This year 13 new faculty joined the ranks of UBC's more than 1,800 full-time faculty. Here are some of the latest appointments.
Asst. Prof. Leonora Angeles is now involved in a unique program based at the Centre for Human Settlements aimed at building the capacity of Vietnamese universities to help people reduce poverty in their communities.
With $4.9-million in funding from the Canadian International Development Agency, the project team will focus on community involvement in planning, and on the participation of women in policy assessment and project design.
As a program developer and gender specialist, she is working closely with Vietnamese educators as part of the project's focus on participatory planning methods and the participation of women.
A member of the School of Community and Regional Planning in the Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Women's Studies Program in the Faculty of Arts, Angeles' research interests include gender and feminist perspectives on international development planning, globalization, politics of women's movements, development strategies, and elites in Southeast Asian states.
Angeles, who is originally from the Philippines, completed her PhD at Queen's University. She has taught at the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Regina as well as the University of the Philippines.
Janice Graham
Anthropology and Sociology
Medical anthropologist Janice Graham's research focuses on elderly people who have frailty and cognitive impairments, particularly those who exhibit characteristics which set them apart from people considered to be aging successfully.
Her studies in the diagnosis of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia, has led her to identify patterns of symptoms, signs and behaviors in people to distinguish among these very different diseases.
This has important implications for the diagnosis and treatment of elderly patients, whose treatment for a single illness may not take into account the range and changing nature of their multiple illnesses.
"My research moves away from traditional attempts to promote standardized sets of categories or criteria for the diagnosis of dementia which ignore practical clinical and human experience," she says.
An associate professor in the Dept. of Anthropology and Sociology, she is holder of the Burwell Chair in Medical Anthropology.
Together with researchers at Dalhousie University, Graham is a principal investigator in a $1.3-million, multi-centre study of Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers in the Maritimes. The study is tracking events the subjects themselves have identified as being meaningful in their everyday lives as they undergo treatment for disease.
Researchers hope this study will help to unravel the meaningful events associated with Alzheimer's disease, while the methodological techniques used may have wide-ranging possibilities for other areas of therapy and clinical research.
Stephen Ward
Sing Tao School of Journalism
A former Canadian Press (CP) Vancouver bureau chief with 15 years of journalism experience, Stephen Ward joined the university as the first full-time teaching appointment with UBC's new Sing Tao School of Journalism.
Ward also taught philosophy at the University of Moncton, the University of Waterloo, and St. Thomas University.
Before becoming Vancouver bureau chief, Ward spent five years as CP's sole staff reporter in Europe. He covered the Gulf War and the Iraqi bombing of Kurds in southern Turkey and northern Iraq and followed Canadian peacekeepers into the former Yugoslavia, including Lt.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie's mission into Bosnia to reopen the Sarajevo airport.
Ward was based in Newfoundland during the period that saw Clyde Wells oppose the Meech Lake Accord, the cod fishery decline and the inquiry into the Mount Cashel orphanage.
He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Waterloo.
Earlier this year, he spent four months as a research fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, part of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His research there was on a new concept of objectivity for the journalism of the future.