Dr. Gail Murphy
Vice-President, Research & Innovation
Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation
Dr. Gail Murphy assumed the role of Vice-President, Research & Innovation on August 14, 2017 and was reappointed in 2023.
Dr. Murphy is a professor in UBC’s Department of Computer Science and was formerly Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Science. After completing her BSc at the University of Alberta in 1987, she worked for five years as a software engineer in the Lower Mainland. She later pursued graduate studies in computer science at the University of Washington, earning first an MSc (1994) and then a PhD (1996).
Dr. Murphy’s research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage and coordinate the information that matters most for their work. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), as well as co-founder of Tasktop Technologies.
Since joining UBC in 1996, Dr. Murphy has been instrumental in championing data science at the university — as a key driver of both the Master of Data Science (a professional graduate program that launched in 2016) and the creation of a Data Science Institute (launched in 2017).
As Vice-President, Research & Innovation, she has been pivotal in advancing the research and innovation agendas of the university across both campuses and articulating and promoting the university’s research and scholarly strengths, goals, and achievements to UBC’s internal and external communities.
