This is an election that is being held under University Policy 18 for one person elected by and from the faculty members of the Vancouver Campus to serve on the President's Advisory Committee for the selection of an Associate Vice-President, Research and Innovation.
Voting Instructions
- Go to WebVote
- Click “CWL login” on the right hand side to login with your CWL credentials
- Click “Vote” under “2018 Associate Vice-President, Research and Innovation Selection Committee - Vancouver Faculty Member Election”
- Vote for your preferred candidate by clicking on the box next to the candidate’s name
- Click on “Submit Vote” then click “ok” to confirm your submission before logging out.
Polls will close at midnight on Tuesday, March 6th, 2018.
Candidate Information
Christopher Overall
Essential for this committee is membership by active experienced researchers.
Professor Overall started his UBC lab in 1993 after a MRC Centennial Fellowship with Dr. Michael Smith (1989-), with subsequent pharmaceutical experience at British Biotech, Oxford (1997-1998) and Novartis, Basel (2004/2008). He is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Protease Proteomics, Faculty of Dentistry, Life Sciences Institute with cross-appointments/affiliations with the Center for Blood Research, Department Biochemistry/Molecular Biology, Prostate Center, and is Honorary Professor, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg.
He is best known for two related but distinct scientific achievements. The first is development of new proteomic methods for discovery of protein substrates of proteolytic enzymes, which allow identification of protease cleavage sites and substrates in vivo for the first time. Thereby he established the field of degradomics. The second is levering these techniques to reveal new and often unexpected biological roles for proteases in vivo and their aberrations in disease. The significance of his research has been recognized by Awards including: 2002 CIHR Researcher of the Year; Tony Pawson Award (2014); Proteomass Scientific Society Award (2017); Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) Discovery Award in Proteomics Sciences (2017). He was elected to the HUPO Executive Council and to Co-Chair HUPO’s Chromosome-Centric Human Proteome Project.
Now funded by a 7-year CIHR Foundation Grant ($5.6M) and with 258 refereed papers (h-index 85,~26,000 citations, 30 >200), including 27 Nature(1), Science(2), and daughter journal (24) papers, he has graduated 13 Ph.D./5 M.Sc. students and successfully trained and mentored 37 PDFs—4 of whom are Full Professors, 3 Associate Professors, and 8 are Assistant Professors.
Robert Rohling
I am an enthusiastic supporter of the new innovation plan at UBC. I wish to see UBC lead the way in enabling entrepreneurship and commercialization, social innovation and knowledge exchange. As a professor, I have been increasing devoted to these activities in order to get my research out of the lab and into the community. I want make an impact in the world. This has included collaboration and licensing to industry, creation of new standards, and founding a new startup. I have worked closely with the UBC University Industry Liaison Office on commercialization. As Director of the Institute of Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems, I have collaborated with entrepreneurship@UBC to grow Hatch, UBC’s on-campus incubator for UBC technology ventures. I have also been active in building multi-disciplinary research clusters on campus including UBC-O. I understand that research and innovation can take different forms in the various faculties across UBC and believe we can implement a new innovation plan that supports all faculties. I have deep roots in UBC. I completed a bachelor’s degree in 1991, and then returned in 2001 as an assistant professor. My current appointments span Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Urologic Sciences. I feel that I am in a good position to help this search committee find a candidate with the skills to fulfill the innovation mandate across the UBC community.
James Tansey
I have had the fortune to work on a wide range of innovation related projects at UBC. I founded the Sauder Centre for Social Innovation and Impact Investing in 2008, I helped to create the e@UBC Innovation Hub with support from Coast Capital and the UBC Impact Seed Fund. I am currently responsible for the UBC Sustainability Initiative, which support a wide range of projects on the UBC campus that use our operations and infrastructure to support regional innovation and demonstration projects. I have also been active in research on innovation in Canada, through a number of large scale genomics projects in BC and the Prairies and through a multi-university initiative with Berkeley and Oxford to identify and understand the drivers of innovation in the clean technology sector. Outside the university I’ve served on boards focused on innovation led by the Provincial government, BC Business Council and most recently, through participation in the Federal Social Innovation and Finance Advisory Committee. I have also been involved in founding a number of private and public companies that have delivered returns on innovation and I have served on the boards of companies focused on the commercialization of innovations from universities. I am committed to supporting the University in recruiting a world class Associate Vice President into this roll to deliver on our innovation strategy.
Nanzin Virji-Babul
I am seeking your support to represent the faculty members of the Vancouver campus to select a new Associate Vice-President, Research and Innovation.
I started my first faculty position at UBC in 2010 and developed two streams of research: a basic science stream focused on examining brain structure and function underlying action perception/action execution networks during infancy and a clinical stream, focused on identifying biomarkers of mild traumatic brain injury. These two broad areas have given me the opportunity to work with numerous faculty members across a wide range of disciplines and fields from physical therapy, medicine, neuroscience, psychology as well as physics and engineering. These collaborations have given me a clear understanding of the issues faced by our diverse faculty in relation to research and innovation.
I also bring an added perspective of entrepreneurship. I created a UBC start-up company that is developing a novel tool to assess whether an athlete has sustained a concussion. I had the opportunity to participate in the e@UBC Accelerator program, which provided me with a solid platform for understanding the process from academic research to innovation and commercialization. I am now learning how best to negotiate the landscape between academia and industry to enhance innovation and growth.
I would be deeply honoured to be elected and serve on the President’s Advisory Committee. If elected, I with participate and contribute enthusiastically in the process with an open and clear mind to represent the best interests of our faculty and of UBC.