in cancer, pathogen invasion, and normal cellular functions. In 2009, she held a “Cellfest” and sponsored several visiting international speakers.
Dr. Edelstein-Keshet’s Scholar in Residence talk, “A Mathematician’s Adventures in Cell Biology,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Physics & Astronomy
Harvey Richer is an observational astronomer who uses his privileged access to the Hubble Space Telescope and a range of other telescopes to explore the age of the Universe, the evolution of stellar systems, and the formation of galaxies. Over the past eight years, he has been one of the largest Canadian users of the Hubble, large blocks of time on which are internationally competitive and extremely limited.
Dr. Richer received his BSc degree in Physics and Mathematics from McGill University and his PhD in Astronomy and Physics from the University of Rochester. Prior to coming to UBC, he taught at Rochester and worked as a Visiting Astronomer at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Since becoming Professor at UBC in 1983, Dr. Richer has been a Canada Council of the Arts Killam Fellow and a Fulbright Fellow.
Dr. Richer’s distinguished record of research brought him to the Institute in 2009, where he and his team analyzed their latest Hubble telescope data with an aim to image one of the earliest star clusters in the Universe. By analyzing the cooled white dwarf stars in this cluster, the team will be able to date the origin of this formation. Further, by locating and characterizing the cluster’s least massive normal stars, they will determine the minimum stellar mass that is capable of sustained nuclear reactions in its core.
Dr. Richer’s Scholar in Residence talk, “Watcher of the Sky: An Observational Astronomer’s View of the Universe,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Forest Resources Management and Landscape Architecture
Stephen Sheppard specializes in landscape planning and aesthetics. He is one of a handful of researchers in the world who uses visualization technology to explore key questions of our times. Dr. Sheppard’s work in Forest Resources Management and Landscape Architecture analyzes the relationship between human perceptions, environmental conditions, and the participatory processes of future planning. From his 1989 work Visual Simulation (Van Nostrand Reinhold), looking at the disconnect between popular concern about the environment and the lack of political will to address the issue, Dr. Sheppard expanded into laboratory-based perception experiments to explore participatory techniques for forestry practitioners.
Dr. Sheppard received his BA and MA in Agricultural and Forest Services from the University of Oxford and his PhD in Environmental Planning from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982. After arriving at UBC in 1997, he divided his time between the environmental services sector and academia. Along the way, he has established himself as a leading figure in the aesthetics of climate change, and his CALP (Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning) research group at UBC has played host to scholars from around the world.
At the Institute, Dr. Sheppard analyzed his latest data on the public perceptions of climate change for a book manuscript, Visualizing Climate Change: A Guide to Visual Communication of Climate Change and Developing Local Solutions, completed under an agreement with Earthscan. Based on his novel research approach into the role of visualization-based planning methods, this research promises to contribute substantively to an understanding of how cognition, cultural factors, and the media influence perceptions on this vital political issue. He held a workshop in March 2010 that demonstrated the background of his CALP research group and its impact on the emerging theory of aesthetics and perception of climate change.
Dr. Sheppard’s Scholar in Residence talk, “Changing Our High-Carbon Aesthetic: Shifting Attitudes on Climate Change,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Music
Bill Benjamin specializes in musical composition and theory. His early work involved a technical analysis of 19th and 20th century music. He also produced a range of musical compositions that garnered a number of honours. More recently, his interests have shifted away from straight analysis to exploring the nature and function of musical memory, a concern that touches on an aspect of musical reality confronted by musicians and non-musicians alike. As a musical theorist, he is considered one of the most distinctive authorities in that field.
Dr. Benjamin holds a Bachelor of Music from McGill University, and MFA and PhD degrees in musical theory and composition from Princeton University. He came to UBC as an Associate Professor of Music in 1978, becoming Professor in 1983 and Director of the School in 1984.
At the Institute, Dr. Benjamin examined underlying philosophical questions about musicality and musical behaviour. This work has drawn him into the interdisciplinary area of aesthetics, psychology, and musicology. He is working toward an alternative approach to music aesthetics that emphasizes the role of the listener as an active participant, as having access to a real internal record of the music. Dr. Benjamin collected qualitative and quantitative data for his new book to be titled Music Heard and Imagined. Dr. Benjamin’s Scholar in Residence talk, “Reproducing Music in Silence,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
English
Margery Fee has shaped national understanding of Canadian literature, culture, and regional and national forms of Canadian English usage. She has also become an influential figure within global indigenous and postcolonial studies, as measured in her numerous publications, research grants, editorships, and plenary addresses.
Dr. Fee completed her doctorate in English at the University of Toronto in 1981. Since taking up her position at UBC as an Associate Professor in 1993, she has held a number of prominent administrative positions in the Faculty of Arts at the same time as maintaining her role as a highly productive and innovative scholar.
Dr. Fee’s longstanding interest in Aboriginal issues, postcolonial studies, narrative, and racialization merged in her article, “Racializing Narratives: Obesity, Diabetes and the ‘Aboriginal’ Thrifty Genotype,” in Social Science and Medicine (2006). This study set her on a path that led to her year at the Peter Wall Institute, where she forged new networks and generated a considerable number of papers as well as two grant applications. Dr. Fee held a Scholar in Residence Workshop in October 2009 entitled, “Connecting Academic Research to Aboriginal Wellness”. Dr. Fee’s Scholar in Residence talk, “What Can the Humanities Offer Science in Understanding Genetics and Social ‘Race’?” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Professor
Fisheries Centre
Tony Pitcher is a distinguished fisheries biologist, with an outstanding scholarly record and a worldwide reputation in fisheries research, much of it interdisciplinary. He received his MA and DPhil in Zoology from Oxford University in 1970. He was appointed as Professor and founding Director of the UBC Fisheries Centre in 1993. In 2003, Dr. Pitcher received the Beverton Medal from the Fisheries Society of the British Isles for his lifetime contributions to fisheries science.
Dr. Pitcher has made major contributions as a research scientist in two particular areas. The first area was fish schooling behaviour. More recently, he has been working on ecosystem assessment and modeling. In his pioneering “back to the future” approach, he uses past ecosystems to set viable future policy goals. This contemporary interest in the sustainability of benefits for humans from marine ecosystems was his research area while at the Institute in 2008.
Dr. Pitcher received funding for a full-scale Exploratory Workshop titled “The Sea Before Us: Reconstructing the Strait of Georgia,” held at the Institute in May 2009. The aim of the Sea Before Us project is to develop and publish concepts, methods, and case studies establishing a restoration ecology for the oceans that is practical and grounded in theory. Dr. Pitcher’s Scholar in Residence talk, “The Sea Ahead: Learning from the Past,” is available as an audio podcast on the Institute’s website.
Associate Professor
Geography
Dr. Bakker is a scholar committed to understanding environmental policy, the role and significance of water resources in society, and distributive justice. Her primary work is in the field of the political ecology of water, water resources, and resource used in developed and developing countries. Dr. Bakker, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, completed her doctorate in 1999 and subsequently held a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford. She came to UBC as an Assistant Professor in 2001 and was a Peter Wall Early Career Scholar in 2002-2003.
Dr. Bakker authored An Uncooperative Commodity: Privatizing Water in England and Wales (Oxford University Press, 2004) and edited Eau Canada: The Future of Canada’s Water (UBC Press, 2006). In addition to producing numerous refereed articles and chapters and a great number of reports, Dr. Bakker contributes to popular debates in the media and elsewhere. At UBC, she is Director of the Water Governance Program.
While at the Institute, Dr. Bakker organized a launch for her edited collection, Eau Canada (see page 20 of the 2006-2007Wall Annual Report), held a workshop on transboundary water governance, a follow-up to her Peter Wall Exploratory Workshop which was intended as the starting point for an edited book on the topic, and prepared a book-length draft of a major synthesis of the vast strands of empirical research and theoretical advances she has accomplished over the past eight years in developing countries. She held an intensive, one-day brainstorming session at the Institute in the spring of 2008 to explore a research focus for a major funding project and published volume.
Professor
Computer Science
Dr. Mackworth is widely considered the leading and most distinguished artificial intelligence (AI) researcher in Canada. He has pioneered and made major contributions in the area of constraint satisfaction problems, methods, algorithms, and applications. He has developed an algebraic model of dynamics, Probabilistic Constraint Nets, which has had an impact on developments such as robotic control systems. Dr. Mackworth was the first to propose robot soccer as the benchmark for research on situated robotic agents, a concept that led to the founding of the International RoboCup Federation. He came to UBC as Assistant Professor in 1974.
Dr. Mackworth’s leadership in the community through his personal contacts and personality has been as impressive as his research contributions. He is a founding fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and has served as its president. He is a senior editor of the international journal Constraints and a member of the board of Artificial Intelligence. At UBC, Dr. Mackworth served from 1990 to 2006 as Director of the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence, a world-leading group of 15 faculty working in artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning. In addition, he took a leading role in developing the undergraduate Cognitive Systems program.
At the Institute in 2007, Dr. Mackworth worked on a subset of his larger research program on the development of constraint-based approaches to computation and control to further develop the Constraint-Based Agent (CBA) theory. The CBA is a formal and practical design framework for the specification and implementation of intelligent systems that function in active environments.
Associate Professor
English
Dr. Segal is a rhetorical theorist, someone who studies the history, theory, and means of persuasion in contexts that include politics, the law, commerce, and, increasingly, science. This field is one of the most interdisciplinary, being noted for its ability to bridge the Humanist-Medical-Scientific divide. Her specialty is the rhetoric of health and medicine. Her contributions to studies of the rhetoric associated with the contemporary biomedicalization of sexuality in Western societies are hailed as pioneering. Dr. Segal came to UBC from the University of Waterloo as Assistant Professor in 1991.
Dr. Segal’s 2005 monograph is Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). She has co-edited a special issue of the journal Configurations on the subject “Scientific Ethos: Authorship, Authority and Trust in the Sciences” (2003).
At the Institute in 2007, Dr. Segal’s research involved continued examination of biomedicalization and its impacts on discourse, society, and individuals, focusing on her SSHRC-funded project “Values and Public Persuasion: The Rhetoric of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Prescription Pharmaceuticals.” She held a Peter Wall Institute funded one-day workshop in the spring of 2008 to gather a small number of international scholars and UBC graduate students who are working on topics in the rhetoric of health and medicine but who normally have no sustained opportunity for serious, face-to-face exploration of shared interests.
Professor
Zoology
Dr. Sinclair has conducted research on the Serengeti of Tanzania for more than forty years, asking very ambitious questions: What determines the size of animal populations? What are the structuring processes in ecosystems? How does one conserve and manage those ecosystems? He has also conducted long-term studies in northern Canada. Dr. Sinclair is considered by his peers to be one of the most influential and productive ecologists working in the world today and perhaps the most recognized ecologist in looking at the behavior of large ecosystems and the nature of population. He came to UBC as Assistant Professor in 1975.
At UBC, Dr. Sinclair was Director of the Centre for Biodiversity Research for six years (1996-2002). He developed a successful, major Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant and raised infrastructure funds for the research program he calls the Biodiversity Knockout Experiment. He also runs the Species at Risk Centre at UBC as part of the Centre for Biodiversity Research.
At the Institute, Dr. Sinclair finalized the edited collection, Serengeti III (The University of Chicago Press, 2008), and worked to synthesize ten years’ worth of data on the Serengeti. To that end, he scheduled a major Exploratory Workshop at the Institute for October 19-21, 2007: “Developing Sustainable Human-Natural Systems: The Greater Serengeti Ecosystem as a Case Study.” One outcome of this workshop was the basis of the next edited collection, Serengeti IV (The University of Chicago Press, Forthcoming 2011), on what affects biodiversity, including both natural and human-induced impacts.
Professor
Computer Science
Dr. Condon is a leader in the theoretical computer science and computational biology communities. Among her research awards are the ACM Distinguished Dissertation Award (1988), National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award (1992), Distinguished Alumna Award from University College Cork, Ireland (2001), and one of the five Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Chairs for Women in Science and Engineering (2004). The latter reflects Dr. Condon’s remarkable influence on women in computer science by inspiring and mentoring them individually and leading projects to improve the number of women entering the field.
For the past decade, Dr. Condon has specialized in interdisciplinary research in the areas of bio-molecular computation and, more recently, RNA (Ribonucleic acid) structure prediction. She publishes in top forums of theoretical computer science, bio-molecular computation, computational biology, and molecular biology, including Nature, Journal of Molecular Biology, and Nucleic Acids Research.
At the Institute, Dr. Condon among other things worked towards writing a new introductory computer science textbook based on a course she created at UBC that is cross-listed in Computer Science and Women’s Studies. She also organized a Distinguished Scholar in Residence Lecture Series, “Computational Approaches to Understanding and Predicting the Structure of RNA Molecules, and Their Roles in Living Cells.” Details of these talks appear in our 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 Annual Reports.
Professor
Pediatrics
Dr. Macnab has developed an unusual and outstanding combination of technical ability, academic knowledge, and scientific expertise. He has in particular a range of knowledge that is extraordinarily broad for an academic clinician who must concern himself with the myriad minutiae that constitute optimum treatment of seriously ill infants and children. It extends from the arcane aspects of developmental biology to the optical physics of biology sensors through the very basics of pediatric transport and child care.
A Canadian leader in the science of Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS), Dr. Macnab has made seminal discoveries at a basic science level that are poised to translate a disruptive technology into an answer for a major clinical problem in urology.
At the Institute in 2006, Dr. Macnab took advantage of being on the main campus to organize a Theme Development Workshop that explored a spectrum of applications of NIRS. He also worked to complete his book manuscript, “The A to Z of Air Travel with Infants and Children.” Dr. Macnab’s Associate Forum talk “Aid for Africa: The ‘Ilkeliani’ of UBC” was held on October 11, 2006.
Professor
Psychology
Dr. Rankin works on the development of learning and memory, having first studied the marine mollusk, Aplysia californica, then later studying the behaviour of the Caenorhabditis elegans (microscopic nematode worms) just as C. elegans was becoming widely appreciated as an experimental field for neurobiological and neuroethological studies. She has emerged as one of the world’s leading researchers in the cutting-edge, interdisciplinary field of behavioural neuroscience, and as the authority on the behaviour of C. elegans. A signal of Dr. Rankin’s stature was her appointment as the host for the next International Congress of Neuroethology, held in Vancouver in 2007.
In addition to her research on nematode behaviour and cellular and genetic mechanisms of learning and memory, Dr. Rankin has contributed to theoretical neuroscience. She has published her research in high impact forums such as Science and Journal of Neuroscience, and has contributed chapters to the three most recent basic reference texts on C. elegans.
At the Institute in 2006, Dr. Rankin will led an Exploratory Workshop on a form of learning called “habituation” with researchers who study the topic in different systems, one outcome was a book-length publication and a scholarly review on the topic, “Habituation Revisited: An Updated and Revised Description of the Behavioral Characteristics of Habituation” (Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 2008). The final report from Dr. Rankin’s Exploratory Workshop is found through the link: http://www.habituation.pwias.ubc.ca/report.php.
Professor
Political Science
Dr. Zacher’s research in the area of international relations and global public policy is well known internationally and has had an immense influence on those who work on the politics of international institutions and law. He has not only published monographs with major university presses and articles in leading journals, but he has held fellowships at Oxford, Cambridge, London School of Economics, and Toronto. After heading up the UBC Centre of International Relations for several decades, Dr. Zacher is at present Research Director
Dr. Zacher’s scholarly influence is also felt across disciplines, especially his co-authored books on Pollution, Politics and International Law: Tankers at Sea (U California Press, 1979); Managing International Markets: Developing Countries and the Commodity Trade Regime (Columbia UP, 1988); and Governing Global Networks: International Regimes for Transportation and Communications (Cambridge UP, 1996).
At the Institute in 2006, Dr. Zacher worked on the politics of international health collaboration, including a book, “United by Contagion.” With Dr. Janice Stein, Director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, he co-directed the Wall Summer Institute for Research, held 25-28 June, 2007. The theme of WSIR 2007 was “Civil Society Organizations and Global Health Governance”; our 2006-2007 Annual Report describes the outcomes of that event.
Professor
Political Science
Dr. Carty is considered the most distinguished Canadian scholar on political parties. He has published extensively and participated actively in professional meetings around the world, has authored and co-authored seminal works on BC and Canadian political parties and methods of elections, and has served as a major consultant to provincial and national Royal Commissions. Dr. Carty joined UBC as a lecturer in 1974.
With Lisa Young and Bill Cross he co-authored Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics (UBC Press, 2000), a study that has redefined the models we now use to explain the growth, development, and changes in our federal parties.
Dr. Carty was the Director of Research for the BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform for several years. This experiment in popular democracy drew worldwide attention. Never before has an assembly of randomly chosen citizens been given the task of studying the intricacies of a major policy question and proposing a solution. Dr. Carty prepared a booklength study of the Citizens’ Assembly, which addresses important international matters of modern democracy.
A second project arose from his involvement in the Canadian Democratic Audit, a multi-scholar ten-volume series. Dr. Carty co-authored the final integrative summary study. He also organized a two-day Scholar in Residence Workshop held 4-5 December, 2005 the state of the field and the possibilities of forming a virtual network of scholars of Canadian political parties and party systems were discussed, see our 2005-2006 Annual Report for details of this workshop.
Professor
Philosophy
Dr. Lopes studies a range of philosophical issues: ethics, epistemology, the philosophy of the mind and cognitive science, and aesthetics. In the field of aesthetics he is regarded as a leading scholar working in the area of representation, aesthetic perception, and pictorial meaning. He came to UBC as Associate Professor in 2000.
In his first book, Understanding Pictures (Oxford UP, 1992), Dr. Lopes elaborates an original and now influential theory of the interpretation of pictures. It is considered one of the leading works in aesthetics of the nineties. His essay, “Art Media and the Sense Modalities: Tactile Pictures” (1997) won a prestigious essay prize from The Philosophical Quarterly. He has also edited or co-edited three important reference works: The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics; Philosophy of Literature: A Companion; and Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts.
Dr. Lopes’ involvement with the Institute has been considerable. He was a 2001-2002 Early Career Scholar and Co-Principal Investigator of the 2003 Exploratory Workshop, “Maps: Then, Here, and Now,” which studied the relationship of mapping and human cognition. (See the 2002-2003 Annual Report for details.)
At the Institute in 2005, he worked to prepare a book entitled Live Wires: A Philosophy of Interactive Digital Art, which is at the cutting edge of the philosophical examination of contemporary arts. He also organized a Distinguished Scholar in Residence Lecture Series on the ontology of digital art. A report on the full series is included in our 2005-2006 Annual Report.
Professor
Geography
Dr. Slaymaker is an award-winning international expert in physical geomorphology and the environment of the cryosphere (landscapes of ice and snow). He has authored, co-authored, or edited nearly twenty books, including Mountain Geomorphology (Arnold, 2004), received dozens of international awards and special honours, and served on numerous major international and national professional associations and committees. Dr. Slaymaker came to UBC as an Assistant Professor in 1968.
Dr. Slaymaker has developed a range of interdisciplinary intellectual interests that have taken him from his original area of field measurement and analysis of erosional processes in the mountains of BC to the analysis of lake sediments as proxies for climate and land use changes over the Holocene, and on to his current interest: the human implications of the great future environmental changes. Reflecting this shift in focus was the major Exploratory Workshop he led at the Peter Wall Institute in April 2003, “Mutual Vulnerability, Mutual Dependence: The Reflexive Relation Between Human Society and the Environment,” a description of which appears in our 2002-2003 Annual Report.
At the Institute in 2005, Dr. Slaymaker organized another Exploratory Workshop for which he is the Principal Investigator. “Assessment of Sensitivity to Disturbance of the Major Cryospheric and Socio-Economic Systems in the Circumpolar World,” held February 26-28, 2006. Details of the Workshop are found in our 2005-2006 Annual Report.
Professor
Psychology
Dr. Ward is considered one of the most creative and original experimental psychologists in the field. As a theorist, he has always sought to conceptualize human behaviour in ways that can be put to empirical, quantitative test. Dr. Ward came to UBC as an Assistant Professor in 1974.
Dr. Ward’s works on sequence effects and on attention are integral to his continuously developing interest in understanding the temporal dynamics of cognition and behaviour. He has more recently extended his interest to the temporal dynamics of non-linear systems – theoretically and mathematically.
He was a Co-Investigator in the first Peter Wall Major Thematic Grant project, “Crisis Points and Models for Decision” (1997-2000). This involvement led him to conduct a series of ground breaking psychophysics experiments, for the first time using added noise to transmit information about a sub-threshold signal across the threshold of perception, and resulted in his book, Dynamical Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2002).
Dr. Ward took advantage of his time at the Institute in 2005 to write up his research on the neural correlates of consciousness. He also intensified his interest in neural synchrony by serving as Co-Convener and Director of the first Wall Summer Institute for Research (WSIR), “Synchrony in Mind, Brain, and Consciousness”. Detailed outcomes of WSIR 2005 are found in the 2005-2006 Annual Report.
Professor
Law
Professor Boyd is internationally recognized as the leading feminist family law scholar in Canada; she is also the country’s leading researcher in the area of child custody law. She works within the interdisciplinary socio-legal studies stream of legal research as well as within feminist studies generally. She came to UBC as Chair in Feminist Legal Studies in 1993.
In the 1980s Professor Boyd began researching the field of child custody law, using it to explore the ways in which women’s work and men’s work were dealt with in social and legal narratives. This work resulted in her book, Child Custody Law and Women’s Work (Oxford University Press, 2003), which ranks among the most important interdisciplinary texts in the family law field. It was nominated for the Walter S. Owen Book Prize. After taking up the newly endowed Chair in Feminist Legal Studies at UBC, she directed a SSHRC-funded collaborative research project that produced the edited collection, Challenging
the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law, and Public Policy (University of Toronto Press, 1997).
At the Institute in 2004 Professor Boyd worked to complete two collaborative, SSHRC-funded projects, wrote two articles, and co-edited two collections. She organized a Peter Wall Distinguished Scholar’s workshop on the research: “Feminism, Law, and Social Change: (Re) Action and Resistance,” May 7–8, 2004. (See page 12 of our 2003-2004 Annual Report for details.)
Professor
Agroecology
Dr. Isman is among the leading figures worldwide in the field of chemical ecology. His research represents a combination of insect behaviour and physiology with plant chemistry and toxicology. His impact on chemical ecology, manifested in the more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers he has written, has been enormous. He is one of a handful of investigators experienced in working at both basic and applied levels and is one of the most renowned investigators of the insecticidal potential of neem, among the most promising natural pesticides in North America in a half-century. He came to UBC as Assistant Professor in 1983.
Dr. Isman has edited two widely-cited collections in the area of chemical ecology, serves on the editorial boards of five journals, and has been president of three scientific societies: the Entomological Society of British Columbia, the International Society of Chemical Ecology, and the Phyotochemical Society of North America (where he was the first entomologist to hold the position).
He took advantage of his time at the Institute to expand his basic investigations of insect behaviour to explore learning and memory in caterpillars and moths.
Professor
Human Kinetics
Dr. Vertinsky is regarded as perhaps the most influential thinker and producer in the fields relating to sports studies, cultural studies, and the body/society paradigm. She is a social and cultural historian whose research is located at the centre of an upsurge of interdisciplinary interest in the body and its role in society, which is now seen as central to much contemporary thought and practice in medical science, educational practice, feminism, technology, and health. It is a subject that bridges the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences and professions. Dr. Vertinsky came to UBC as Assistant Professor in 1975.
Her co-edited collections, Sites of Sport: Space and Place and Experience, and Disciplining Bodies in the Gymnasium: Memory, Monument, and Modernism, appeared in the spring of 2004.
She has many publications, honours, and awards, including election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education and to the College of Fellows of the European Committee for Sport History. She is Past-President of the North American Society for Sport History and Vice-President of the International Society for the History of Sport. She is also a UBC Distinguished University Scholar.
At the Institute in 2004 Patricia worked to complete her research and book on the Dartington Hall (England) project, which focuses on the ‘educating’ of the British Body in the inter-war years. Dr. Vertinsky planned a Peter Wall Distinguished Scholar in Residence Conference on her co-edited book (2005) project, “Physical Culture, Power, and the Body” for October 15–16 2004, which is described in our 2004-05 Annual Report.
Associate Professor
Zoology
Dr. Whitlock is regarded as being in the top tier of evolutionary geneticists in the world. He is able to do both theoretical and empirical work that is fundamental. He is best known for his research on the evolution of spatially structured populations. He took up his UBC appointment as Assistant Professor in 1995.
Dr. Whitlock has played a starring role in a major advance in evolutionary biology over the last 10 years: the development of ‘metapopulation’ biology. His work has produced a series of landmark results that show how basic features of evolution depend on spatial structure, a topic now on the cutting edge of evolutionary biology. A second theme in his research is how selection and random genetic drift can generate new adaptations; his work in this area is considered the leading and most influential in the field. A third research direction with an applied impact is conservation biology: “How small a population can be before extinction is inevitable.”
He has published a flood of key contributions that have measurably advanced each of the three research directions; he has also been associate editor of top-tier journals, Evolution, Heredity, and the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
As a Peter Wall Scholar in Residence in 2004, he worked on writing an extensive book on statistics in biology. His Peter Wall Distinguished Scholar’s project was to organize the first meeting of the evolutionary biologists of the Pacific Northwest: “EVO-WIBO 2004: Evolutionary Biology in the Pacific Northwest,” April 17–18, 2004. (See page 12 of our 2003-2004 Annual Report for details.)
Professor
Nursing
Joan Anderson is both a sociologist and registered nurse. She holds the Elizabeth Kenny McCann Chair in the UBC School of Nursing. Dr. Anderson’s research spans the disciplines of sociology of health, critical medical anthropology, nursing and health care, focusing on the issues of migration, culture, gender and health. Her research deals with how personal histories, as well as socio-political and economic factors, influence the construction of life stories and the experiencing and management of health and illness. Specifically, Dr. Anderson was Principal Investigator on a three year (2002-2005) CIHR project “The Hospitalization and Help-seeking Experiences of Diverse Ethnocultural Groups.” This project is looking at how patients from different ethnocultural backgrounds experience the transition from hospital to home and home-care management. She was also Site Principal Investigator on the SSHRC funded study “Multicultural Meanings and Social Support Among Immigrants and Refugees”(2000-2003). Dr. Anderson was also Principal Investigator on the CIHR funded research project “First Nations Women and Health Services” (2001-2003).
Dr. Anderson planned a symposium entitled “Reimagining community: Decolonization, postnationalism healing and well-being”, held at the Institute in the fall of 2003. Details of this event are found in the 2003-2004 Annual Report.
Dr. Anderson’s research has been published in influential peer reviewed journals including Sociology of Health and Illness, Journal of Advanced Nursing, and Social Science and Medicine.
Professor
Psychology
Ken Craig is a clinical psychologist who works in the field of pain and illness behaviour. Dr. Craig’s research focuses primarily on the social science perspectives that would assist in understanding and controlling the serious health challenges of acute and chronic pain in children and adults. Much of Dr. Craig’s recent published work is in the challenging area of understanding and improving pain management for a number of highly vulnerable populations characterized by limitations in the capacity to communicate painful distress.
Dr. Craig was a CIHR Senior Investigator (through 2005) and Principal Investigator on a CIHR funded project entitled “Multidimensional Assessment of Infant Pain: Validity and Reliability of Indicators,” and Principal Investigator on the SSHRC funded project “Social Transactions as Determinants of Pain.” During his residency at the Institute in 2003, Dr. Craig completed work (with T. Hadjistravropoulos) on Pain: Psychological Perspectives, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004). Dr. Craig has published widely and frequently in peer reviewed journals including: Pain, Journal of Pediatric Psychology, Journal of Pediatrics, Social Science and Medicine, and Behaviour Research and Therapy.
In 2002 Dr. Craig was awarded the Donald O. Hebb Award by the Canadian Psychological Association (its most prestigious scientific award) for “distinguished contributions to psychology as a science” and the 2002 Jeffery Lawson Award for Advocacy in Children’s Pain Relief from the American Pain Society. His many honours and distinctions also include a UBC Killam Teaching Prize (2000), a UBC Killam Research Prize (1991) and a Canada Council Killam Research Fellowship (1992-1994).
Professor
English
Dr. Grace’s teaching and research interests lie in the areas of 20th century Canadian Literature and Culture, Drama, Biography and Autobiography, and Interdisciplinary Studies in 20th Century Literature, Art, Film, Theatre and Music. She served as head of the UBC Dept. of English 1997-2002 and earlier as Associate Dean of Arts. Dr. Grace has received many research awards, including a Canada Council Killam Research Fellowship 2004-2006. Her honours and awards include the UBC Killam Research Prize in 1990 and the UBC Jacob Biely Prize in 1998. In 1991 Dr. Grace was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She was made a UBC Distinguished University Scholar in 2003.
The breadth and depth of Dr. Grace’s research interests are well illustrated by her extensive publication record. She has published over 150 articles and 13 books. Notable among her books are: Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, Vol. I. London and Toronto, Jonathan Cape, and U. of Toronto Press, 1995; and Vol. II 1996; Canada and the Idea of North, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's U., 2002; Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre, co-edited with Albert-Reiner Glaap, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003.
At the Institute in 2003, the primary focus of Dr. Grace’s research was in the area of autobiography. She worked towards completing a new edition of Mina Benson Hubbard’s 1908 book A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador and worked on an in-depth study of Canadian playwright and woman of the theatre Sharon Pollock. Her Exploratory Workshop “Putting a Life on Stage: Theatre and AutoBiography”, was held in February 2004 and reported on in our 2003-04 Annual Report.
Professor
Geography
David Ley’s research is in the areas of downtown and inner cities as well as broader issues in social and cultural geography. In particular, his work has focused on issues to do with immigration and large urban centres, the black inner city as frontier, the role of humanistic approaches to geography, gentrification and political ideology, and urban landscapes and cultural conflict. One of Dr. Ley’s major research activities from 1996 to 2003 was as UBC Director of the Metropolis Project, riim.metropolis.net, a SSHRC funded Centre of Excellence. The project’s mandate is, initially, to examine race, ethnicity and immigration in Canadian cities, and thereafter, in comparative context with cities in other countries. Prior to taking up his residency, Dr. Ley held an Exploratory Workshop entitled “Multicultural Sites/Sights: Sydney and Vancouver as Gateway Cities.” Details of Dr. Ley’s Exploratory Workshop can be found in our 2000-2001 Annual Report.
Dr. Ley has a very diverse and extensive publication record. He has papers in such noted journals as Annals - Association of American Geographers, Urban Geography, The Canadian Geographer, and Economic Geography. He has also authored or co-authored nine books, including the ground breaking work The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; and what is now considered a classic in urban studies, The Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost, Washington: Association of American Geographers, 1974.
Among his many honours and distinctions, David Ley is a Canada Research Chair, Tier I, recipient of a UBC Killam Research Prize, 1989-91, and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1998). In 2000 Dr. Ley received the Christenson Fellowship of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford and in February 2003 he was named a Trudeau Foundation Fellow (2003-2006).
Professor
Geography