ARS SCIENTIA - Key Persons
Alannah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia. She heads the Quantum Materials Design Lab, which is part of the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute. Before coming to UBC, Alannah completed her PhD in physics as a Vanier Scholar at McMaster University and was the Smalley Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University. Having worked in both physics and chemistry departments, Alannah is passionate about taking an interdisciplinary approach to the study of quantum materials. When she's not growing crystals or at the beam line, Alannah loves cooking (and eating!), playing bridge, and learning to sail in the waters around beautiful British Columbia.
Job Titles:
- Department of Physics & Astronomy / Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute
- Professor
Andrea Damascelli is a Full Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in the Electronic Structure of Quantum Materials. He currently serves as Scientific Director of the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (Blusson QMI) at UBC and Co-Director of the Max Planck-UBC-UTokyo Centre for Quantum Materials.
Andrea works in one of the most advanced areas of condensed matter physics: quantum materials. His work has gained global recognition and helped make Canada a leader in the field of photoelectron spectroscopy - a highly sophisticated technique that images the energy and velocity of electrons propagating inside a material.
As a physicist, he has always been passionate about the arts and humanities, and has long looked for creative ways to bring the disciplines together. Ars Scientia is an important step towards this vision. As an adventurous and curious scientist, when he's not in the lab looking at how electrons move or walking around the beautiful UBC campus with his dog Hunter by his side, you will find him sailing and exploring the Pacific Ocean… or perhaps cooking an Italian feast at his home in Vancouver.
Job Titles:
- Communications Manager at the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute
- Staff
Emily is the Communications Manager at the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, as well as a writer and cookbook author. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from UBC, and has managed research institute communications in the life and natural sciences for nearly ten years.
Job Titles:
- Research Associate With the Quantum Matter Institute
- Staff Scientist / Department of Physics & Astronomy / Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute
James Day is an experimental physicist and research associate with the Quantum Matter Institute. He completed his PhD from the University of Alberta in 2008, and spent his time there exploring the fundamental properties of quantum solid helium-4. He has been at UBC, in various capacities, ever since.
His expertise is in low temperature physics, scanning tunneling microscopy, microwave spectroscopy, and physics education. Roughly speaking, he studies how electrons behave in exotic materials, and how students behave in first-year physics labs.
He loves science outreach, cares deeply about equitable learning, and is continually attempts to do better. He strives to actively contribute to his profession, and loves collaborating with others and sharing his insights. He tries to spend his time meaningfully and efficiently, and is committed to life-long learning and adaptability. He sees new challenges as opportunities for growth. He is so excited to be a part of the Ars Scientia team.
Job Titles:
- Department of Physics & Astronomy
- Professor
- Professor at the University of British Columbia
Jeremy is a professor at the University of British Columbia. His recent research has focused on compact objects: white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. These are the most extreme objects in the universe. Astrophysicists think that they provide the power behind quasars and gamma-ray bursts, the brightest objects in the recent universe.
His team discovered that stars like the Sun lose much of their mass in the final million years of nuclear burning, not gradually over a billion years as previously thought. He discovered waves in the oceans of neutron stars (yes, neutron stars have oceans) and the fate of our Galaxy after it collides with the Andromeda galaxy). Hint: there will be no Milky Way after that happens!
Lee is a first-generation immigrant whose work is largely informed by a lifetime of movement across Canada and the United States. Lee's interdisciplinary practice explores the psychic violence of cultural assimilation and nationalism. Her performances, installations, and sculptures shift between an intersectional analysis of this violence at the scale of a nation (where nuclear tests, land-seizures, and xenophobia exacerbate one another) and of the home (where the burdens of identity and generational trauma can be foundational and inescapable). Lee holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in science and fine arts. She has exhibited throughout Canada and the United States, as well as performed at documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. Recently, Lee was awarded the Oscar Kolin Fellowship, the Vera G. List Sculpture Award, and a Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Award at the BANFF Centre for Arts and Creativity. Lee currently resides within the stolen territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Chambers is a dance artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances "that are already there"-the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her choreographic projects have been presented at Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Helen and Morris Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), Sophiensaele (Berlin), Nanaimo Art Gallery, Artspeak (Vancouver), Hong Kong Arts Festival, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, Agora de la Danse (Montréal), Festival of New Dance (St. John's), Mile Zero Dance Society (Edmonton), Dancing on the Edge (Vancouver), Canada Dance Festival (Ottawa), Dance in Vancouver, The Western Front, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. She is Max Tyler-Hite's mother.
Lycan is a photo-based installation artist who resides in Vancouver, BC, Canada on the traditional and unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səl'ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. Lycan's work investigates the way objects and images are placed and displayed in the world and the cycle of value they experience. She employs photography and sculpture in order to engage them beyond medium specificity. Lycan received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited across Canada, the US, Europe, and the Middle East, including solo exhibitions at Ag Galerie, Tehran, Iran (2018); Burrard Art Foundation, Vancouver (2016); Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto (2015-16); Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2014); SFU Gallery, Burnaby (2014); Or Gallery, Vancouver (2011); and Gallery TPW, Toronto (2009). Lycan also collaborated from 2005-2015 with the artist collective Instant Coffee, a service-oriented artist collective that have exhibited widely.
Lee was born in Seoul, Korea. He studied architecture at Hong-Ik University, before immigrating to Canada to study fine art at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He works in performance, media, sculpture and drawing. His practice involves experimentation with form and process in order to express inherent relationships between material and immaterial content. He is a founding member of the Vancouver-based artist collective ‘Intermission' and is presently a member of ‘Instant Coffee' artist collective. His work has been exhibited nationally, and internationally. Lee lives and works in Vancouver BC.
Job Titles:
- Department of Physics & Astronomy
Luke Reynolds studies how brains relax. He is working through his third year as a PhD student in physics at the University of British Columbia though originally from central Illinois in the US and studying physics in Colorado and southern New Zealand in between. The fundamentals of relaxation in brain MRI, the phenomenon that creates image contrast, lack a precise description which would allow for better research and diagnosis prospects in future hospitals. Luke works to study the finer points of the molecular physics inside the brain leading to the relaxation forming many MRI images. This work places him in a lab running experiments with an NMR spectrometer, a higher resolution MRI machine, on samples that are similar to the brain (like hair conditioner). When not in the lab, he fills his time with music, growing plants, and playing outside.
Job Titles:
- Department of Physics & Astronomy / University of British Columbia
Sarah Morris is a 4th-year PhD student who came to the University of British Columbia after completing her undergraduate and Masters in Physics at the University of Cambridge. After trying a variety of research internships, she found the field of MRI Physics and was drawn to the versatility of the technology, the vibrancy of the research field and the important real-world applications. Sarah holds an NSERC CGS D scholarship for her PhD and is working on developing advanced MRI scans which can be used to measure microstructural changes in the brain and spinal cord. One focus of her research is applying these techniques to track tissue damage after spinal cord injury, with the hope of establishing metrics to use in clinical trials. She is very interested in science communication and public engagement, most recently coming 3rd in the UBC 3 minute thesis competition. Outside of research, Sarah has been taking Ballet classes since she was a child. She also loves skiing, hiking and reading on the beach.
Job Titles:
- Curator, Academic Programs
Shelly Rosenblum is Curator of Academic Programs at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (the Belkin). Inaugurating this position at the Belkin, Rosenblum's role is to develop programs that increase myriad forms of civic and academic engagement at UBC, the wider Vancouver community and beyond. Rosenblum received her PhD at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her awards include fellowships from the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University and a multi-year Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of English, UBC. She was selected for the Summer Leadership Institute of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (2014). Her research interests include issues in contemporary art and museum theory, discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative and performativity. Her teaching covers the 17th to the 21st centuries. She remains active in professional associations related to academic museums and cultural studies, attending international conferences and workshops, and recently completing two terms (six years) on the Board of Directors at the Western Front, Vancouver, including serving as Board President. At UBC, Rosenblum is an Affiliate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.