Latest NSERC, SSHRC, NFRF results include 38 successful UBCO projects
Researchers across UBC Okanagan will benefit from the latest funding announcement from the federal government, investigating everything from nanoscale insights into tectonics to a unique 13th-century Spanish text.
UBC’s Okanagan campus has received a significant investment from the federal government, with more than $9 million in research funding announced today across 38 research projects.
The grants, awarded through Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), will fund cutting-edge research at UBCO, including investigations into food bank resilience, emerging fuels and digital literacy for older adults.
One highlight of these projects is a successful SSHRC Partnership Grant for more than $2.1 million led by Dr. Francisco Peña, Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, which involves an international team of researchers looking to translate, digitize and annotate the General estoria for a lay audience. This unique 13th century text, written in Spanish, was an effort to record the entire history of man, from the origins of the world as narrated in the Bible up to the time the work was commissioned.
The research funding was part of a larger announcement by the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions. She announced $1.3 billion in research funding for Canadian universities through various programs from federal granting agencies.
OKANAGAN PROJECTS
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
SSHRC 2024 Partnership Grants
Partnership Grants are intended for large teams of postsecondary institutions and/or organizations of various types that work in formal collaboration.
Peña, Francisco (Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies)
The Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography: A Digital Edition of the General e Grand Estoria (DEGE)
SSHRC 2024 Partnership Development Grants
SSHRC Partnership Development Grants (PDG) provide support to new or existing partnerships for initiatives that advance research, provide research training, and/or knowledge mobilization in the social sciences and humanities.
Rush, Kathy (Faculty of Health and Social Development)
A Public-Private Digital Literacy Program Partnership To Advance Support for Older Adults’ Digital Literacy Learning Journey
SSHRC 2024 Insight Grants
SSHRC’s Insight Grants support scholars in the social sciences and humanities to address complex issues pertaining to individuals and societies and to further our collective understanding.
Aguiar, Luis (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Ethnic Media in Canada at a Crossroads: Challenges, Opportunities and Contributions to Canadian Society
Carlyle, Margaret (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Delivering the Enlightenment in the French Atlantic World
Sloan Morgan, Onyx (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Tracing the Settler Colonial Legacies of Insurance: From Empire to Wildfires in British Columbia, Canada
Smith, Megan (Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies)
Truth Machine: Authenticity & Immersive Computational Art in the time of Artificial Intelligence
Walsh, Zachary (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Locating the new normal: Nonclincal psychedelic use in context
Ward, Shannon (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Language Revitalization in Transnational Perspective: Tibetan-Canadian Children’s Experiences of Heritage Language Education in an International Boarding School
Wilson, Shawn (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Continuing the Ceremony of Research: New Directions in Indigenous Methodologies
SSHRC 2025 Insight Development Grants
Insight Development Grants support research in its initial stages. The grants enable the development of new research questions, as well as experimentation with new methods, theoretical approaches and/or ideas.
Asano, Miho (Faculty of Health and Social Development)
What It Means to Live Alone and Die Well – Elder Orphans
Craig, Andrea (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Measuring Conflict and Estimating the Impacts on Immigrant Outcomes
Girvan, Anita (Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies)
Gule Wamkulu: Chewa governance systems for Transnational well-being in and Beyond African and Afro-descended Communities
Hasan, Mohammad (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science)
Design, Co-Creation, and Evaluation of a Usability Scale for VR Applications by and for Older Adults
Héroux-Legault, Maxime (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Understanding and Improving Attitudes toward Immigrants in Canada
Mohamadpour Tosarkani, Babak (School of Engineering)
Building Resilient Food Banks: A Community-Centered Framework for Emergency Preparedness
Robinson, Pamela (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Ethics from the ‘inside’
Shen, Qingyang (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Effect of tenement regulation on property values and development timelines
New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF)
2024 Exploration competition
The objective of the Exploration stream is to support high-risk, high-reward and interdisciplinary research. It seeks to inspire projects that bring disciplines together beyond traditional disciplinary or common interdisciplinary approaches by research teams with the capacity to explore something new that might fail, but that has the potential for significant impact.
Hoekstra, Femke (Faculty of Medicine)
Implementing Drone Technology in Rural Indigenous Healthcare Systems: The Drone Transport Initiative
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
2024 DISCOVERY GRANTS
The NSERC Discovery Grants program supports ongoing programs of research with long-term goals rather than a single short-term project or collection of projects. These grants recognize the creativity and innovation that are at the heart of all research advances.
Discovery Launch Supplements provide timely resources to support early career researchers (ECRs) as they establish a Discovery Grant-funded research program. Projects marked with * below were awarded additional Discovery Launch Supplements of $12,500
Andrews, Jeffrey (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science)
Unsupervised statistical learning: spatial models and error estimation
Bauschke, Heinz (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science)
Modern Splitting Algorithms: static properties, asymptotic behaviour, extensions and applications
Dubosq, Renelle (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science)
Nanoscale insights into tectonic phenomena: Exploring mineral structure-property relationship in Earth sciences*
Foster, Glen (Faculty of Health and Social Development)
Human neurocirculatory control during physiological stress
Frattolin, Jennifer (School of Engineering)
Unravelling the interplay of arterial biomechanics and chemokine transport*
Godin, Robert (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science)
Spectroscopic investigations of charge flow in photocatalytic carbon nitride systems
Irani, Pourang (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science)
Beyond Performance: Exploring End-User Comfort for In-Situ User Interfaces
Kheirkhah, Sina (School of Engineering)
Emerging fuels’ combustion for future power-generation and aviation gas turbines
Li, Ri (School of Engineering)
Super-biphilic Surface-enhanced Boiling Heat Transfer of Dielectric Fluids for Near-source/junction Microchip Cooling
Murch, Susan (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science)
Chemistry of Non-Protein Amino Acids
Nicoladis, Elena (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)
Do gestures relieve the cognitive load of weak proficiency in bilinguals?
Purcell, Sarah (Faculty of Medicine)
Defining the role of endogenous and exogenous ovarian sex hormones on energy balance regulation*
Russello, Michael (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science)
The genomic basis of adaptation to changing environments with applications to wildlife conservation
Sediako, Dimitry (School of Engineering)
The Development of Sustainable Metallic and Composite Materials for Next Generation High-Efficiency Automotive Powertrains
Thompson, John (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science)
Mixed-type and time series clustering with change-points*
Zarifi, Mohammad Hossein (School of Engineering)
Sustainable, Eco-Friendly RF/Microwave Systems for Edge Intelligence for 6G and Beyond
RESEARCH TOOLS AND INSTRUMENTS
The NSERC Research Tools and Instruments grants foster and enhance the discovery, innovation and training capability of university researchers in the natural sciences and engineering by supporting the purchase of research equipment.
Arjmand, Mohammad (School of Engineering)
Rheometer | Dynamic Mechanical Analyzer for Rheological and Structural Characterization of Polymer Composites
Co-applicants: Sadeghzadeh Milani, Abbas;
Li, Isaac (Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science)
Urgent replacement of motorized microscope stage for super-resolution molecular force imaging
Li, Ri (School of Engineering)
High-performance Thermal Infrared System for the Research of Near-source/junction Microchip Cooling
Siddiqua, Sumi (School of Engineering)
Gas Chromatography for development of novel CO2 adsorbents