Policy, Economics & Governance

Update: UBC Climate Emergency

simarj — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 18:36:53 +0000

Update: UBC Climate Emergency simarj Thu, 11/03/2022 - 11:36

The climate emergency is here, and UBC is committed to bringing our community together to confront this crisis.

In December 2019, the UBC Board of Governors unanimously endorsed a Declaration on the Climate Emergency, responding to the advocacy and leadership of our students and community members and joining other universities, organizations, municipalities, and Indigenous Nations around the world.

Following the declaration, an independent Climate Emergency Task Force (CETF) made up of students, faculty, and staff from both UBC campuses undertook an extensive community consultation process and produced the CETF report¹. This report identified nine strategic priorities and 28 recommendations for UBC to take action in responding to the climate emergency.

This fall, UBC Sustainability Hub released the first progress report², describing the actions taken by the UBC community to advance the strategic priorities put in place through the CETF. The report celebrates the creativity and diversity of climate emergency actions at both UBC Vancouver and UBC Okanagan. These include the launch of a new Centre for Climate Justice³ in the Department of Geography, and the approval of two new Climate Action Plans 2030⁴ setting ambitious targets for reducing operational and embodied emissions.

UBC Sustainability Hub has also launched a new version of the Climate Emergency website. Recognizing that tackling the climate emergency as a university requires collective responsibility and action from the UBC community as a whole, the website is a way to stay connected with climate action across UBC.

¹UBC Climate Emergency Engagement Final Report and Recommendations 2021

²Climate Emergency at UBC Report on Progress 2021-22

³UBC Centre for Climate Justice

⁴UBC Vancouver Climate Action Plan 2030 and UBC Okanagan Climate Action Plan 2030

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Climate Change & Energy

Policy, Economics & Governance

Interview: Dr. Sean Lumb, Interim Managing Director, entrepreneurship@UBC

dlopez — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 06:46:48 +0000

Interview: Dr. Sean Lumb, Interim Managing Director, entrepreneurship@UBC dlopez Thu, 08/11/2022 - 23:46

Dr. Sean Lumb, Interim Managing at entrepeneurship@UBC, offers insight on how his team helps turns ideas into action, and the benefits of participating in citizen science like the Campus as a Living Lab initiative.

What is the operational role of your unit on campus?

entrepreneurship@UBC (e@UBC) helps UBC researchers propel their ground-breaking discoveries into products and services that solve the world’s most pressing problems. We do this by helping to develop viable, transformative ventures built around research innovation. By design, e@UBC enables science-based researchers (faculties, staff, and students) to step out of their technical comfort zones and, with guidance and mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs, investigate and deploy a viable, validated business model.

What are some of the different ways that your Unit can support on-the-ground research on campus?

Many research grants today ask how funding will be used to translate discoveries into impact that can benefit society. entrepreneurship@UBC can help researchers define the potential translational path for a new venture, to build into their research and corresponding grant applications.

entrepreneurship@UBC also offers many learning opportunities throughout the year that support researchers in understanding the potential startup opportunity for their research outcomes, as well as industry networking opportunities that catalyze relationships across the innovation ecosystem. For researchers who decide to pursue a new venture, e@UBC has full scale venture-building supports that surround startups with the resources and community (experienced executives, entrepreneurs, investors, etc.) that they need to build their company for success.

What potential research opportunities excite you the most, with regard to your unit’s function?

As we serve the entire university community, we have the great fortune to work with researchers from every discipline. But, the three areas in which we see the most new venture opportunities are entrepreneurs solving problems in human health, climate, and social systems. Each of these areas has a Venture Studio and community built around it that interfaces with everything from research clusters to industry associations and related faculties.

Venture Studios often incubate ventures that face difficulty attracting first customers or partners to deploy pilots. The Campus as a Living Lab (CLL) initiative provides an excellent opportunity to solve this problem by partnering researchers with UBC to launch climate solutions on campus. The success of the pilot project in proof of concept can then be leveraged to secure additional clients and attract investment funding to scale research impact to society.

What are your operational constraints in incubating on-the-ground research?

One of the biggest challenges with translating research into impact is to secure a partner or client to support a pilot project. The beauty of the CLL initiative is that UBC acts as the first client and supports successful research translation through an on-campus demonstration pilot, with potential to to leverage pilot success to either secure UBC as an ongoing client for the final product/service or to secure additional clients. UBC’s role as a research hub and pseudo-municipality makes it particularly useful for demonstrations of technologies and services that benefit local government or other large institutions.

What are your past research collaborations?

We work closely with researchers on finding a commercial path for their innovation. Two recent examples are Carbin Minerals and Bioform, UBC spin-off ventures based on innovation developed by UBC researchers. Carbin Minerals comes from the CarbMin Lab at UBC led by Professor Greg Dipple, who, with his team, has developed technology to unlock the enormous carbon dioxide sequestering potential of mine waste, which will enable mines to become massive carbon sinks, while producing valuable carbon sequestration credits.

Bioform was founded by Dr. Jordan Mackenzie, who holds a PhD in fluid mechanics and developed the technology during his time as a postdoctoral fellow and then research associate at UBC’s department of chemical and biological engineering, working with co-founder and Professor Dr. Mark Martinez. Bioform turns kelp and wood fibre into compostable and fully biodegradable bioplastic materials that can replace petrochemical-based single-use plastics, ranging from agricultural mulch films to food packaging. entrepreneurship@UBC is providing industry-specific business development resources and mentoring through our Climate Venture Studio.

We also work with faculties, schools and institutes to support their researchers in building an entrepreneurial mindset. Examples include: supporting student teams and delivering content in the Engineers in Scrubs Program, the Imagine Journalism program, Arts Amplifier, and co-delivering the Innovation UBC / e@UBC Research Impact Challenge.”

A recent and exciting example in our Human Health Venture Studio has been with the School of BioMedical Engineering (SBME) Propels initiative built and delivered in partnership with entrepreneurship@UBC and SBME, which launched in September 2021. Planning has now begun for the 2022 edition of the series. SBME Propels is an extracurricular series of workshops, seminars and panels for the SBME community, segmented into 4 streams: (1) Research Partnerships, (2) Translating your Innovations, (3) Career Pathing and Professional Skills for Trainees, and (4) Leadership for Early-career Faculty. All four streams will be available in parallel, with sessions taking place virtually as lunch-and-learns.

Find out more about SBME.

We are always seeking new opportunities to support researchers, faculties, and initiatives in innovative ways, and look forward to finding more opportunities to collaborate on bringing climate and social and human health innovation to the world.

Policy, Economics & Governance

Interview: Steve Cundy, Director, UBC Advanced Research Computing

dlopez — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 06:43:39 +0000

Interview: Steve Cundy, Director, UBC Advanced Research Computing dlopez Thu, 08/11/2022 - 23:43

Steve Cundy, Director of UBC Advanced Research Computing offers insight into some of the high-performance computing platforms available to researchers at UBC and speaks to the opportunities and challenges of his work.

What is the operational role of your unit on campus?

UBC Advanced Research Computing (ARC) provides institutionally-dedicated resources and support services for researchers across all disciplines working on questions that have significant or specialized data and computational needs. Working with institutional, national, regional and industry partners, we offer services and resources to empower researchers and accelerate time to discovery and innovation through the use of leading digital research infrastructure.

ARC provides training, consulting, and access to high-performance computing platforms such as Sockeye, Chinook, and RONIN to the UBC research community. Sockeye is UBC’s high-performance computing system that can enable months’ worth of work to be done in weeks or less when compared to traditional personal computers. Our object storage platform, Chinook, provides a place for research data files to be securely stored and shared – launched to meet the needs of researchers working with an ever-increasing amount of data, video, and images. Furthermore, our team of experts is available to work alongside any member of the UBC research community to evaluate what technical solutions are best suited to meet their research requirements. We also provide research data management support to researchers and offer specialized software, such as REDCap and Globus which are both secure applications for collecting, tracking, and managing research data.

What are some of the different ways that your Unit can support on-ground research on campus?

ARC provides a single point of contact for all requests relating to research computing infrastructure, platforms, and services, whether the service is provided by ARC or one of our many partners. This may include providing access to locally available digital research infrastructure and resources, consulting on privacy, security, grant proposals, and research data management, operating and supporting our institutionally dedicated HPC cluster and storage service, or facilitating onboarding to the National platforms and commercial cloud.

Additionally, we are also mandated to provide training and education to the research community. This includes hands-on workshops, online training events, and one-on-one support to ensure that researchers of all disciplines and skill levels have access to our platforms and resources throughout the course of the calendar year.

What potential research opportunities excite you the most, with regard to your unit’s function?

A few areas of growth in which I can foresee ARC’s participation include AI/Machine Learning platforms, cloud computing, data management platforms, web or graphical user interface to HPC clusters, and quantum computing. Currently, the expanding growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning is extremely exciting, and given that UBC is home to top leaders and innovators in the field, we are extremely well positioned to provide high-impact, comprehensive support for new innovations and discoveries.

What are your operational constraints in incubating on-the-ground research?

With technology, there is always the constraint of maintaining existing infrastructure while simultaneously advancing in other areas. ARC proactively supports pilot projects to gain better understanding on how best to utilize certain platforms and tools to support UBC research. Another operational constraint that we face is the availability of computing infrastructure, which is very much a key component of the research we support. As both federal and our institutional computing hardware sees constant utilization, we have to be extremely resourceful and strategic when ensuring our researchers have access to the resources they need to meet publication and conference deadlines. Demand for computational power to support research has never been higher, specifically specialized processors such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We are also seeing a sharp rise in available software, platforms, and tools. Integrating and supporting fresh capabilities is always a challenge, and the sheer amount of new solutions requires us to be dynamic in our approach to delivering the research services necessary for UBC research activities.

What are your past research collaborations?

ARC is a research support unit and as such, does not collaborate directly on research projects. However, of the many different projects we have supported across the institution, from grant applications through to project closure or anything in between, here are a few examples of recent projects acknowledging the support ARC had provided:

TURJUMAN: A Public Tool for Neural Arabic Machine Translation. Visit site
Automated discovery of noncovalent inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 main protease by consensus Deep Docking of 40 billion small molecules. Visit site
Eight papers accepted from UBC Computer Vision Group by CVPR 2021. Visit site

Learn more about the CLL Project

Data & Technology

Policy, Economics & Governance

Interview: John Metras, Interim Vice-President, Operations & Associate Vice-President, Facilities

dlopez — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 06:37:59 +0000

Interview: John Metras, Interim Vice-President, Operations & Associate Vice-President, Facilities dlopez Thu, 08/11/2022 - 23:37

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.

Learn more about the CLL Project

Built Environment & Mobility

Policy, Economics & Governance