Leadership & Community

Dr. Liisa Galea

Our place in the world

The Department of Psychology ranked tenth in the world and first in Canada in the 2018 subject rankings by Times Higher Education (THE). 2018 marked the first year THE included psychology as a stand-alone subject.

The Department also ranked first in Maclean’s 2018 rankings for the best 20 psychology programs in Canada. Maclean’s annual program rankings evaluates ten program areas—including psychology— based on reputation, research, publications, and citations.


Leadership

Dr. Michael Chandler received the 2017 APA Mentor Award for his longstanding commitment to mentoring students and early career scientists over his career.

The BC Pain Research Network was formed to expand pain research in British Columbia. Dr. Kenneth Craig, director of the network, formed this partnership between Pain BC and UBC with initial funding from UBC’s Research Excellence Clusters initiative and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Dr. Liisa Galea became the UBC Neuroscience Graduate Program Director. For Galea, who has been actively teaching and supervising in the graduate program since 1998, this position is vital in uniting scholars from different neuroscience disciplines at UBC.

Dr. Toni Schmader received a $2.5 million dollar SSHRC Partnership Grant to fund the Engendering Success in STEM consortium (ESS). The ESS is using this funding to break down the biases girls and women face in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).

Dr. Janet Werker was awarded the 2018 Killam Prize in Social Sciences, one of Canada’s most prestigious awards for academic-career achievement.

Dr. Janet Werker received the nation’s highest honour, an appointment as Officer of the Order of Canada, in recognition of her internationally renowned contributions to our understanding of speech perception and language acquisition in infants.


Community and Public Engagement

UBC psychology graduate students Kyle Gooderham and Drake Levere launched Brain Buzz, a new science podcast that is putting science out into the open.

At the 2017 Quinn Memorial Lecture, Dr. Robert Knight presented his talk Insights into Human Cognition from Direct Brain Recording.

A natural curiosity about people led Jenn Lin, an undergraduate student, to create Humans of UBC Psych, a digital storytelling project featuring people in the psychology community at UBC.

Nine international speakers were invited to UBC to deliver colloquium talks on a wide range of topics.