A total of 45 research excellence clusters led by researchers at UBC Vancouver will be supported through the Research Excellence Clusters initiative in 2024/25.
Research Excellence Clusters are interdisciplinary networks of researchers addressing societal and cultural problems, and working together to solve challenges that transcend traditional boundaries associated with departments, institutions, and funding agencies.
Funding is awarded through Grants for Catalyzing Research Clusters (GCRC) competitions.
Support for the research excellence clusters in 2024/25 includes:
- 25 new grants funded through the 2024/25 competition
- 14 clusters in the second year of funding awarded in 2023/24
- 6 transition grants for previously funded clusters no longer eligible to apply to GCRC competitions following program changes recommended by an external review
2024/25 GCRC Competition grant Recipients
The collaborative “Advancing Multifunctional Dental Biomaterials” (AMDB) Research Excellence Cluster aims to leverage impactful research to prevent, mitigate and repair the effects of highly prevalent oral diseases through the development and enhancement of innovative dental biomaterials, while addressing oral health inequity and accessibility. Our mission also encompasses sharing existing knowledge, fostering learning, and providing insights into ongoing research for dental professionals, knowledge users, and the general public.
Cluster Lead: Adriana Manso
The BC Eating Disorders Research Excellence Cluster brings together clinicians, researchers, and community partners in a multi-disciplinary network to facilitate research and knowledge translation relating to eating disorders across the lifespan. Cluster activities include engagement in provincial and national knowledge mobilization initiatives, connecting trainees with mentorship opportunities, and leading a team project on education and support for the eating disorders workforce.
Cluster Lead: Jennifer Coelho
Illicit drug toxicity and overdose are the leading cause of death for children and youth aged 10-18 in British Columbia. Research indicates that there are significant gaps in substance use care for this population, particularly those experiencing structural vulnerabilities along axes of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability. This cluster will bring together world-leading experts at UBC with colleagues across Canada and the United States to improve quality of care and health outcomes for young people that use drugs.
Cluster Lead: Matthew Carwana
Climate Justice Partnerships empowers UBC faculty, staff, and students to collectively support climate justice. We support community-led climate action by connecting the UBC community to the direct research needs of community partners while ensuring that our research is ethical, actionable, and accountable. We facilitate just and respectful relationships with community organizations, movements, First Nations, and other partners that enable us to produce politically impactful, groundbreaking research on climate justice.
Cluster Lead: Naomi Klein
Despite experiencing inequitable impacts, many Indigenous people and communities also thrived during the COVID-19 pandemic by returning to traditional cultural practices and ways of being. Health research often ignores these strengths and misses opportunities to equip Indigenous communities for pandemics. We believe the best way to prepare Indigenous communities for future pandemics is to help them thrive in their daily lives. Our Indigenous-led research cluster fills this gap by partnering with other Indigenous scholars and communities, making sure research is guided by a community agenda throughout the entire process.
Cluster Lead: Kimberly Huyser
How do we manage landscapes jointly for wildlife and people? Urbanization and agricultural expansion threaten biodiversity through habitat destruction. However, communities benefit from proximity to nature: urban-dwellers gain recreation and health benefits, while farmers depends on species like pollinators. Promoting biodiversity in populous regions such as Metro Vancouver can help secure these benefits, but may also enhance encounters and conflicts between people and wildlife. This research cluster will tackle these complex trade-offs through partner-based research with diverse stakeholders and key decision-makers, aimed at designing inclusive and effective conservation solutions to benefit people and nature alike.
Cluster Lead: Claire Kremen
Critical Image Forum (CIF) is an interdisciplinary research cluster and public humanities project at UBC focusing on issues related to photography and expanded documentary practice. The CIF proceeds from the understanding that photographs are by their nature defiant of disciplinary boundaries: they are used to shape science, medicine, community memory, political awareness, the arts, geography, and social realities. Thus it works to connect academic research, photographic practice, and community work from across disciplines to propose how we can critically “read” photographic images. We support research in social and racial justice, visual art and cultural theory, political histories and decolonial methodologies.
Cluster Co-leads: Althea Thauberger & Kelly McCormick
DIBS' mission is to improve outcomes across major societal and planetary challenges by improving our understanding of decision-making, encouraging long-term behaviour change, and working together toward an environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable future. DIBS has several goals, including: (1) conducting cutting-edge behavioural science research; (2) working with our partners in government, industry, and beyond to apply insights and methods from behavioural research to real-world challenges; (3) helping people develop their applied behavioural science knowledge and skills; and (4) growing and supporting the network of behavioural science experts and enthusiasts.
Cluster Lead: Jiaying Zhao
Our research cluster will bring together First Nation and local communities, archive, museum and repository representatives, practising archaeologists, heritage management officers, Indigenous/First Nations scholars and allies across BC, the Americas and beyond to re-imagine the future of data and cultural heritage curation locally and globally and develop solutions for change. Our cluster will address critical issues facing cultural heritage repositories via an ethos of practice guided by Indigenous and other descent community perspectives and moves toward data and cultural heritage sovereignty for First Nations and local communities.
Cluster Lead: Camilla Speller
The UBC Disaster Resilience Research Network intends to build transdisciplinary connections and identify shared research goals to inform disaster risk reduction policy and decision making at community and governance levels. The cluster aims to advance multi-hazard assessment and mitigation in support of an inclusive and equitable development of just disaster risk management, with a focus on BC informed by international perspectives.
Cluster Co-leads: Carlos Molina Hutt & Sara Shneiderman
The Drone Transport Initiative (DTI) cluster is an interdisciplinary team comprised of researchers, private companies, public sector collaborators, and regulators. The cluster aims to address health inequities by co-creating innovative solutions that support timely healthcare access to essential medical supplies to rural, remote and Indigenous communities. The pathways developed are transferable and applicable to all health care setting to address access and emergency response in rural and remote community settings in Canada.
Cluster Lead: Anurag Singh
The Future Minerals Initiative is an interdisciplinary research cluster which brings together academic researchers, Indigenous community leaders, and industry professionals to reimagine the global mineral resource sector. FMI uniquely integrates academic expertise in earth sciences, engineering, law, economics and public policy together with Indigenous Knowledge, to drive technical innovation in mineral exploration and mining, while reimagining the environmental, social and human rights dimensions of mineral resources in the context of Indigenous sovereignty. We aim to position British Columbia as the ‘Silicon Valley’ of the mineral resource sector, working to create the world’s most technologically advanced and socially responsible mining jurisdiction.
Cluster Lead: Nadja Kunz
The cluster accelerates interdisciplinary research to find real-world solutions that will be readily adopted by consumers, government and business key for our sustainable future. The research includes in the innovation of new packaging materials (intelligent, biodegradable, self-healing, sustainable sourced and processed), biosensors and eco-friendly barrier coatings for packaging applications. It includes research related to safety and risk assessment, consumer attitudes/behaviour, supply chain implications and lifecycle assessment for developing packaging systems. Key will be to mobilize research outputs by engaging stakeholders from material providers to consumers to inform and shape regulatory policies, business and community/consumer practices.
Cluster Lead: Anubhav Pratap-Singh
The proposed research group seeks to create an interdiciplinary platform for scholars working on anticolonialism and global history to explore the meaning of global political theory further and theorize the ways in which land and sea have bridged the anti-colonial world in the past as well as explore the promises - and limits - of anticolonialism as a normative resource for the the future global age. The ultimate goal is to collectively advance the agenda of creating a global framework for studying anticolonial thought and to create a Center for the Study of Global Political Thought at UBC.
Cluster Lead: Barbara Arneil
We aim to implement interdisciplinary, inclusive, and collaborative approaches into current research practices impacting Indigenous people. In addition, we seek to strengthen community engagement based on reciprocal and respectful relations, bring Indigenous people's voices and knowledge into research, advance Indigenous research sovereignty and transform theory, methodology, and practice of academic research.
Cluster Lead: Eduardo Jovel
There is an urgent unmet clinical need for more effective interventions for substance use/mental health disorders. The Multidisciplinary Alliance for Translational Research and Innovation in Neuropsychiatry (MATRIX-N) seeks to bridge gaps between neuroscience/psychiatry research, clinical practice and patient needs to facilitate innovative solutions to local/global challenges related to the overdose crisis, high-risk substance use, concurrent disorders, and pain. Two promising strategies to address research gaps are the integration of foundational and clinical research, and concept of ‘reverse translation’, which prioritizes insights from clinicians, front-line health workers, and patients in inspiring translational research with potential for immediate and significant clinical impact.
Cluster Lead: Anthony Phillips
We will develop a community of practice bringing together diverse faculty from Science, Applied Science, Architecture, and Land and Food Systems to explore development of living hybrid materials made from synthetic microbial communities including microalgae and fungi, with applications related to sustainable construction, waste treatment, and food security. These materials will enable the creation of carbon positive value cycles across industrial sectors including manufacturing and agriculture and provide a transdisciplinary research, teaching, and training ecosystem at the interface of microbial ecology, biological engineering, and sustainability science.
Cluster Lead: Steven Hallam
The MUSIC (MUsic and Science Interdisciplinary Collaboration) Research Cluster will develop collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects, educational opportunities, and community outreach projects in music cognition. Research projects of interest to the members include: the perception and cognition of music and other auditory input; music and language processing and acquisition; effects of music in clinical settings for treatment of psychiatric disorders, neurodivergences, and neurodegenerative diseases; and music learning and dyslexia. Cluster activities will include Workshops offering interdisciplinary education, a Speaker Series welcoming prominent researchers in music cognition, and Outreach events connecting the work of the research cluster to the community.
Cluster Lead: Leigh VanHandel
Pop Culture Catalysts: Popular Media and Social Change explores how popular culture reflects social and political change and can instigate social change. Popular culture is the most prevalent and powerful form of cultural production in our lives; yet, it remains on the fringes of academic inquiry, where little understanding exists about the value of popular culture in research, teaching, and knowledge mobilization. This Research Cluster will therefore serve as an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary hub for the evaluation of popular media and its impacts, seeking to identify the role of popular culture in illuminating and catalyzing social and political change.
Cluster Lead: Elizabeth Nijdam
Male suicide rates are high and there are predictions that post COVID-19 transitions will increase men's suicide risk. The reducing male suicide (RMS) research cluster comprises world leading researchers in men's mental health, and together this group works to develop, implement and evaluate upstream suicide prevention programs across three themes by: 1) Addressing men’s mental health inequities 2) Guiding the practices of men to seek, and practitioners who provide, mental health care 3) Assisting men to build equitable intimate partner relationships and social connections The RMS work positions UBC as a collaborative world leader for reducing male suicide.
Cluster Lead: John Oliffe
The goals of RespNetBC are to: a) advance common themes and methodologic approaches grounded in meaningful engagement of stakeholders to synergize research and scholarship between silos of lung health and disease focus across British Columbia; and b) empower trainees and junior faculty by placing them in supported leadership roles in BC lung health discovery and clinical translation by fostering creativity, innovation, and collaboration through an equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) lens, and providing a renewable source of skilled, energetic, and empowered research leaders.
Cluster Lead: Najib Ayas
38,000 Canadians suffer sudden cardiac arrests (SCA) each year. Only 5-7% return home. The BC Resuscitation Research Collaborative (BC RESURECT) aims to improve survival in BC. Our efforts are far reaching through our national CanSAVE research group developing recognition technology, improving rapid community response, and understanding how to minimize the effects of SCA on brain function and develop survivor-led quality of life standards of care.
Cluster Lead: James Christenson
The Smart Infrastructure and Construction Research Cluster (SICRC) is dedicated to developing cutting-edge structural and construction technologies, and creating efficient and cost-effective solutions for civil infrastructure. This multidisciplinary research cluster consists of expertise from material and structural engineering, robotics, computer science, construction management and infrastructure planning from both UBCV and UBCO campuses, in collaboration with leading industry partners and international experts, to address multiple challenging issues including the significant housing crisis, labor shortage, and global warming effects in North America and worldwide.
Cluster Lead: Tony Yang
Families of children with medical complexity experience physical, social, and economic exclusion. Medical complexity is characterized by the presence of complex, chronic conditions requiring specialized care, substantial health needs, functional dependence and/or limitations, and frequent healthcare usage. Our cluster will advance knowledge, clinical programs and policy to support these families through a community-led and comprehensive research program and knowledge exchange activities.
Cluster Lead: Jennifer Baumbusch
TrustML facilitates the development of trustworthy machine-learning-based systems: systems that are reliable, secure, explainable, and ethical. The cluster brings together a remarkable set of experts from computer science and engineering, law, business and ethics, and relevant application domains such as finance, manufacturing, education, and medicine. It (a) examines trust-related challenges in these critical domains, (b) helps develop and adopt guidelines for new AI policies, and (c) investigates solutions for building trustworthy systems that professionals and the general public can safely adopt.
Cluster Lead: Julia Rubin
2023/24 competition grant recipients (second year of term)
The Accelerated Translational Opioid Research Cluster (ATORC) aims to mobilize clinicians and foundational scientists to develop innovative pharmaceutical and diagnostic solutions to frontline challenges in the opioid epidemic. The ultimate goals of this work centre around developing broadly accessible tools and technologies that will impact the opioid crisis. ATORC research projects are motivated by addressing the needs of frontline addiction and pain management clinicians and are collaboratively executed by leading UBC Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences research groups.
Cluster Lead: Glenn Sammis
Sepsis occurs when an infection results in vital organ damage, and can result in death or disability. Sepsis has huge clinical, social, economic, and political impacts. Thus reducing the impact of sepsis cannot be achieved without cross-cutting, interdisciplinary collaborations. Action on Sepsis fosters diverse and inclusive partnerships across biology, medicine, population and public health, and policy to effectively prevent, diagnose, and manage the deadly condition of sepsis. We aim to create innovative, targeted interventions that will minimize death and disability and improve outcomes for people with sepsis in BC and across the globe.
Cluster Lead: Mark Ansermino
BCREGMED is a multi-disciplinary research initiative comprised of world-class scientists, clinicians, and industry partners. Since our inception, we have catalyzed unique collaborations and opportunities for our community. We are dedicated to identifying and removing barriers to regenerative medicine, and accelerating innovative research towards translational outcomes.
Cluster Lead: Fabio Rossi
The goal of the Bionics Network is to develop safe, user-friendly materials and devices, both wearable and implantable, that improve health and well-being by performing preventative, restorative, and assistive functions. This is achieved by bringing together engineers, clinicians, and the consumer community.
Cluster Lead: Karen Cheung
Cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. One in every two Canadians will receive a cancer diagnosis. Despite improvements in treatment these trends will remain as the Canadian population ages. Given the scale of the cancer burden, cancer control must move beyond treatment to emphasize prevention. The cancer prevention cluster will:
- Create a network of researchers, practitioners and stakeholders to enhance the landscape of cancer prevention in BC and beyond;
- Conduct interdisciplinary research to generate cancer prevention evidence, moving evidence into policy and practice;
- Focus cancer prevention on priority populations to reduce cancer inequities.
Cluster Lead: Trevor Dummer
The UBC Centre for Migration Studies promotes collaborative, interdisciplinary, intersectoral, and transformative research that advances our understanding of the causes, consequences, and experiences of human mobility, both within and across borders. As a community of scholars and practitioners, we work together to advance and decolonize the study and understanding of migration and belonging and to facilitate publicly engaged dialogue that fosters inclusive and just communities.
Cluster Lead: Antje Ellermann
The Collaborative Entity for ceREBrovasculaR Ischemia (CEREBRI) is an emerging cluster comprised of multidisciplinary health professionals, clinician-scientists, health policy-makers, neuroscientists, UBC academic Faculty of Medicine Departments / Divisions as well as patient & family partners who are collectively focused on improving the clinical outcomes of British Columbians with diseases emanating from cerebral ischemia. The cluster will focus its main research themes on creating new and novel projects that are based upon forging breakthroughs in the diagnosis, management and understanding the pathophysiology of cerebral ischemia based diseases in humans.
Cluster Lead: Mypinder Sekhon
The Centre for Asian Canadian Research Engagement (ACRE) cluster will respond to ongoing issues facing diverse Asian Canadian communities, particularly the pervasiveness of anti-Asian racism which became very public during the pandemic. As a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, staff, and community knowledge bearers, we want to better understand and engage with the changing demographics of Asian Canadian communities, while highlighting the differential impacts of anti-Asian racism on these communities. We will explore how Asian Canadian communities can be represented and represent themselves through new approaches to archival collection, collaboration, digital preservation, and impactful distribution of public education.
Cluster Lead: Henry Yu
The Data Science and Health Cluster is bridging the gap between health system data and UBC’s data science and research infrastructure, embedding analytics and innovation within clinical medicine to improve health outcomes.
Cluster Lead: Anita Palepu
The Dynamic Brain Circuits in Health and Disease cluster seeks mechanistic insight into normal and dysfunctional brain circuits across nervous system illnesses and injuries. We accelerate these insights by strengthening the collaborative research environment through networks of peer tutors that support local and international workshops and the development of new course material. Emerging neuroscience tools include expanded tissue microscopy and fully synthetic model brains and organisms that help inform and guide therapeutics. Through these efforts all faculty, staff, and trainees gain access to physical infrastructure and technology training in addressing questions around brain circuit function that embrace data-driven methodologies.
Cluster Lead: Tim Murphy
This cluster connects scholars from across Arts whose research engages with landscapes in Latin America. Our workshops, speaker series, and other activities will centre the question of extractivism and its impact on Indigenous peoples, Latin American societies, and the environment. By fostering new research relationships, we will be able to apply for SSHRC grants and lay the foundations for a Centre for Latin American Studies. We will also use our events at UBC to develop collaborations with Latin American universities so as to create opportunities for Mitacs fellowships and to recruit Latin American postdoctoral researchers funded by national scientific councils.
Cluster Lead: Benjamin Bryce
Streets provide the connective tissue for cities, providing mobility and access, distributing goods and utilities, and opportunities for social and civic interaction. Rethinking the Right-of-Way (ReROW) is focused on innovation in the design and management of streets, sidewalks, alleys, and other public spaces that lead to better social, health, and sustainable outcomes. With respect to the ROW, the cluster will focus on three research themes and the connections between them:
- mobility and access;
- energy and the environment;
- health and wellbeing.
Cluster Lead: Kelly Clifton
The Transformative Health and Justice Research Cluster is a peer-led, interdisciplinary, and cross-sectoral research network catalyzing equity-oriented studies at the interface of health and justice. We apply strength-based research approaches for decolonizing, anti-stigmatizing, and culturally safe engagement, policy development, and community advocacy for and with people who are impacted by the criminal legal system.
Cluster Lead: Helen Brown
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing agriculture. Solutions to current climate change induced problems, and rapidly approaching future problems, will require a diverse, interdisciplinary, and strategic plan for each of our agricultural sectors. Our research cluster brings together diverse areas of expertise to provide a platform for collaboration among researchers with a common interest in wine production and climate change. It is expected that our cluster will synergize to define novel strategies that address the impact of climate change on wine production and also provide broad knowledge applicable to other agricultural systems.
Cluster Co-leads: Vivien Measday & Simone Castellarin
Transition grant recipients
Transition grants are for previously funded clusters no longer eligible to apply to GCRC competitions following program changes recommended by an external review.
The BC Diabetes Research Network is a network of diabetes research experts who provide evidence-based information to the public, governments and community organizations, and connect and support researchers, clinicians and trainees to enhance their work. The network is focused on building a collaborative culture among people who want to dramatically decrease the impact of diabetes.
Cluster Lead: Bruce Verchere
Biodiversity is the greatest show on Earth, essential to ecosystems, economic systems, food security, and human health. Its deterioration has spurred global efforts to stem its decline. The BRC Cluster pursues a common goal: to understand anthropogenic impacts on the biosphere and their policy, conservation and societal implications. We propose a comprehensive program to measure biodiversity change, link science and economics of biodiversity loss, develop methods for biodiversity data and prediction, and provide advanced training. The project culminates in a proposal to develop a Biodiversity Knowledge Centre to serve as a flagship in BC for biodiversity change science and collaboration.
Cluster Lead: Mary O'Connor
Quantum computing is the next wave of fundamental science poised to revolutionize human experience. We want to discover and create the technology on which quantum computations will be run in the next two decades. The challenge is to produce a universal quantum computer that is demonstrably scalable and which also achieves a practical quantum advantage over classical computers.
Cluster Lead: Lukas Chrostowski
The Social Exposome Cluster facilitates interdisciplinary collaborations to examine the social and environmental factors that have lasting impacts on our health and well-being and the biological processes in the body by which they do so (referred to as “biological embedding”). The ultimate goal is to use this knowledge to develop and implement policies and interventions to reduce health inequities and improve health outcomes across the life course.
Cluster Lead: Michael Kobor
The Women’s Health Research Cluster (WHRC) is a network of women’s health researchers and stakeholders that are interested in how sex and gender influence health outcomes. We work towards creating a future where women can live equitably healthy lives across the lifespan by promoting, expanding, and catalyzing impactful research on women’s health.
Cluster Lead: Elizabeth Rideout
The Relational Technologies research cluster brings collaborative interdisciplinary teams together to support community-led cultural survivance through immersive and interactive storytelling. Partnerships among community-based research leads, technical experts at and beyond UBC, and campus venues for knowledge exchange focus on emergent digital tools and technologies for mapping, gaming, and curating stories.
Cluster Co-Leads: Daisy Rosenblum & David Gaertner
Research Clusters led by researchers at our Okanagan campus are funded through the Eminence Program.
SEE THE RESEARCH CLUSTERS LED FROM THE OKANAGAN CAMPUS