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 |
|---|---|---|
| Bashashati Saghezchi, Ali | School of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine | Bioinformatics; Medical and biomedical engineering; Artificial Intelligence; Computational Pathology; Cancer Genomics; Computational Biology; Digital Pathology; Image Processing; Machine Learning; Ovarian Cancer; Signal Processing; Multi-modal Learning |
| Bassett, Ken | Department of Family Practice | Gender and Blindness: testing gender specific community interventions in Upper Egypt, an assessment of community ophthalmology projects in Central India, as well as community ophthalmology projects in Nepal and Tanzania. |
| Bayrampour Basmenj, Hamideh | Midwifery Program | Psychosocial, sociocultural and behavioral determinants of health; Electronic health (e-Health); Mobile health (mHealth); Midwifery; Health information systems (including surveillance); Perinatal mental health; Perinatal Anxiety; Pregnancy Outcomes; eHealth; mHealth |
| Beasley, Clare Louise | Department of Psychiatry | identify changes in the brains of individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder that may elucidate the etiology of these disorders and provide clues to novel treatments; white matter pathology and inflammation; effects of antipsychotic medications on the brain |
| Bedaiwy, Mohamed | Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology | Other clinical medicine; Recurrent Pregnancy Loss; Endometriosis; Minimally Invasive Surgery; Assisted Reproductive Technologies |
| Benard, Francois | Department of Radiology | Medical isotopes Radioisotopes Nuclear Medicine Cancer Imaging Molecular imaging of cancer Radionuclide therapy, Cancer division, radiology, pancreas centre |
| Benavente, Oscar | Division of Neurology | Acute Stroke Trials, Secondary stroke prevention |
| Bennewith, Kevin | Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine | Oncology; Molecular Pathology & Cell Biology; Cancer research; Solid tumour microenvironment; Hypoxia; Metastasis research; Pre-metastatic niche; Targeting hypoxic tumour cells in therapy; Radiation biology |
| Beristain, Alexander Guillermo | Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology | Healthy Starts; cellular and molecular processes that direct trophoblast cell biology in early placental development; Examining the A Disintegrin And Metalloproteinase (ADAM) family in trophoblast biology; Examining the effects of obesity-associated inflammation on the maternal-fetal interface; Identifying gene expression differences in subpopulations of trophoblasts in normal and pathological pregnancies |
| Bernatchez, Pascal | Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology & Therapeutics | Pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences (except clinical aspects); Cardiovascular diseases; Cardiovascular System; Genetic Diseases; Hypertension; atherosclerosis; angiogenesis; Muscular Diseases; Neuromuscular Diseases; Lipid/Lipoprotein analysis; Lipid Disorders; Pharmacokinetics; Cell Signaling and Infectious and Immune Diseases; endothelial dysfunction; endothelium; Inflammation; lipoproteins; Marfan syndrome; muscular dystrophy; nitric oxide; vascular disease |
| Besserer, Floyd | Department of Emergency Medicine | |
| Bettinger, Julie | Department of Pediatrics | Public and population health; Epidemiology; Vaccination; Infectious diseases; Health Promotion; Community Health / Public Health; Infectious disease epidemiology; vaccine clinical trials; Vaccine hesitancy; vaccine programs; vaccine safety |
| Bhagavatula, Sastry | Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology & Therapeutics | Age-related research, Anesthesiology, plasticity of synaptic transmission, mammalian central nervous system |
| Bhatti, Parveen | School of Population and Public Health | Epidemiology (except nutritional and veterinary epidemiology); Environmental determinants of health (including environment-gene interactions); molecular epidemiology of cancer; occupational and environmental epidemiology of cancer; mechanistic studies of exposed populations |
| Bingham, Brittany | Division of Social Medicine | |
| Birol, Inanc | Department of Medical Genetics | bioinformatics, computational biology, genomics, transcriptome analysis, next generation sequencing, cancer, Bioinformatics, sequence assembly, transcriptomics, gene regulation networks, high throughput informatics for big data |
| Black, Peter | Department of Urologic Sciences | Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (especially equality rights); Canadian human rights legislation |
| Black, Charlyn | School of Population and Public Health | Public and population health |
| Black, Alexis | School of Audiology and Speech Sciences | Developmental psychology; Behavioural neuroscience of learning and memory |
| Blanke, Philipp | Department of Radiology | |
| Blydt-Hansen, Tom | Department of Pediatrics | Childhood Diseases; Pediatric kidney transplant; Injury phenotype; Rejection; Biomarkers; Metabolomics; Chemokines |
| Boerner, Katelynn | Department of Pediatrics | Pediatrics; Health equity; Gender and health relationship; Sex and gender-based analysis; Health psychology; Clinical child psychology; Developmental psychology; Patient and citizen engagement research; chronic pain; pediatric psychology; Qualitative research; intensive longitudinal methods; sex and gender based analysis; gender diversity; Autism; neurodiversity; clinical psychology; Health Equity; rehabilitation; chronic illness; eating disorders; medical trauma; Health Psychology; Development; Adolescence |
| Bouchard, Katrina | Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology | Clinical sexology; Mental health and wellbeing; Sexual identy, sexual attraction and sexual behaviour; Sexual health; sexual response; sexual well-being; women's health; couples |
| Bowie, William | Division of Infectious Diseases | Immune System |
| Boyd, Lara | Department of Physical Therapy | Neurosciences, biological and chemical aspects; Neurosciences, medical and physiological and health aspects; Physical therapy; Rehabilitation medicine; Learning; Learning and Memory; Motor System; Motor learning; Neurophysiology; Physiology; Plasticity / Neuronal Regeneration; stroke |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Dr. Hogg studied how neurons shape their dendritic arbors during early brain development. Using in vivo imaging, he discovered new rules for how visual experience reorganizes synaptic connections. These findings improve our understanding of brain wiring and may provide insight into neurodevelopmental disorders. | Doctor of Philosophy in Neuroscience (PhD) |
| 2025 | Dr. Singla engineered diagnostic methods to assess kidney health non-invasively using ultrasound and machine learning. His work advanced tools for kidney disease detection and management, accurately predicting kidney decline. This benefits people with chronic kidney disease, which affects one in ten Canadians, and those with organ transplantation. | Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy (MDPhD) |
| 2025 | Dr. Wong employed super-resolution microscopy to study endocytosis at the nanometer scale within cells. This research demonstrates how small molecule drugs and mutations impact the structure of individual endocytic vesicles and identified a stress-induced trafficking pathway with implications for disease research and drug development. | Doctor of Philosophy in Cell and Developmental Biology (PhD) |
| 2025 | Dr. Kotapalli studied the function of an epigenetic modulator in luminal muscle invasive bladder cancer. Her research provided a deeper understanding of the molecular mechanisms critical for development of luminal MIBC. The findings of the research will guide development of new therapies for bladder cancer. | Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Oncology (PhD) |
| 2025 | Dr. Checkervarty examined newborn blood profiles to gain a deeper understanding of early-life immunity and vaccine response. By utilizing various machine learning techniques, he identified key biological markers distinguishing weak from optimal vaccine responders. The research provides new insights into the understudied early-life immune system. | Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Medicine (PhD) |
| 2025 | Dr. Monjaras studies focused on tissue engineering to improve treatment for bladder cancer patients. He developed a tumor model as a tool for drug efficacy testing and transformed stem cells into cells that could potentially be used in organ regeneration. These findings he hopes lead to the improved quality life and outcomes for patients. | Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Oncology (PhD) |
| 2025 | XIST is a long non-coding RNA that triggers X-chromosome inactivation, an essential process to compensate for dosage between females and males. Dr. Navarro Cobos tested different transgenes containing human and mouse XIST domains and found a functional shorter XIST version that could be used for chromosome therapy. | Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Genetics (PhD) |
| 2025 | Ribosomes are critical molecular machines that carry out the process of translation. Dr. Hay investigated how changes in the ribosome enhance the production of proteins in the interferon response, a critical component of the innate immune response. Her work provides novel insights into our understanding of immunity and viral infection. | Doctor of Philosophy in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (PhD) |
| 2025 | Dr. Kim developed a computational tool to categorize the brain’s immune cells by shape and explored how these changes relate to immune memory. Her work introduces new approaches for studying microglial diversity and offers insights into the connection between cell shape and gene expression, advancing our understanding of brain health and disease. | Doctor of Philosophy in Neuroscience (PhD) |
| 2025 | Dr. Kerai-Sayani created survey in Urdu, in consultation with children in Pakistan, to assess their positive development and wellbeing. She also evaluated aspects of its accuracy and found that the survey effectively captures children's feelings and daily experiences, making it a valuable tool for monitoring- and developing programs to support their wellbeing. | Doctor of Philosophy in Population and Public Health (PhD) |
