Leading Scholars 2015-2016

  • Robinder Bedi
    Robinder Bedi, Assistant Professor in the Department of Counselling Psychology and Special Education
    Phone: 604-822-4185 / email: robinder.bedi@ubc.ca
    Website

    Robinder is currently working on research examining the factors that make it more likely that a man will drop out of counselling or psychotherapy, the differences between men who visit a counsellor versus those who do not, and the dynamics of male mental health help-seeking. He sees there is a clear need for continued research on how best to provide mental health services to Canadian boys and men based upon samples of male clients.


  • Katherine Bowers
    Katherine Bowers, Assistant Professor in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies
    email: katherine.bowers@ubc.ca
    Website

    Katherine's research examines the way that writers build up palpable fear in their narratives, using the example of nineteenth‐century Russian novelists who borrowed devices from British and French gothic fiction. These Russian writers – a group that includes such well‐known figures as Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov – are known for their contributions to literary realism, a style of writing that purports to represent life with verisimilitude, to impress upon its readers a sense of realness.


  • Catherine Corrigall-Brown
    Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology
    email: corrigall.brown@ubc.ca
    Website

    The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) are two prominent organizations concerned with environmental degradation. However, while ELF blows up SUVs and burns down homes, the RSPB conducts research and manages nature reserves. Why do these two social movement organizations (SMOs), concerned with the same issues, come to embrace such radically different tactics for social change? Catherine's current research examines this question, showing that an organization's ideology and structure, in combination with government response to the group, shapes the tactics that organizations choose.


  • Michael Daniels
    Michael Daniels, Assistant Professor in the Sauder School of Business
    Phone: 604-827-5825 / email: michael.daniels@sauder.ubc.ca
    Website

    Michael's research has focused on the role of shame in corporate organizations. He has explored how abusive supervisors affect employee performance outcomes via the experience of shame. Targets of abuse who had high power distance values were the most adversely affected, likely because they cope with supervisory shaming in more maladaptive ways. His current research focuses is on the act of social shaming in organizations.


  • Matthew McCarty
    Matthew McCarty, Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical, Near-Eastern, and Religious Studies
    email: matthew.mccarty@ubc.ca
    Website

    Matthew's current research and its related monograph, The Materiality of Religion in the Roman World, focuses on the intersections between archaeological remains, art/architecture, politics, and religious knowledge. At the heart of the project sit two related questions, one methodological, the other historical. First, how can material evidence be used to understand ancient religion? And second, how did the creation of the Roman Empire change other, potentially very different systems in the Mediterranean and beyond to develop as a kind of "globalized" religion in the empire?


  • David Morton
    David Morton, Assistant Professor in the Department of History
    Phone: 604-822-5195 / email: navin.ramankutty@ubc.ca
    Website

    David's research is about what historically has been one of the greatest preoccupations for residents of Maputo, Mozambique: the securing of a place to live. For most, this has meant the construction of a house in the flood-prone informal areas of the city, known as the subúrbios, and the alteration and maintenance of that house over successive generations. To consider where people have lived is to explore how they have lived, what they have cared about, and what they have worked for, and so ultimately this project is about how housing has long embodied not just the "making do" of urban living – the emphasis of much of the scholarship on African cities –but also some of people's most keenly felt aspirations.


  • Rajat Panwar
    Rajat Panwar, Assistant Professor in Sustainable Business Management and the Departments of Wood Science and Forest Resources Management, Faculty of Forestry
    Phone: 604-827-0644 / email: rajat.panwar@ubc.ca
    Website

    An overarching objective of Rajat's research is to develop ways in which businesses could become meaningful, engaged, and trusted partners in sustainability. Particularly, he is interested in exploring and developing strategies how businesses can be helpful in saving the world's forests. At a first glance, this line of research would seem rather paradoxical to most people because businesses are often seen as predators to our natural environment in general, and forests in particular. He aims to get a better grip on why businesses do what they do; what environmental demands and expectations are put on them; how they perceive and respond to these expectations; and more importantly, how 'win-win' outcomes can be achieved.


  • Eve Poudrier
    Eve Poudrier, Assistant Professor in the School of Music
    Phone: 604-822-9193 / email: eve.poudrier@ubc.ca
    Website

    Eve's research project consists of a cross-cultural study of temporal multiplicity in music as instantiated by polyrhythms. The focus is upon how the human mind deals with complex rhythms and how these rhythms come to be embodied. In particular, there has been very little research that has focused on how the psychophysical mechanisms that support rhythmic action, perception and cognition both influence and are shaped by specific musical practices and the aesthetic experiences they afford.


  • Alex Rauscher
    Alex Rauscher, Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics
    email: rauscher@physics.ubc.ca
    Website

    Alex's research team develops new MRI scans that measure brain tissue damage and explore how new treatments protect or even repair the brain. Disability in preterm babies is almost exclusively due to damage to the very vulnerable developing brain. With objective MRI markers his team will be able to see treatment effects within weeks rather than months or years. The new imaging markers may lead to a dramatic acceleration of the search for effective interventions.


  • Lindsey Richardson
    Lindsey Richardson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology
    Phone: 604-827-5511 / email: lindsey.richardson@ubc.ca
    Website

    Lindsey's research focuses on the power of structural interventions to improve the health of vulnerable populations. She notes that socio-economic well-being, including employment, income and material security (e.g., housing and food), are intrinsically linked to health. However, among marginalized and vulnerable individuals, such as people who use drugs (PWUD), socio-economic well-being is often precarious and its relationship with health is complex, variable and contingent on context. This context consists of the physical, economic, social and policy dimensions that have profound impacts on the health of individuals and health inequality across populations.