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Ranked among the world’s top medical schools with the fifth-largest MD enrollment in North America, the UBC Faculty of Medicine is a leader in both the science and the practice of medicine. Across British Columbia, more than 12,000 faculty and staff are training the next generation of doctors, health care professionals, and medical researchers, making remarkable discoveries to help create the pathways to better health for our communities at home and around the world.
The UBC Faculty of Medicine offers a diverse array of training opportunities including cutting-edge research experiences in the biosciences, globally recognized population health education, quality health professional training, as well as several certificate and online training options. The Faculty of Medicine is home to more than 1,700 graduate students housed in 20 graduate programs (14 of which offer doctoral research options). Year after year, research excellence in the Faculty of Medicine is supported by investment from funding sources here at home and around the globe, receiving approximately more than $1.8B in total research funding since 2016.
We value our trainees and the creative input they have to scholarly activities at UBC. Our priority is to enable their maximum potential through flexible opportunities that provide a breadth of experiences tailored to their own individual career objectives. We maintain high standards of excellence, and work to create a community of intellectually and socially engaged scholars that work collaboratively with each other, the university, and the world, with the overarching goal of promoting the health of individuals and communities.
Most Faculty research is conducted under the auspices of 23 centres and institutes that are part of UBC or affiliated with it, in collaboration with our health partners.
UBC Faculty of Medicine provides innovative educational and research programs in the areas of health and life sciences through an integrated and province-wide delivery model in facilities at locations throughout British Columbia.
The Life Sciences Centre is the largest building on the UBC Vancouver campus. Completed in 2004, the $125 million, 52,165 sq metres building was built to accommodate the distributed medical educational program and the Life Sciences Institute.
The Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health (DMCBH), a partnership between the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health, unites under one roof research and clinical expertise in neuroscience, psychiatry and neurology in order to accelerate discovery and translate new knowledge into better treatment and prevention strategies. DMCBH has both laboratory and clinical research areas within the Centre proper and in the UBC Hospital Koerner Pavilion. Our core facilities are essential to ongoing collaboration, teaching, and research.
The BC Children's Hospital Research Institute is it the largest research institute of its kind in Western Canada in terms of people, productivity, funding and size. With more than 350,000 square feet of space, the Institute has both 'wet bench' laboratory and 'dry lab' clinical research areas, and other areas to facilitate particular areas of research and training.
New knowledge and innovation are crucial to successfully identifying, addressing and overcoming the increasingly complex health-related challenges that influence the lives of all of us – in British Columbia, in Canada, and in countries and communities around the globe.
The UBC Faculty of Medicine is recognized nationally and internationally for research innovation that advances knowledge and translates new discoveries to improve the health and well-being of individuals and communities. Research opportunities feature extensive collaborations across other faculties, health institutions and health partners across British Columbia, Canada and internationally.
The Faculty provides and fosters research excellence across the full continuum, from basic science to applied science and then to knowledge implementation, with a focus on precision health; cancer; brain and mental health; heart and lung health; population health; and chronic diseases.
| Name | Academic Unit(s) | Research Interests |
|---|---|---|
| Nunez, Desmond | Department of Surgery | Sensory systems, auditory; Otorhinolaryngology; Age Related Hearing Loss; Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss; Recurrent Acute Otitis Media |
| Nygaard, Haakon | Division of Neurology | potential role for anti-convulsant drugs in treating Alzheimers disease, which have shown promise in preclinical models of the disease |
| O'Connor, Timothy | Department of Cellular & Physiological Sciences | Identification of small molecules that stimulate neurite outgrowth and regeneration Examination of the role of semaphorins during embryonic development |
| O'Donnell, Maureen | Department of Pediatrics | Pediatrics, children with disabilities, prenatal antidepressant exposure, cerebral palsy, austism, purple crying, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, social disparities |
| Oberlander, Timothy | Department of Pediatrics, School of Population and Public Health | Population epidemiological studies that characterize neurodevelopmental pathways that reflect risk, resiliency and developmental plasticity |
| Oberle, Eva | Public and population health; Other education; Adolescent Mental Health/ Social-Emotional Wellbeing; Positive youth development; Promoting mental health and wellbeing through schools; Risk and resilience; Research with population-level data; Social and emotional learning in schools | |
| Ogilvie, Gina | School of Population and Public Health | Sexually transmitted infections, human papillomavirus, HIV in women and care for marginalized populations |
| Ogrodniczuk, John | Department of Psychiatry | Mental Health and Society; Psychodynamic Psychotherapy; Personality Disorders; Group Psychotherapy; Men’s Mental Health; Alexithymia; Athletes |
| Oldani, Graziano | Department of Surgery | |
| Olson, Robert | Department of Surgery | Clinical oncology; Clinical trials; Radiotherapy; stereotactic radiotherapy; patient reported outcomes; Head and Neck Cancer; Breast Cancer; Epidemiology; Community Health / Public Health; Social Determinants of Cancer; health services delivery; Lung cancer |
| Ong, Christopher | Department of Urologic Sciences | Prostate cancer growth; Treatment resistance; Cell signalling pathways; SEMA3C |
| Oruc, Ipek | Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences | visual recognition of high level forms such as faces, letters and objects |
| Oviedo-Joekes, Eugenia | School of Population and Public Health | Psychosocial, sociocultural and behavioral determinants of health; Substance Use; person-centered care in addiction; injectable opioid agonist treatment; Harm reduction |
| Oxland, Thomas | Department of Orthopaedics, Department of Mechanical Engineering | Spinal Cord Injury, Aging Spine, Orthopaedic Implants |
| Palepu, Anita | Division of General Internal Medicine | Health services and systems; homeless; Addiction; housing; Epidemiology; health care utilization; safe medication prescribing |
| Palis, Heather | School of Population and Public Health | implementation of harm reduction and substance use treatment interventions |
| Panenka, William | Department of Psychiatry | Brain, Behaviour & Development |
| Pang, Catherine C | Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology & Therapeutics | Cardiovascular pharmacology, education, hypertension |
| Park, Yongjin | Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, Department of Statistics | Other basic medicine and life sciences; High dimensional data analysis; Biostatistical methods; Bioinformatics; single-cell genomics; Computational Biology; Causal inference; Bayesian machine learning |
| Parker, Seth | Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology | Metabolomics; Cell metabolism; Pediatric cancer; mass spectrometry; Childhood disease; Cancer; Solute carriers; Metabolism; Mitochondria; Stable-isotope tracing; Functional assay development |
| Paterson, Ryan | Department of Urologic Sciences | medical and surgical management of kidney stone disease, laparoscopic urologic surgery, and the surgical treatment of benign prostatic enlargement |
| Patrick, David | School of Population and Public Health | Health sciences; Public and population health; Antibiotics and Resistance; Pharmacoepidemiology; Responding to the Threat of Antimicrobial Resistance at Population Level; Response to Emerging Infectious Diseases; Linking Antibiotics in Infancy to Risk of Atopy |
| Pavlidis, Paul | Department of Psychiatry, Michael Smith Laboratories | Neurosciences, medical and physiological and health aspects; Engineering and technology; genomics; Bioinformatics; cellular and molecular neuroscience; Genetics; disorders of the nervous system; single-cell genomics; Computational Biology; Gene regulation |
| Pelech, Steven | Division of Neurology | Neurological disorders (except neuromuscular diseases); Mechanisms of carcinogenesis; Adaptive immunity; Medical virology; Protein Microarrays; Protein Kinases; Protein Phosphatases; Protein phosphorylation; Cell signalling; Signal transduction; Cell division; COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; Neurological Disease; Cancer; Immunology |
| Perrone, Lucy | Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine | Improving health outcomes through improved diagnostic testing quality, Improving capacity through strengthening health and laboratory systems, Using effective quality improvement tools and approaches to improve diagnostic service delivery |
This is an incomplete sample of recent publications in chronological order by UBC faculty members with a primary appointment in the Faculty of Medicine.
| Year | Citation | Program |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Dr. Lapointe extensively employed various DNA sequencing technologies to gain deeper insights into anti-viral drug resistance and the molecular epidemiology of HIV, HCV, and SARS-CoV-2. His research has significantly advanced our understanding of viral public health dynamics, and heloed shape the local and national clinical management guidelines. | Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Medicine (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Sheth investigated the neural correlates of two distinct types of dynamic patterns freely-moving and goal-driven present in the stream of thought. Her findings offer new insights into the functions of the default and executive networks of brain and have implications for mental health, spontaneous thought, mind-wandering, and creativity. | Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Medicine (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Rufenach studied the biophysical interactions and three-dimensional structures of protein complexes involved in calcium signaling pathways. Her research has contributed to understanding the mechanisms of skeletal muscle contraction and rare neuromuscular diseases. | Doctor of Philosophy in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Francis mapped the dynamics of antibiotic resistance gene carriage in the healthy newborn infant gut and characterized changes in response to severe acute malnutrition and HIV, in low-resource settings. His findings have major implications for antibiotic prophylaxis, therapy and stewardship practices in global neonatal and infant populations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Medicine (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Desai revealed that despite better CF prognosis in recent years, people with CF still face substantial burden from lung impairment and other complications. Rising healthcare costs due to expensive medications pose additional challenges. These findings will help improve their service planning and resource allocation in the future. | Doctor of Philosophy in Population and Public Health (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Dellazizzo Toth developed imaging techniques and technologies enabling rapid recording of all activity across a complete neural arbor in an awake animal and applied these tools to interrogate how individual neurons are modified by experience. | Doctor of Philosophy in Neuroscience (PhD) |
| 2023 | Millions of undiscovered viruses circulate in wildlife and many of them threaten to spillover into humans and livestock, causing outbreaks and pandemics. Dr. Kuchinski developed new genome sequencing techniques for discovering these threats and monitoring their spread. These tools will help protect our health and livelihoods from these viruses. | Doctor of Philosophy in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Carlaw's research helped improve the efficacy of therapeutic CRISPR Cas9 base editing for the treatment of previously incurable childhood genetic diseases. Her research helped establish some of the first reporter models for studying base editors and paved the way for the next generation of lipid nanoparticle delivered gene editors. | Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Genetics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Cyrus' work focused on the Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 syndromes, where she expanded the clinical phenotype of the most recently described syndrome: SUZ-12 Related Overgrowth. She further used Drosophila melanogaster to develop assays that can tell us if human genetic variants of interest can cause these syndromes or not. | Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Genetics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Lu studied the function of a major autism risk gene neurexin-1, showing that losing one copy of this molecule leads to significant synaptic deficits. He subsequently used gene-editing technology to rescue these impairments by altering how neurexin-1 RNA is processed, identifying a potential therapeutic strategy for neuropsychiatric patients. | Doctor of Philosophy in Neuroscience (PhD) |