Five teams of collaborating PhD students and faculty members at UBC have received funding from the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (G+PS) PhD Collab pilot program.
The PhD Collab is a pilot program originated and funded by G+PS, and has garnered strong interest in its two-year span, with 100 applications from across more than 50 academic units at UBC. This initiative offers awards and guidance to support PhD students from different disciplines to co-develop new knowledge and/or applications to address complex questions or problems.
This is the second round of funding awards for the two-year pilot. Awards range from $62,000 to $90,000, totalling $410,000 to support student stipends and knowledge dissemination/mobilization activities.
The primary objectives of this program are to provide new opportunities for PhD students to build competencies and networks in collaborative, inter/transdisciplinary scholarly work, and to advance collaboration as a desired research and learning mode across disciplines to enrich scholarship.
“It is wonderful to see so many PhD students from different disciplinary backgrounds applying to this program to learn from one another,” says Dr. Jenny Phelps, Assistant Vice-Provost of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies.
“The world’s most pressing issues are highly complex and require multi-dimensional expertise to apprehend. We need scholars who are capable of blending their insights, methodologies and perspectives with others to generate new understandings and approaches. Doctoral education is an ideal arena to help build those collaborative capabilities. We are very excited to support the awarded students and teams as they take bold steps in innovative doctoral education and scholarship.”
As part of their doctoral work, students will collaborate with each other, faculty, and in some cases, other partners from sectors beyond the academy. This award is meant to free up student time and cover research and professional development expenses in ways that may not be possible with discipline-specific funding sources. Participating PhD students will be able to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries from the inception of projects through data collection to writing of theses and resulting publications. Collaborative outputs will form a component of each student’s dissertations.
Five teams of collaborating PhD students and faculty members at UBC received nearly $340,000 during the initial pilot year.
Learn more about the funded teams and projects below.
| Project title | Faculty/units involved |
|---|---|
| Can Artificial Intelligence be a meaningful member of the team? integrating AI into team-based primary care through interdisciplinary collaboration |
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Farmer's gambit: calculative and innovative disease management tactics from a transdisciplinary viromics-social evolution-game theory approach
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Arts-based interventions in graduate research: art as an open-systems research methodology
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How to build a living planet: the ingredients for life on other worlds
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Re-thinking the right of way – streetsmarts collaboratory
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5 PhD students to be selected after initial collective process |
For further information on the PhD Collab program, visit the website.