Knowledge Exchange Strategic Advisory Committee

The committee provided advice and support to inform the 2019-2022 Knowledge Exchange Strategy at UBC. The members were chosen based on their expertise in a variety of relevant areas. 

Marcelo Bravo
Specialist, Knowledge Mobilization and Research Capacity Building

Marcelo Bravo

Marcelo is the Specialist, Knowledge Mobilization and Research Capacity Building at Northern Center. Marcelo will provide support to define and implement approaches that support the sharing and use of evidence as well as collaborating to build processes and standards for the effective management and communication of research ethics and organizational research approaches. Marcelo is coming to Northern Health from UBC, where he supported the creation of the UBC Policy Studio, an interdisciplinary initiative focused on finding innovative solutions to complex, systemic and resilient problems, and facilitated the development of the UBC Knowledge Exchange Unit. Marcelo has ample expertise in knowledge mobilization and knowledge translation approaches, methods, and research capacity development. He is a member of the Research Impact Network, a pan-Canadian network committed to developing institutional capacities to support the impact of research by developing best practices, services, and tools. Marcelo also has experience working with Vancouver Coastal Health – Office of the Chief Medical Health Officer while supporting interdisciplinary teams to embrace methodological innovations benefiting population health work. His expertise includes working in urban and rural contexts, including projects with First Nations and Indigenous communities in Canada and in Mexico.

Mary Chapman
Public Humanities Hub Academic Director, Department of English Language and Literatures, Faculty of Arts

Mary Chapman

Mary Chapman (B.A. Queen’s, M.A. Queen’s, Ph.D. Cornell) is Professor of English and Academic Director of the Public Humanities Hub at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. Her Making Noise, Making News: US Suffrage Print Culture in Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014) was winner of the 2015 SSAWW Book Prize and the 2015 CAAS-Robert K. Martin Book Prize and a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Her edited collection Becoming “Sui Sin Far”: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016) was awarded the Chinese Canadian Historical Society’s Ed Wickberg Prize. Before completing her Ph.D., Chapman researched the Gemini-winning documentary television series The Struggle for Democracy, founded Fiddlehead Theatre Company, and edited textbooks for Nelson Canada.

Matthew Evenden
Associate Vice-President, Research & Innovation

Matthew Evenden

Matthew is a professor in UBC’s Department of Geography and is a highly respected and influential scholar in the area of environmental history. In his almost 20 years at UBC, Matthew has contributed to numerous university-wide committees and initiatives, and since 2015 has served as the Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Arts.

Heather Frost
Director, Support Programs to Advance Research Capacity

Heather Frost

Bio coming soon.

Heather Gainforth
Assistant Professor, School of Health and Exercise Sciences, UBCO

Dr. Gainforth’s academic training in Health Promotion, Knowledge Translation, and Kinesiology has fostered her belief that evidence-based health promotion interventions and guidelines must be widely disseminated both in general and special populations. Her research aims to close the gap between health behaviour change research and practice by advancing the science and practice of integrated knowledge translation. Her emerging research program aims to identify, develop, and implement novel strategies for disseminating evidence-based health information and interventions to populations. Her systems-based research is grounded in behaviour change theory and techniques and is guided by strong collaborations between researchers and communities. Dr. Gainforth was motivated to take part in the Knowledge Exchange Advisory Committee because the goals of the committee closely align with her research program’s goals of advancing the science and practice of knowledge translation.

Aleteia Greenwood
Associate University Librarian, Research Services, UBC Library

Aleteia Greenwood is Associate University Librarian, Research and Scholarship. In this role she has high level oversight for Asian, Koerner, Woodward and Xwi7xwa Libraries and the Research Commons. Previous to this position she has had a variety of roles at UBC: Head Librarian, Woodward Library; Head Librarian, Science & Engineering Library (now merged with Woodward); Science and Engineering Reference and Instruction Librarian; Student Librarian, and Public Services Library Assistant. She was also the Assistant Librarian at the Baltimore Museum of Art Library at the beginning of her career. All of these positions inform her knowledge and care in her leadership. She devotes her off-work hours to creating paintings and masks, as well as print-making.

Susan Grossman
Director, Centre for Community Engaged Learning

Susan Grossman

Susan provides leadership to support excellence in educational consulting and community engagement. She ensures that CCEL holds the requisite expertise to enable collaborations between UBC and community partners directed at resolving complex, community-based challenges. Working in partnership with senior administrators - Deans, Associate Deans, and Department Heads - Susan identifies how to leverage resources and assets at CCEL and the University to create, implement, and evaluate sustainable programs that engage students in deep partnership with community members and organizations.

Femke Hoekstra

Femke Hoekstra

Dr. Femke Hoekstra is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO). She completed her PhD at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. Her PhD research focused on the nationwide implementation of a physical activity promotion program in Dutch rehabilitation care. In 2017, she started her postdoctoral research with Dr. Heather Gainforth and Prof. Dr. Kathleen Martin Ginis at the UBCO, in which she focused on understanding and improving knowledge translation processes by studying the process of engaging community members into the (spinal cord injury) research process.

Dr. Hoekstra's research interest focuses on improving health for persons with physical disabilities through the development, evaluation and implementation of behavioural interventions and trials in real-world settings using an integrated knowledge translation (IKT) approach. She is awarded with a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Fellowship (2020) and with Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Trainee Award (2020).

Merrilee Hughes
Research Grants & Knowledge Translation Manager, School of Nursing

Merrilee Hughes

Merrilee Hughes is the UBC School of Nursing’s Research Grants & KT Manager. She works closely with the school’s faculty and graduate students to review knowledge exchange strategies, identify funding opportunities, and support grant development. In 2011, UBC’s Leave for Change program selected Merrilee to serve as an international grant development advisor in Kathmandu, Nepal. In 2014, UBC’s Men’s Depression & Suicide Network seconded her to manage its programming, with a focus on knowledge translation. Merrilee was a recipient of the 2019 UBC School of Nursing Centenary Medal of Distinction. Along with past experience in academic publishing and journalism, Merrilee has conducted research on how pharmaceuticals are communicated in the media and the quality of online nutrition reporting.

Kathleen Leahy
Director of the UBC Learning Exchange

Kathleen Leahy

Kathleen plays a broker, convener, translation and community organizer role at the UBC Learning Exchange, directly engaging community leaders and organizations in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, while leading a team of professional and student staff who engage residents and community partners. The UBC Learning Exchange is an off campus, multifaceted hub and shared space for learning. With a background in community development and non-traditional education in both professional and volunteer capacities, Kathleen works alongside groups of people who have been historically marginalized. Her efforts focus on practical ways to bring different people together to ensure social inclusion, social justice and systems change. Working across boundaries in community-based settings informs her community-university engagement work at UBC.  

Karon Maclean
Professor, Department of Computer Science
Special Advisor, Knowledge Mobilization, Faculty of Science

Karon Maclean

Karon MacLean is Professor in Computer Science at UBC, with degrees in Biology and Mechanical Engineering (BSc, Stanford; M.Sc. / Ph.D, MIT). Her research is in the design of haptic (touch) interactions: cognitive, sensory and affective design for people interacting with the computation we touch, emote and move with and learn from, from robots to touchscreens and the situated environment. Currently, her primary foci are physically therapeutic human-robot interactions; developing new classes of “nomadic” force feedback devices and interactions; and community-wide, orchestrating the development of a much-needed haptic design ecosystem supported by tools and guidelines.

At UBC since 2000, she leads UBC’s Designing for People (DFP) interdisciplinary research cluster and CREATE graduate training program (dfp.ubc.ca). From 2018-2021 she served as Special Advisor, Innovation and Knowledge Mobilization to UBC’s Faculty of Science, and in that role she sought ways to open up research silos within FoS and outside it, both throughout UBC and to promote engagement with community, government and other partnerships outside UBC.

Katie McCallum
Manager, Community Engagement

Katie McCallum headshot

Katie is Manager of Community Engagement in UBC’s External Relations portfolio. She leads a team of community engagement professionals to deliver programs that support and enable reciprocal engagement with local non-profits and community partners. With a background in social research, analysis and planning, Katie enjoys working with people and numbers alike to translate information and conversation into tools for decision making. Katie received a Master of Arts degree in Geography and has since been an avid learner in the fields of project evaluation, learning analytics, visual analytics and community organizing. Her fields of research experience include immigration and settlement, homelessness and housing, rural and remote community development and food security.

Heather Anne McKay
Professor, Department of Family Practice
Director, Centre for Hip Health and Mobility

Heather Anne McKay

Professor McKay’s community-engaged research program investigates health promotion and chronic disease prevention strategies to enhance health at key time points – childhood and later life. Her research evaluates the role of novel interventions on physical health, mobility and social connectedness. Professor McKay leads an interdisciplinary team who, with community partners, evaluate factors that promote adaptation, implementation and scale-up of effective health promoting programs to improve health on a population level. She received a KT Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and a BC Woman of Distinction Award. She is a Fellow, Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

The Knowledge Exchange Advisory Committee epitomizes how best to communicate the importance and impact of academic research to different stakeholder groups. My passion to build large, interdisciplinary teams and connect with community and government partners to move research findings into action, positions me well to support Kx goals.

Kate McLeod
PhD candidate, School of Population and Public Health

Kate McLeod

Kate’s thesis research is looking at the transfer of responsibility for health care services in BC’s provincial correctional facilities to the Provincial Health Services Authority with her supervisors Dr. Jane Buxton and Dr. Ruth Elwood Martin. She is interested in how governance models and policy impact healthcare and health outcomes for people who experience incarceration, including continuity of care with community services, quality of healthcare, and opportunities to address health inequities.

Kate is also interested in participatory and collaborative approaches to research in prison health. At the Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education, she is the evaluator for a 5-year project working with men who are federally incarcerated in BC to develop participatory approaches to preventing sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections in prisons. She is a 2019-2020 CIHR Health Systems Impact Fellow with the BC Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions, Overdose Emergency Response Centre and a UBC Public Scholar.

Madjid Mohseni
Professor, Chemical and Biological Engineering

Madjid Mohseni

Research in my laboratory focuses on water quality and the application of advanced water treatment processes to improve the quality of drinking water. In particular, I work on the development, evaluation, and implementation of advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), particularly UV-based AOPs, ion exchange, and electrochemical processes. Our research involves laboratory scale development and investigation, as well as pilot scale and field evaluation of the technologies under real operating conditions at several partner community sites. We aim to not only advance the science behind the water treatment technologies, but also offer communities and industries more efficient and cost-effective technologies to reduce pollution and protect human health and the environment. 

Moura Quayle
Professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs

Moura Quayle

Moura is a professor in the UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.  She was the founding Director pro tem of the School that houses the Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Previously she was the Director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues (2014-2017) and a Professor at the UBC Sauder School of Business (2009-2014) Moura’s interests lie in rethinking, refining and rebuilding collaborative spaces at the intersections of academia, government, business and civil society.  Her teaching and research focus was originally the Sauder d.studio and now is the Policy Studio at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. The Policy Studio is a university-wide endeavor that focuses on finding innovative solutions to complex, systemic, or resilient problems through the use of the strategic design method. It integrates disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise from across UBC faculties and departments.  The Policy Studio’s recent work has included collaborating with:  the Solutions Lab Community of Practice at the City of Vancouver (funded by a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant); the Healthy Policy Program with Vancouver Coastal Health; and, the Vice-President Research and Innovation at UBC, supporting the creation of the UBC Knowledge Exchange. Moura has been Deputy Minister of the B.C.  Ministry of Advanced Education (2005-2009), B.C. Commissioner of Pacific Coast Collaborative, Dean of UBC’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems (1997-2005), and Associate VP, Academic Programs at UBC Okanagan.  Moura received an honorary doctorate from the University of Guelph in 2004 and the Distinguished Alumna Award from the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley in 2009. Her book, Designed Leadership, was published by Columbia University Press in July 2017, paperback version July 2019.

Joanie Sims-Gould
Assistant Professor, Department of Family Practice, Centre for Hip Health and Mobility

Joanie Sims-Gould

Dr. Joanie Sims-Gould is involved in knowledge translation and exchange across a number of projects at the Centre for Hip Health and Mobility primarily with older adults, their families, the health professionals who work with them and local, provincial and national stakeholders. Her research interests include: the delivery of home health services to elderly clients (home care), the intersection of family care and health care, aging in place and the role of the built environment, aging in a long term care environment, knowledge translation and exchange and qualitative research methodologies.

Michelle Stack
Associate Professor, Department of Educational Studies

Michelle Stack

Michelle Stack is the author of Global University Ranking and the Mediatization of Higher Education, and editor of a second upcoming book on university rankings and journal impact factors. Michelle has led several courses and workshops focused on building the capacity of scholars and scholar-practitioners to expand public conversations and policy debates through media.  She has also led community-engaged research using photovoice and video. Michelle is an associate professor in Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, winner of the 2017 Killam Award for Teaching, a public commentator on education and a former senior policy advisor.  Her central research interest concerns how people, knowledge and institutions are categorized and the influence of these categorizations on our ability to grapple with “wicked problems” including inequity and climate change.

Bryce Traister
Dean, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, UBCO

Bryce Traister

Bryce Traister studies and teaches courses in early American literature and culture. He holds a BA and PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and taught for 20 years at Western University in London, Ontario, before joining the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies in 2017 He is the author, most recently, of Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism, published by Ohio State University Press, and is the editor of American Literature and the New Puritan Studies, (September 2017). His current work includes a second edited collection for Cambridge, The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature.

Serbulent Turan
Coordinator, Public Scholars Initiative, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies

Serbulent Turan

Dr. Serbulent Turan is a Political Scientist and the Public Scholarship Coordinator at the University of British Columbia. His research centres around the question of obedience to political authorities, protests, social uprisings and revolutions. As the coordinator for UBC’s Public Scholars Initiative and the Killam Connection Program, Dr. Turan has a strong interest in and supports all projects designed to make university knowledge understandable to all stakeholders and, as important, actionable at various levels from communities to governments. 

Kelsi Wall
Government Relations Officer, Communications

Alexi White

Alexi White is a senior advisor for government relations at UBC. A graduate of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Alexi recently moved to BC from Ontario where he held a series of increasingly senior positions in the provincial government, culminating in the role of Director of Policy to the Minister of Education. His experience in government and higher education has made him a strong advocate for the need to build and strengthen partnerships between academia and policy makers.

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We acknowledge that the UBC Point Grey and Robson Square campuses are situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil- Waututh) Nations.

About us

The UBC Knowledge Exchange Unit builds capacity among researchers, students and staff across disciplines to develop and share impactful knowledge through connections and exchange with communities, government, not-for-profit organizations and the general public.

We are a part of Innovation UBC in the Vice-President, Research and Innovation (VPRI) portfolio

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