https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708 Since 1916 the Vancouver Institute (VI) has sponsored regular lectures of general public interest, and in so doing has fostered a liaison between "town-and-gown". Held weekly during the spring and fall academic terms these free public lectures were initially presented at the Assembly Hall located on UBC's original Fairview campus. In 1929 the lectures moved to the University's Point Grey campus where they have become a popular Saturday night fixture. Operating on a modest budget supported by mem 60 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451837 Dr. Potvin is a distinguished tropical forest ecologist whose research advances understanding of carbon dynamics, biodiversity, and community-based climate solutions. With decades of fieldwork in Panama and Latin America, her work has shaped international climate policy, including through her service as a UN climate change negotiator for Panama. She has published more than 100 scientific articles in leading journals such as Nature, Science, and Global Change Biology. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she was the first woman to receive its Miroslaw Romanowski Medal. Dr. Potvin leads Sustainable Canada Dialogues, a national network of scholars developing climate action policy, and is a Trottier Fellow at the Trottier Institute for Science and Public Policy. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451837 Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:32:11 -0700 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451838 Dr. Chunhua Wu’s research examines consumer behaviour and firm strategy in the internet and mobile marketing domain. He teaches Market Research, Business Intelligence, and Business Analytics across undergraduate, graduate, MBA, and executive programs. Before academia, Dr. Wu co-founded an internet company providing financial information services in China. He is also an active investor in ventures including SpaceX, Tanium, Next Trucking, and Intelligent City. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451838 Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:32:01 -0700 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451738 Dr. Venditti is a geomorphologist and Director of the River Dynamics Laboratory at SFU. His research focuses on the fluid and sediment dynamics of large river systems, with particular attention to bedrock canyons, global sediment export, and the physics of extreme flooding. His work, including publications in Nature, has advanced understanding of flow and incision in bedrock rivers. He has contributed to major collaborative studies, including research on how the 2015 megatsunami reshaped the Tyndall Glacier landscape. From 2021–2024, he led a BCSRIF-funded team examining the impacts of the Big Bar Landslide on salmon migration and population dynamics. He is the founding Director of SFU’s School of Environmental Sciences and has held research positions at UC Berkeley and Caltech. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451738 Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:30:02 -0700 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451739 Dr. Angel founded the Art Canada Institute (ACI) in 2013 to democratize access to Canadian art for a diverse, twenty-first-century public, making high-quality, bilingual digital resources available to all regardless of location or prior knowledge. The ACI now offers open-source publications, a digital library, school art education programs, a fellowship program, and a weekly newsletter. Dr. Angel is an arts commentator for CBC and a contributor to Maclean’s, ArtNews, The Walrus, and The Globe and Mail. She teaches courses on Nazi-era art restitution and art crime and has taught at the University of Toronto and York University. She has lectured at major institutions including Harvard, the ROM, the AGO, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Israel Museum. She also serves on several nonprofit boards. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451739 Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:29:51 -0700 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451521 Dr. Brownlee’s research examines the social dimensions of human life, focusing on loneliness, belonging, social human rights, and freedom of association. Working in moral, political, and legal philosophy, she explores how sociability shapes human flourishing and how everyday interactional norms generate distinct virtues, vices, goods, and harms. She is the author of Being Sure of Each Other (2020) and Conscience and Conviction (2012). Before joining UBC, she was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick and held visiting fellowships at Oxford, ANU, Vanderbilt, St Andrews, and Monash. Her honours include a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2012) and the Royal Society of Canada’s Kitty Newman Memorial Award (2022). She is also a Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, and Fulbright Fellow. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451521 Sat, 21 Feb 2026 04:32:56 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451522 Dr. Owen is a Canadian scholar and policy expert specializing in digital technologies, democracy, and international security. His research examines platform governance, information disorder, and the regulation of emerging technologies. Dr. Owen’s work has informed public policy debates in Canada and internationally, and he frequently advises governments and civil society organizations. He is the author of Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (2015) and co-editor of The World Won’t Wait (2015) and Journalism after Snowden (2017). He writes regularly for major media outlets, including The Globe and Mail, and hosts the Big Tech podcast. Dr. Owen is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and a Fellow at the Public Policy Forum. In 2025, he was appointed to the Government of Canada’s AI Strategy Task Force. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451522 Sat, 21 Feb 2026 04:32:46 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451395 Dr. Colijn’s interdisciplinary research bridges mathematics, statistics, genomics, evolution, and epidemiology to unravel how infectious diseases spread and evolve, especially through the development of innovative phylogenetic modelling tools. During the COVID‑19 pandemic, she secured a Genome BC grant to develop a statistical tool to map the spread of the virus in British Columbia and served on Canada’s federal COVID‑19 expert panel. Dr. Colijn was a member of the BC COVID-19 Modelling Group and Canada’s Chief Science Advisor’s expert panel on COVID-19.Honoured as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023, Dr. Colijn leads the Mathematics, Genomics and Prediction in Infection and Evolution (MAGPIE) group at SFU’s Department of Mathematics. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451395 Wed, 04 Feb 2026 04:30:34 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451396 Mr. Kluckner is a celebrated Vancouver-based artist, writer, historian, and illustrator whose work bridges urban heritage and graphic storytelling. Author of over twenty books, including Vancouver: The Way It Was (1984), Vanishing Vancouver (1990), and Surviving Vancouver (2024), his watercolors and sumi-e paintings capture the city’s changing face. A leading advocate for heritage preservation, he was founding president of the Heritage Vancouver Society, president of the Langley Heritage Society, and a board member of the Heritage Canada Foundation. A past president of the Vancouver Historical Society, he now innovates through graphic novels such as Toshiko (2015), 2050 (2016), Julia (2018), and The Rooming House (2022). His art and writing continue to inspire people in British Columbia and beyond. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0451396 Wed, 04 Feb 2026 04:30:25 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102899 Digitized copy of a video recording of a Vancouver Institute presentation of a dramatic performance of Patricia Marchak's "God's Assassins: State Terrorism in the Argentine in the 1970s". Adapted for performance by Patti Flather and directed by John Wright, the performance featured members of UBC faculty and staff. Original video recording available in the University Archives (UBC VT 871) https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102899 Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:37:06 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0108939 Item consists of a digitized copy of a video recording of a Vancouver Institute lecture given by Patricia Marchak on February 8, 1992. Original video recording available in the University Archives (UBC VT 258). https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0108939 Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:35:52 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102655 Item consists of a digitized copy of an audio recording of a Vancouver Institute lecture given by Pat Marchak on October 5, 1996. Original audio recording available in the University Archives (UBC AT 1997). Also included is a PDF copy of the edited lecture that appeared in "The Vancouver Institute: an experiment in public education" Peter Nemetz (ed). https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102655 Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:32:59 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102892 Item consists of a digitized copy of an audio recording of a Vancouver Institute lecture given by Julie Cruikshank on February 5, 1994. Original audio recording available in the University Archives (UBC AT 1922). https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102892 Thu, 08 Jan 2026 04:37:26 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102770 Item consists of a digitized copy of an audio recording of a Vancouver Institute lecture given by Richard Pearson on January 26, 1985. Original audio recording available in the University Archives (UBC AT 1269). https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102770 Thu, 08 Jan 2026 04:34:01 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0348383 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0348383 Thu, 11 Dec 2025 05:08:27 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0450758 Dr. Garland’s research has significantly advanced interventions to support cancer survivors’ quality of life and recovery. Her clinical practice and research bridge psychology, oncology, and sleep medicine, with a focus on how poor sleep affects cancer recovery and how evidence-based interventions can improve sleep and related symptoms. She directs the Sleep, Health & Wellness Lab, which addresses insomnia, fatigue, cognitive decline, and distress among cancer patients. Dr. Garland has received numerous early-career awards, including honours from the Canadian Psychological Association, the Society for Integrative Oncology, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and the Arthur J. Spielman Early Career Distinguished Achievement Award. She also serves as a Senior Scientist at the Beatrice Hunter Cancer Research Institute in Halifax, Nova Scotia. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0450758 Sat, 22 Nov 2025 04:36:30 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102997 Item consists of a digitized copy of a video recording of a Vancouver Institute lecture given by Ivan Head on October 5, 1991. Original video recording available in the University Archives (UBC VT 247). https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102997 Thu, 20 Nov 2025 04:30:51 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0450737 Prof. Myers-Smith’s research quantifies trends and impacts of Arctic vegetation change to answer why the Arctic is greening and how tundra ecosystems have responded to climate change to inform future projections. She uses satellite and drone-based remote sensing in combination with long-term ecological research, in partnership with international researchers, northern communities and governments, to explore processes such as increases in shrubs in tundra ecosystems and the impacts on wildlife habitats, through to abrupt permafrost thaw. Her research demonstrates a dramatic transformation of tundra ecosystems with Arctic warming and a broad spectrum of global biodiversity change during the Anthropocene. She communicates her science broadly in the media reaching global audiences. She has been elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0450737 Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:30:35 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0450738 Dr. Green is a pioneering Canadian physician who has reshaped compassionate end-of-life support. When Canada legalized medical assistance in dying (MAiD) in 2016, she became one of its earliest providers. Dr. Green co-founded and led the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), serves as medical advisor to the BC Ministry of Health’s MAiD oversight committee, moderates CAMAP’s national online forum, and has hosted several national conferences on the topic. She also co-leads the national MAID Curriculum Project and is clinical faculty at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria. Beyond her clinical work, she frequently speaks about MAiD to audiences locally, nationally, and internationally. Her bestselling memoir, This Is Assisted Dying (2022), chronicles her first year in this field and underscores her compassionate approach. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0450738 Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:30:25 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102658 Item consists of a digitized copy of an audio recording of a UBC Excellence in Research Lecture delivered at the Vancouver Institute by Max Cynader on March 12, 2005. Original audio recording available in the University Archives (UBC AT 3076). https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102658 Fri, 14 Nov 2025 04:30:36 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102861 Item consists of a digitized copy of a video recording of a Vancouver Institute lecture given by Max Cynader on November 10, 1990. Original video recording available in the University Archives (UBC VT 215). https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102861 Fri, 14 Nov 2025 04:30:26 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0450680 Dr. King’s interdisciplinary lab investigates the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of host-pathogen/parasite interactions through using a combination of experimental evolution, computational approaches, and collections from the wild. She explores the impact of climate change, biodiversity loss, and other ecological factors on the outcomes of infection now and across time. With over 100 publications, her work addresses critical questions about biodiversity, disease, and ecological resilience. Her significant honours include the 2023 Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution Mid‑Career Excellence Award, the 2023 Canadian Society of Zoologists R.A. Wardle Medal, the 2022 Zoological Society of London Scientific Medal, the 2020 Linnean Society Bicentenary Medal, and the 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize. She is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and was recently awarded the 2026 Francis Crick Medal from the Royal Society of London. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0450680 Sat, 08 Nov 2025 04:30:39 -0800 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102806 Item consists of a digitized copy of an audio recording of a Vancouver Institute lecture given by Anthony Sinclair on February 18, 1995. Original audio recording available in the University Archives (UBC AT 1953). Also included is a PDF copy of the edited lecture that appeared in "The Vancouver Institute: an experiment in public education" Peter Nemetz (ed). https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0102806 Sun, 26 Oct 2025 04:30:29 -0700 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0450522 Dr. Van Raamsdonk is recognized internationally for his pioneering work at the intersection of quantum mechanics and gravity. His research aims for a better theoretical understanding of elementary particle physics, classical and quantum gravity, and cosmology. His essay “Building up spacetime with quantum entanglement” won first prize from the Gravity Research Foundation in 2010 and has become a landmark in the field. He has received numerous honours, including a Sloan Fellowship, a Canada Research Chair, the CAP/CRM Medal in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, a Simons Investigator Award, and UBC’s Killam Faculty Research and Teaching Prizes. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Dr. Van Raamsdonk plays the saxophone and teaches a course on the physics of music. In 2021, Van Raamsdonk published a short picture book titled The Hot and Cold Adventures of Mr. Bric. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0450522 Sat, 25 Oct 2025 04:31:18 -0700 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0448278 Dr. Tworek’s research examines the history and policy of communications, focusing on how new media technologies impact democracy. Her interest in democracy was spurred by writing her prize-winning book, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 (2019). Dr. Tworek’s insights have been featured in major outlets including The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico, The Globe & Mail, The Financial Times, and CNN. She also contributes a monthly column for the Centre for International Governance Innovation, where she is a senior fellow. Additionally, she is a non-resident fellow at both the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. Dr. Tworek co-edits the Journal of Global History and is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s New College of Scholars, Artists and Scientists. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0448278 Sat, 05 Apr 2025 04:30:34 -0700 https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0448258 Dr. Lisa Tobber is an Assistant Professor and the Principal’s Research Chair in Resilient Buildings at the University of British Columbia Okanagan and earned her PhD in Structural Engineering from UBC Vancouver. She leads the ASSET Group, a team of researchers dedicated to improving the seismic resilience of multi-story buildings through large-scale testing and numerical modelling. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/12708/items/1.0448258 Sun, 30 Mar 2025 04:30:55 -0700