Peter Wall Institute For Advanced Studies - Programs

Programs

The Institute's programs include:

• Exploratory Workshops, which bring together researchers from UBC and elsewhere, to "assess basic research and research possibilities with major potential impact in a new way".
• Major Thematic Grants, of up to CAD$500,000, "to support interdisciplinary, collaborative teams" over a period of several years. Thematic grants have been on topics such as crisis points; chemistry and physics at ultracold temperatures, sensorimotor computation; and HIV-Exposed but uninfected infants.
• Colloquia
• Theme Development Workshops.
• The Peter Wall Distinguished Professorship. The University describes this as "one of UBC's highest honours". The current Peter Wall Distinguished Professors are Brett Finlay, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Microbiology & Immunology, and Derek Gregory, Geography. Brett Finlay is a microbiologist and Officer of the Order of Canada. "This is huge," Finlay was quoted as saying upon receiving the professorship. "The Peter Wall Institute is a really special place at the University of British Columbia." Finlay's recent work is on vaccines to combat E. coli and SARS. Derek Gregory is an internationally renowned scholar in both the social sciences and the humanities. His appointment is for a five-year term, effective 1 July 2011.
• The Distinguished Scholars in Residence program, developed to bring to the Institute for one year senior UBC faculty members with distinguished research records and commitment to interdisciplinarity.
• The Early Career Scholars program, which program brings together outstanding tenure-track faculty from diverse disciplines at the early stages of their careers at UBC.
• The Distinguished Visiting Professor program. The Institute's visiting professors to date have been the intellectual historian Arif Dirlik (in 2005), the Nobel prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman (in 2008), and French neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz (in 2009), computer scientist Barbara Grosz (in 2010), and cognitive neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene (2011), and microbiologist, Philippe Sansonetti (2011).
• The Wall Summer Institute for Research, which has featured public talks by James Orbinski, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
• "The Wall Exchange" Free Downtown Public Lecture Series. The inaugural event took place May 2011 with guest speaker, J. Craig Venter, Leading genomic scientist and sequencer of the human genome, on the construction of the first synthetic cell and the global ocean sampling expedition.
• The International Visiting Research Scholar program grants up to fifteen partnerships of $10,000 to bring some of the world’s best scholars to UBC. These highly competitive partnership awards are selected based on merit and the calibre of both the proposed scholar and the interdisciplinary research to be conducted jointly with one or more UBC scholar.
• The UBC Visiting Scholar Abroad Program gives two awards of $25,000 to UBC faculty members who are early or mid-career scholars (pre-tenure or recently tenured) to travel abroad to undertake innovative research that will make a social, ethical, medical, scientific, or other contribution to the country being visited.
• The International Roundtable Discussion Program hosts up to six international Roundtables per year. This program allows scholars on a local, national and international level to come together in the pursuit of knowledge within an interdisciplinary environment. The roundtable sessions foster novel approaches towards engagement in fundamental research and idea exchange that may prompt advances in the sciences and humanities. The first International Roundtable Discussion, titled, "Rising from the Ashes: Resilience, Arts and Social Transformation," was held in October 2012.
• The Institute has partenered with Consulate General of France in Vancouver to bring leading French scholars to UBC in a program titled "French Scholars Lecture Series / Cycle de conférenciers français à l'université de Colombie-Britannique", inviting academics from France, from different disciplinary and research backgrounds, to participate in a dialogue with their Canadian counterparts.
• International Exchanges. Under the memoranda of understanding with our International Partners, the Institute can welcome each year outstanding professors from the Collège de France within the context of its invited Wall Distinguished Visiting Professor program, and in turn, the Collège can invite up to three senior Faculty Associates of the Institute for one month under the rubric of its International Exchanges program. Stellenbosch will welcome senior Faculty Associates of the Institute for fellowships of three months or longer. The Institute and TUM–Institute for Advanced Study will arrange annual brief exchanges of small, interdisciplinary research clusters with interests in a common topic.
• The Colloquia Abroad are small meetings to which scholars from a range of disciplines, from UBC and abroad, are brought together for a few days to develop and further research agendas on cutting edge topics. Holding the meetings in other parts of the world will enable key researchers to attend who might otherwise not be able to do so.

The Institute's discontinued programs include:

• Distinguished Junior Scholar, which aimed to provide an opportunity for participants to interact with peers from diverse disciplines and for UBC departments to have an opportunity to develop contacts with exceptional new scholars from around the world. Past awardees have included the biologists Stuart West and Jeremy Marchant Forde and the writer/poet Alison Calder.