The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies was founded in 1991 and was a research institute at the University of British Columbia. It supported basic research through collaborative, interdisciplinary initiatives.[1] The institute brought together UBC scholars with researchers from around the world "to work together on innovative research, develop new thinking that is beyond disciplinary boundaries, and engage in intellectual risk-taking."[1] The institute had a varied program of scholars in residence, visiting scholars, distinguished professorship, multiple speaker series, and major special events. It was dis-established by the UBC Senate in April 2024.[2]
In 1991, Vancouver property developer Peter Wall donated 6.5 million shares of the Wall Financial Corporation (at the time, it was worth CAD$15 million and the largest private donation received by the University of British Columbia[3]) to fund the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced studies, which had been conceived by Wall and then UBC President David Strangway.[4][5] Strangway was quoted as saying, "Peter realized that there was an opportunity to create a university-based institute for advanced research which doesn't exist anywhere else. He made it clear from the outset that the money had to be used to generate new ideas and initiatives that wouldn't happen otherwise."[5]As of March 2007,[update] the market value of the shares stood at CAD$48 million.[6] Also in 1994, the university dedicated a CAD$10 million Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Endowment Fund to the institute.[7]
The institute began active operations in 1994 with the appointments of UBC Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Michael Smith (1932–2000), and Prof. Raphael Amit, then director of UBC's W. Maurice Young Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Research Centre, as Peter Wall Distinguished Professors.[5] The institute's first full-time director was Kenneth MacCrimmon from 1996 to 2002.[5][8] The institute acquired its own facilities at the Leon & Thea Koerner University Centre (formerly the Faculty Club) in 1999.[9][10][11] In 2002, the institute appointed as its new Peter Wall Distinguished Professor Dr. Brett Finlay, who teaches in the department of biochemistry & molecular biology, the department of microbiology & immunology, and at the Finlay Lab at the Michael Smith Laboratories at UBC, and whose research led to the developments of vaccines for SARS[12] and E. coli.[13][14][15][16]
The institute was a member of UBIAS and hosted its International Conference on September 17–19, 2013.[17] It concluded Memoranda of Understanding with the Collège de France in 2008, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in 2009, and the TUM Institute for Advanced Study in 2010.[18] According to Chris McGill, who was assistant to the director from 1999 to 2004,[19] "The Institute was not modelled on a particular centre or institute. The individuals involved in establishing the Peter Wall Institute and in developing its programs looked at a number of different models. The Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study & Conference Center at Lake Como, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford were some of the facilities that were considered. By trying to adapt elements from each of these centres and institutes to the particular mandate of the Peter Wall Institute we have created a new and original form of research institute."[7]
The most recent director of the institute was Dr. Philippe Tortell, a professor in the Departments of Botany and Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences at the University of British Columbia.[20] Dr. Tortell resigned in protest against directives from the board of trustees, which he viewed as "wholly inconsistent with its mission and mandate"[21][22]
Programs
The institute's programs included:
The Peter Wall Distinguished Professorship. The university describes this as "one of UBC's highest honours".[23] 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.[24] "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."[25] Finlay's recent work is on vaccines to combat E. coli[26] 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.[27] In 2014, UBC Law Professor Janis Sarra was appointed UBC Presidential Distinguished Professor on a three-year term.[28]
"The Wall Exchange" Downtown Public Lecture Series. The institute brings prominent public intellectuals to give a free public lecture and forum at the Vogue Theatre in downtown Vancouver twice per year. The inaugural event took place May 2011 with guest speaker 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.[30] Past speakers include geographer and Peter Wall Distinguished Professor Derek Gregory (2011), philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler (2012), cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees (2012), microbiologist and Peter Wall Distinguished Professor Brett Finlay (2013), philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour (2013), politician and United Nations special envoy Stephen Lewis (2014), molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler (2015), architect Eyal Weizman (2015), historian of science Naomi Oreskes (2016), and anthropologist Gabriella Coleman Gabriella Coleman (2016).
The Wall Scholars program. Based on the combination of discontinued programs (Early Career Scholars, Distinguished Scholars in Residence, and Research Mentorship Awards), the Wall Scholars Research Award (worth $20,000) is given to exceptional UBC faculty, in any discipline and at any stage of their careers, to stay in residence at the institute for one year and participate in a collaborative, interdisciplinary research environment. Part of the Wall Scholars program includes the Wall Wednesday Afternoon Series, an annual series of public forums held by each of the current Wall Scholars on a topic of their choice.[31]
The International Visiting Research Scholar program. Select UBC faculty are granted partnership awards of $10,000 to bring an international scholar to UBC for a minimum of three weeks to collaborate on interdisciplinary research projects.[32]
The International Research Roundtable program. The institute funds and hosts up to five roundtables per year, during which local, national and international scholars, community leaders, artists, policy makers, and others come together in the pursuit of knowledge within an interdisciplinary environment. The roundtables foster collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches towards research centered on a broad-ranging theme, and may lead to important advances in science or solutions to important problems. The first International Roundtable Discussion, titled, "Rising from the Ashes: Resilience, Arts and Social Transformation," was held in October 2012.[33]
The institute has partnered with the 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.[34]
International Exchanges. 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. The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) welcomes 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.[35]
Wall Colloquia Abroad. These 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.[36]
Theme Development Workshops. The institute provides a venue and refreshments to UBC faculty who wish to meet and discuss potential collaborative research projects, themes, and research funding proposals involving multiple academic disciplines and faculties.[37]
Arts-Based Initiatives. Researchers at the Peter Wall Institute have adapted arts-based approaches (drama, poetry, visual arts, dance and song) to offer alternative ways of exploring important research questions as well as disseminating research findings to diverse audiences. The institute has hosted a Wall Composer in Residence, Wall Author in Residence, Wall International Visiting Artists, as well as a large number of arts-based forums and performances.[38]
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada. Established in 1908, it is the oldest university in British Columbia. With an annual research budget of $747.3million, UBC funds 9,675 projects annually in various fields of study within the industrial sector, as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations.
Michael Smith was a British-born Canadian biochemist and businessman. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kary Mullis for his work in developing site-directed mutagenesis. Following a PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester, he undertook postdoctoral research with Har Gobind Khorana at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Subsequently, Smith worked at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory in Vancouver before being appointed a professor of biochemistry in the UBC Faculty of Medicine in 1966. Smith's career included roles as the founding director of the UBC Biotechnology Laboratory and the founding scientific leader of the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence (PENCE). In 1996 he was named Peter Wall Distinguished Professor of Biotechnology. Subsequently, he became the founding director of the Genome Sequencing Centre at the BC Cancer Research Centre.
The Peter A. Allard School of Law is the law school of the University of British Columbia. The faculty offers the Juris Doctor degree. The faculty features courses on business law, tax law, environmental and natural resource law, indigenous law, Pacific Rim issues, and feminist legal theory.
Green College is a centre for interdisciplinary scholarship and a community of scholars at the University of British Columbia founded by Cecil Howard Green and Ida Green.
The UBC Sauder School of Business is the business school of the University of British Columbia. The faculty is located in Vancouver on UBC's Point Grey campus and has a secondary teaching facility at UBC Robson Square downtown. UBC Sauder has been accredited by AACSB since 2003. The current Dean is Darren Dahl.
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Canadian public research university with campuses in Vancouver and Kelowna, British Columbia. The following is a list of faculties and schools at UBC.
Mark Turin is a British anthropologist, linguist and occasional radio broadcaster who specializes in the Himalayas and the Pacific Northwest. From 2014–2018, he served as Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program and Acting Co-Director of the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, cross-appointed between the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. Turin served as Interim Editor of the journal Pacific Affairs from 2023-2024.
Judy Illes,, PHD, FRSC, FCAHS, is Professor of Neurology and Distinguished University Scholar in Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia. She is Director of Neuroethics Canada at UBC, and faculty in the Brain Research Centre at UBC and at the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute. She also holds affiliate appointments in the School of Population and Public Health and the School of Journalism at UBC, and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. USA. She was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2017.
Leah Edelstein-Keshet is an Israeli-Canadian mathematical biologist.
The UBC Faculty of Medicine is the medical school of the University of British Columbia. It is one of 17 medical schools in Canada and the only one in the province of British Columbia. It has Canada's largest undergraduate medical education program and the fifth-largest in the U.S. and Canada. It is ranked as the 2nd best medical program in Canada by Maclean's, and 27th in the world by the 2017 QS World University Rankings.
The Vancouver School of Economics is a school of the University of British Columbia located in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The school ranks as one of the top 25 in the world and top in Canada. The school exhibits research activity and offers undergraduate and graduate degrees.
Somdatta Sinha is an Indian researcher and professor of biology, who is one of the earliest to start working in the area of theoretical biology in India. Her expertise is in the interdisciplinary fields of mathematical & computational biology, nonlinear dynamics and complex systems with a view to understand the logic and design of biological processes. She studies spatio-temporal organization in biological systems – from biological sequences to spread of disease in populations – using mathematical and computational methods. She has played a central role in the development of mathematical and computational biology in her country through research, organization of scientific meetings, training programs, conferences, and teaching interdisciplinary courses at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her research encompasses patterns, interactions, and dynamics of biological systems using mathematical and physical methods to understand complex multi-scale biological systems. Sinha's research contributions focus on modelling a variety of biological systems, such as, circadian rhythms, pattern formation, biochemical pathways, synthetic biology, single and meta-population ecological models, epidemiology, and controlling spatiotemporal dynamics. She has also carried out computational analysis of genomes for classification of organisms using Chaos Game Representation (CGR) and Multi-fractal analysis, protein structure function analysis using graph theory, and network analysis of large biochemical pathways. Her publications have made important contributions in the respective fields and are highly cited. Her seminal contribution to the development of the interdisciplinary field of Mathematical and Computational Biology in India was acknowledged by the Department of Biotechnology, Govt of India with the National Senior Woman Bioscientist Award in 2013 and the J C Bose National Fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India. She is a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Sciences. She was elected Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for 2000-2001 and International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada in 2018. She has traveled widely across the globe and has given many invitational talks in universities and conferences.
Bonny Norton,, is a professor and distinguished university scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, Canada. She is also research advisor of the African Storybook and 2006 co-founder of the Africa Research Network on Applied Linguistics and Literacy. She is internationally recognized for her theories of identity and language learning and her construct of investment. A Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), she was the first recipient in 2010 of the Senior Research Leadership Award of AERA's Second Language Research SIG. In 2016, she was co-recipient of the TESOL Award for Distinguished Research and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
B. Brett Finlay, is a Canadian microbiologist well known for his contributions to understanding how microbes cause disease in people and developing new tools for fighting infections, as well as the role the microbiota plays in human health and disease. Science.ca describes him as one of the world's foremost experts on the molecular understanding of the ways bacteria infect their hosts. He also led the SARS Accelerated Vaccine Initiative (SAVI) and developed vaccines to SARS and a bovine vaccine to E. coli O157:H7. His current research interests focus on pathogenic E. coli and Salmonella pathogenicity, and the role of the microbiota in infections, asthma, and malnutrition. He is currently the UBC Peter Wall Distinguished Professor and a Professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories, Microbiology and Immunology, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Co-director and Senior Fellow for the CIFAR Humans and Microbes program. He is also co-author of the book Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World and The Whole-Body Microbiome: How to Harness Microbes - Inside and Out - For Lifelong Health. Finlay is the author of over 500 publications in peer-reviewed journals and served as editor of several professional publications for many years.
Bruno D. Zumbo is a Canadian mathematical scientist trained in the tradition of research that combines pure and applied mathematics with statistical and algorithmic techniques to develop theory and solve problems arising in measurement, testing, and surveys in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. He is currently Professor and Distinguished University Scholar, the Canada Research Chair in Psychometrics and Measurement, and the Paragon UBC Professor of Psychometrics & Measurement at University of British Columbia.
Sally Nora Aitken is a Canadian environmentalist and academic. She has worked with government and industry to use knowledge from forest genetics research to forest management, tree breeding, and genetic conservation.
Margery Fee is a professor emeritus of English at the University of British Columbia (UBC). From 2015 to 2017, Fee was the Brenda and David McLean Chair In Canadian Studies at UBC. She publishes in the fields of Canadian, postcolonial and Indigenous studies and Canadian English usage and lexicography.
Matilde Bombardini is an Italian economist, who is a professor of Economics of International Trade at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. She is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the Institutions, Organisations & Growth Program since June 2007 and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) for the Political Economy Program since April 2009.
Gina Suzanne Ogilvie is a Canadian global and public health physician. She is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Global Control of HPV related diseases and prevention, and Professor at the University of British Columbia in their School of Population and Public Health.
Patricia M. Schulte is a Canadian zoologist who is a Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Her research considers physiology, genomics and population genetics. Schulte is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the former President of the Canadian Society of Zoologists.
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