Interview: John Metras, Interim Vice-President, Operations & Associate Vice-President, Facilities
John Metras, Interim Vice-President of Operations & Associate Vice-President with Facilities shares more on the interconnected nature of systems at UBC and the need to find a balanced approach when addressing climate action.
What is the operational role of your unit on campus?
The UBC Facilities group is responsible for the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of UBC’s buildings, public realm, and utilities infrastructure to ensure a safe, functional, and sustainable physical environment for the campus community. The departments within the Facilities group include: Infrastructure Development, Building Operations, Energy & Water Services, Municipal Services, Custodial Services, and Customer Services & Informatics.
What are your most urgent and pressing challenges?
Climate action is our most urgent challenge. Innovative and timely technical solutions and significant capital investments will be required to drive down GHG emissions from campus operations (buildings, district energy system, vehicle fleet) to net zero. This leading edge work must be balanced against, and ideally integrated with, other fundamental priorities such as reducing seismic risk and deferred maintenance in campus buildings and utilities infrastructure, improving accessibility on campus, reducing water consumption and solid waste generation, maintaining and enhancing the campus urban forest, ensuring building ventilation systems are effectively designed and operated to minimize the risk of airborne disease transmission (a new challenge), and improving climate resilience. Underlying any planning, design and construction work we do on the physical campus is the need for meaningful engagement with xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam). The inherent complexities and trades offs required to achieved these multiple objectives, particularly given our extremely constrained budgets, represent amazing Campus as a Living Lab opportunities.
What potential research opportunities excite you the most, with regard to your unit’s function?
We are excited by and supportive of research associated with any of the above challenges and priorities. It would probably be easiest to think about these problems one at a time but they are all pressing and important. The greatest opportunities may lie in helping identify ways to address multiple challenges with integrated solutions that have material impacts. We need the help of our academic colleagues to work with us to address these challenges in a multi-pronged, multi-disciplinary way.
What are your operational constraints in incubating on-the-ground research?
We need to ensure at all times the on-going safety, functionality, and reliability of campus infrastructure. Risks associated with research projects need to be managed to ensure that these core requirements are not negatively impacted.