Three UBC Science researchers recognized with NSERC prizes
Three UBC Science researchers have been awarded some of the most prestigious science and engineering prizes in Canada. The Natural...
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At UBC Science, outstanding scientists and students strive to unravel the principles that underlie our universe - from the subatomic to the macroscopic, from pure mathematics to biotechnology, from ecosystems to galactic systems. Through the breadth and depth of our academic endeavours and the calibre of the people who make up our community, we take pride in discovering new scientific knowledge and preparing Canada’s and the world’s next generation of scientists.
A diverse range of highly ranked programs
With access to master’s and doctoral degrees through nine departments and 350 research groups, our graduate students work with world-class faculty to explore the basic sciences, and to pursue interdisciplinary and applied research across departments and units. UBC’s research excellence in environmental science, math, physics, plant and animal science, computer science, geology and biology is consistently rated best in Canada by international and national ranking agencies.
Committed to outstanding graduate training
UBC Science houses a wide range of prestigious NSERC Collaborative Research and Training Experience and related industry programs: from atmospheric aerosols to high-throughput biology, from biodiversity research and ecosystems services to plant cell wall biosynthesis, from quantum science and new materials to applied geochemistry. The options for enriched graduate training in industry related fields are almost endless.
World-class research infrastructure
Our affiliated institutes and centres include UBC's Michael Smith Laboratories, Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, Biodiversity Research Centre, Life Sciences Institute, Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, Mineral Deposit Research Unit, and TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics.
Top research talent
UBC Science boasts more than 50 Canada Research Chairs, 12 fellows of the Royal Society of London, and has been home to two Nobel Laureates. Our graduate students have won 15 prestigious Vanier Scholarships.
A diverse, supportive community of scholars
UBC Science is committed to excellence, collaboration and inclusion. Women account for 40 per cent of the Faculty's graduate enrollments, and the percentage of international students has increased to 48 per cent over the past decade.
Mission
To nurture an exceptional scientific learning and research environment for the people of British Columbia, Canada, and the world.
Research Centres
Biodiversity, Evolution and Ecology
- Biodiversity Research Centre
- Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research
- Centre for Microbial Diversity and Evolution
Computational Sciences and Mathematics
- Data Science Institute
- Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems
- Institute of Applied Mathematics
- Statistical Consulting and Research Laboratory
- Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences
Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
- Geophysical Inversion Facility
- Lithoprobe: Canada's National Geoscience Project
- Mineral Deposit Research Unit
- Pacific Centre for Isotopic and Geochemical Research
- Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling
Genomics and Biological Sciences
- Centre for High-Throughput Biology
- Geomatics for Informed Decisions Network
- Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics
- Michael Smith Laboratories
Human-Computer Interaction
- Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems
- Vancouver Institute for Visual Analytics
Life Sciences
- Biomedical Research Centre
- Centre for Blood Research
- Centre for Microbial Diseases and Immunity Research
- Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health
- International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries
- Life Sciences Institute
- Michael Smith Laboratories
- Neglected Global Diseased Initiative
Chemistry and Materials Science
- Advanced Materials and Process Engineering Laboratory
- Max Planck-UBC Centre for Quantum Materials
- Quantum Devices Group
- Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute
Physics
- Antihydrogen Trapping and Spectroscopy at CERN
- Pacific Institute for Theoretical Physics
- TRIUMF: Canada’s National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics
- UBC ATLAS Project at Large Hadron Collider
Sustainability
Research Facilities
Designed to inspire collaboration and creativity across disciplines, the new Earth Sciences Building (ESB) lies at the heart of the science precinct on UBC’s Vancouver Campus. The $75 million facility is home to Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Statistics, the Pacific Institute of the Mathematical Sciences, and the dean’s office of the Faculty of Science. ESB’s updated teaching facilities will help Canada meet the challenges of a transforming and growing resource sector. Just as importantly, the researchers and students working and learning in the new facility will offer a valuable flow of well-trained talent, new ideas, and fresh professional perspectives to industry.
Research Highlights
UBC Science faculty members conduct top-tier research in the life, physical, earth and computational sciences. Their discoveries help build our understanding of natural laws—driving insights into sustainability, biodiversity, human health, nanoscience and new materials, probability, artificial intelligence, exoplanets and a wide range of other areas.
UBC Science boasts 50 Canada Research Chairs and 10 fellows of the Royal Society of London, and has been home to two Nobel Laureates.
Schools / Departments
Graduate Degree Programs
Research Supervisors in Faculty
or browse the list of faculty members in various academic units. You may click each unit to view faculty members appointed in that unit. View the full faculty member directory for more search and filter options.
| Name | Academic Unit(s) | Research Interests |
|---|---|---|
| Snutch, Terrance Preston | Michael Smith Laboratories, Department of Psychiatry, Department of Zoology | Molecular and genetic analysis of the nervous system |
| Solymosi, Jozsef | Department of Mathematics | Additive Combinatorics, Discrete and Computational Geometry, Graph theory, and Combinatorial Number Theory |
| Song, Liang | Department of Botany | Plant genomics; Environmental stresses; Seed development; Gene Expression |
| Sossi, Vesna | Department of Physics & Astronomy | Medical Imaging, Brain imaging |
| Srivastava, Diane | Department of Zoology | biodiversity, tropics, Costa Rica, insects, mites, food webs, habitat loss, Community ecology, conservation, how species loss from food webs can affect the way ecosystems function |
| Stairs, Ingrid | Department of Physics & Astronomy | pulsars, gravity, general relativity, radio astronomy, radio pulsars, pulsar searches and long-term timing, Radio astronomy |
| Stamp, Philip C | Department of Physics & Astronomy | Theoretical physics, strongly-correlated condensed matter systems, quantum magnetism, decoherence, quantum information, gravity |
| Straus, Suzana | Department of Chemistry | Proteins; Antimicrobial peptides; Viral membrane proteins; Structure-function; Protein-protein interactions |
| Stull, Roland | Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences | Meteorology and weather; weather; Meteorology; atmospheric science; numerical weather prediction; clean energy meteorology; storms; transportation weather; forest fire weather; weather disasters; atmospheric boundary layers; aviation meteorology |
| Sugioka, Kenji | Department of Zoology | Basic medicine and life sciences; Cell division; Animal morphogenesis; Cytoskeletal dynamics |
| Sumaila, Ussif Rashid | Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs | Bioeconomics, marine ecosystem valuation and the analysis of global issues such as fisheries subsidies, IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated) fishing and the economics of high and deep seas fisheries |
| Suttle, Curtis | Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences, Department of Botany, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries | Marine Environment; Microbial Diversity; Marine Microbiology; Environmental Virology; Biological Oceanography; Viral Discovery; Viruses; Phage |
| Tanner, Martin | Department of Chemistry | Enzymes responsible for the biosynthesis of the sialic acids in mammals |
| Taylor, Eric | Department of Zoology | Genomics; Evolutionary Genetics; biodiversity; speciation; fishes; conservation; biogeography |
| Tetzlaff, Wolfram | Department of Zoology | Neural development and regeneration |
| Thachuk, Mark | Department of Chemistry | Reaction dynamics, mathematical techniques, Chemical physics |
| Thompson, Charles | Department of Microbiology & Immunology | Regulation of bacterial gene expression |
| Tocheva, Elitza | Department of Microbiology & Immunology | Microbiology; Biological and Biochemical Mechanisms; Functional and Structural Proteomics; Microbial Ultrastructure; Cryo-electron tomography and Structural Biology; bacterial physiology; Microbial Diversity; Secretion systems and Mechanisms of pathogenesis; Novel bacterial phyla |
| Tokuriki, Nobuhiko | Michael Smith Laboratories, Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology | Experimental evolution of proteins and molecular networks. |
| Tortell, Philippe | Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences, Department of Botany | Biological / Chemical Oceanography, Climate-active Trace Gases, Primary Productvity, Polar Marine Ecosystems |
| Trites, Andrew | Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries | marine mammals, seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins, fisheries competition, population biology, ecology, Marine mamals research centre, biology of marine mammals, population dynamics, bioenergetics, fisheries |
| Tropini, Carolina | Department of Microbiology & Immunology | Bacteria; Biological and Biochemical Mechanisms; Bioinformatics; Microbiology; Gut microbiota; Bacteriophages; Bioengineering; Biophysics; Inflammatory bowel disease |
| Tsai, Tai-Peng | Department of Mathematics | Differential equations and integral equations in pure mathematics; Partial Differential Equations; Mathematical physics |
| Tseng, Michelle | Department of Botany, Department of Zoology | Ecology and Quality of the Environment; Ecology; Evolutionary Biology |
| Turner, Robin | Michael Smith Laboratories, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering | Biomedical Technologies |
Pages
Recent Publications
This is an incomplete sample of recent publications in chronological order by UBC faculty members with a primary appointment in the Faculty of Science.
Recent Thesis Submissions
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Driving chemistry at photoelectrodes and electrodes (Chemistry - PHD)
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On the existence, structure, and stability of chiral magnetic skyrmions (Mathematics - PHD)
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The intestinal microbiota in early life undernutrition (Microbiology and Immunology - PHD)
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Directional and 3-D confinement-dependent fracturing, strength and dilation mobilization in brittle rocks (Geological Engineering - PHD)
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Skinprobe 2.0 : development of a system for low-cost measurement of human soft tissues (Computer Science - MSC)
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Designing an eyes-reduced document skimming app for situational impairments (Computer Science - MSC)
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XSnare : application-specific, cross-site scripting protection (Computer Science - MSC)
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The role of the microenvironment and inflammation in the promotion of cancer metastasis (Microbiology and Immunology - MSC)
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High cadence kurtosis based RFI excision for CHIME (Astronomy - MSC)
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Robust methods for inferring cluster structure in single cell RNA sequencing data (Bioinformatics - MSC)
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Electronic transport in twisted double bilayer graphene (Physics - MSC)
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Gentrification without displacement : determining the costs (Resource Management and Environmental Studies - MA)
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Equivariant extension of distributions on GLn (Mathematics - PHD)
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Expanding the utility of whole genome sequencing in the diagnosis of rare genetic disorders (Bioinformatics - PHD)
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Machine learning methods for metabolic pathway inference from genomic sequence information (Bioinformatics - PHD)
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Schedule data, not code (Computer Science - PHD)
Doctoral Citations
A doctoral citation summarizes the nature of the independent research, provides a high-level overview of the study, states the significance of the work and says who will benefit from the findings in clear, non-specialized language, so that members of a lay audience will understand it.
| Year | Citation | Program |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Dr. Giacomin investigated how different species of fish deal with environmental stressors. As the world's aquatic environments become more variable due to human impacts and climate change, the findings of her thesis advance our understanding of how diverse species of fish can cope and survive in challenging environments. | Doctor of Philosophy in Zoology (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Yu developed statistical models and methods that can assess associations between longitudinal data and survival data, and handle the complications in the longitudinal data simultaneously. She applied her methods to an HIV vaccine study and discovered significant relationships between the risk of HIV infection and some immune response biomarkers. | Doctor of Philosophy in Statistics (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Fortune discovered that bowhead whales feed year-round in the Eastern Canadian Arctic, and use flexible feeding strategies that may help them adapt to climate induced changes in their prey. She also found that bowheads slough their skin and rub against rocks to exfoliate - providing a new understanding of bowhead whale biology. | Doctor of Philosophy in Zoology (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Lever developed methods to extract biomedical knowledge from published academic papers. Working at BC Cancer's Genome Sciences Centre, he used machine learning approaches to find genetic information useful to clinicians treating cancer patients in a personalized way. His results are accessed daily by cancer researchers around the world. | Doctor of Philosophy in Bioinformatics (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Marquez used a mouse model to study the relationship between Epstein-Barr Virus (the virus that causes Infectious Mononucleosis) and the development of Multiple Sclerosis (or MS). She found that B cells infected with the mouse version of Epstein-Barr directly contribute to the worsening of the mouse version of MS. | Doctor of Philosophy in Microbiology and Immunology (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Martens studied the surface chemistry of platinum catalysts inside hydrogen fuel cells. A better mechanistic understanding of corrosion and degradation in these devices is critical for the development of economically viable clean power systems. | Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Granados studied the formation of Jupiter sized planets that are very close to their host star. Using numerical simulations, she found that under certain conditions, these 'close-in Jupiters' can form in the region we observe them today through multiple planet-to-planet collisions while there is still considerable amount of gas present in the protoplanetary disk. | Doctor of Philosophy in Astronomy (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Charette studied pattern formations on evolving surfaces. He provided new findings on the bifurcations of reaction-diffusion systems and developed a numerical method to demonstrate his findings using the Closest Point Method. His work can be extended to many other evolving domain problems. | Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics (PhD) |
| 2019 | Researchers today are able to study the behaviour of deep diving animals via sensors that generate high volumes of data. Dr. Fu developed automatic data analytic methods to group dive depth trajectories of southern elephant seals by dive shape. His methods help researchers understand seals' foraging and resting behaviour. | Doctor of Philosophy in Statistics (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Hund investigated the impacts of climate change and population growth on water supplies in the seasonally-dry tropics. She monitored streams and groundwater, modelled future climate scenarios, and worked with communities to develop novel tools to support adaptation to drought. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geological Sciences (PhD) |