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 |
|---|---|---|
| Barr, Alasdair | Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology & Therapeutics | Mental health and addictions, with a particular emphasis on psychosis and the medications used in its treatment, Anesthesiology |
| Barton, Jason | Division of Neurology, Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences | face perception, object recognition, eye movements, higher visual function, Human vision and eye movement |
| 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; Endometriosis; Recurrent Pregnancy Loss; Infertility; Minimally Invasive Surgery |
| 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 | |
| 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, Alexis | School of Audiology and Speech Sciences | Cognitive sciences |
| Black, Charlyn | School of Population and Public Health | Public and population health |
| Black, Peter | Department of Urologic Sciences | Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (especially equality rights); Canadian human rights legislation |
| 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 | biopsychosocial factors involved in the developmental trajectory of youth with chronic pain |
| 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 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Mental health conditions are common but under-treated after concussions. Dr. Otamendi's research suggests that discussing with patients the role that mental health can have in complicating recovery could enhance their acceptability of mental health treatment, thereby contributing to optimal concussion recovery. | Doctor of Philosophy in Rehabilitation Sciences (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Alaeiilkhchi explored the effects of ketogenic diets, ketone esters and metformin on mouse models of multiple sclerosis. He discovered that these metabolic treatments could enhance cell repair processes, offering promising avenues for new MS treatments. | Doctor of Philosophy in Neuroscience (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Li made a groundbreaking discovery in cancer research, identifying a unique metabolic pathway that mediates chemoresistance in cancers. This potential druggable target could revolutionize the approach to overcoming chemotherapy resistance, offering new hope for effective cancer treatment. | Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Medicine (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Smith found that specific HIV medications cause damage to human embryonic stem cells cultured in a dish. These findings strongly suggest that certain HIV medications are safer than others for a developing baby during pregnancy and may help inform and guide future human trials for the safest treatment of HIV in women of reproductive age. | Doctor of Philosophy in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Montgomery studied the effect of different milks on the nutritional status of toddlers and the foods that contribute to the intake of nutrients required for early growth and development. Her work contributes new knowledge that will serve for the derivation of age-specific feeding recommendations and dietary guidelines. | Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Medicine (PhD) |
| 2024 | In his doctoral work, Dr. Sravan developed the Personally Meaningful Outcomes-Assessment Process (PMO-AP) to gauge treatment effectiveness. A study with 50 participants demonstrated PMO-AP's reliability, validity and practicality. This patient-centered approach provides clinicians with a versatile tool to evaluate treatments for chronic conditions. | Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Medicine (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Inkster investigated DNA methylation in the human placenta to inform our understanding of pregnancy complications that differ by sex. Her work found that sex differences exist across the placental epigenome, and illuminated a unique relationship between DNA methylation and X-chromosome inactivation distinguishing placenta from other tissues. | Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Genetics (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Tung investigated the disease mechanisms underlying heart attacks and cardiac hypertrophy by combining experimental medicine and data science. His study, published in Nature Communications, highlights the importance of timing and spatial considerations of treatment for heart diseases, providing a blueprint for future clinical research. | Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Medicine (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Akbari explored DNA methylation in normal and cancerous human samples. He created tools to detect genetic regions with parent-specific methylation and uncovered several novel regions. He also developed a technique that discerns if a child's genetic variations come from the father or mother, without needing any information from parents. | Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Genetics (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Kwan researches the TATA-box binding protein (TBP), an essential protein that initiates transcription and is the first step in gene expression. Dr. Kwan challenges the dogma of transcription initiation and presents evidence that TBP has evolved from its historical role in governing transcription. | Doctor of Philosophy in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (PhD) |
