UBC researchers, BC-based Unilia and Harbour Air are collaborating on fuel cells of the future.

A fuel cell powerful enough to help propel an aircraft needs to be light enough to leave the ground—and durable enough to keep working in the demanding conditions of flight.

UBC Okanagan researchers and BC-based Unilia (Canada) Fuel Cells Inc. are joining forces to explore how to build the cells of the future.

“Designing fuel cells for aviation presents different challenges than building them for use on roads, rail or water,” explains Dr. Joshua Brinkerhoff, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at UBC Okanagan. “Aircraft propulsion systems need to deliver substantial power while remaining light and dependable through changing temperatures and operating conditions.

“Working with Unilia gives us an opportunity to connect fundamental research with fuel cell development and create new designs specifically tailored for aviation.”

The $10.6-million collaborative project includes a $3.7-million contribution from the Initiative for Sustainable Aviation Technology (INSAT). Supported by the Government of Canada, INSAT is administered by Strix, a non-profit organization that promotes innovation and collaborative research in the Canada’s aerospace, defence and related sectors.

Hydrogen fuel cells generate electricity without the emissions produced by combustion engines during operation. But fuel-cell stacks used in automotive and heavy-duty vehicle sectors have yet to meet the demanding weight, performance and durability requirements of commercial aircraft.

UBC researchers will model and optimize fuel cell–battery hybrid configurations, study the supporting systems needed aboard an aircraft, and test materials under conditions relevant to flight.

Unilia will pair high-performance fuel cell cores with lightweight components to build a compact, high-power stack that runs at high temperatures and low humidity.

Together, the partners aim to demonstrate the technical viability of a fuel-cell-stack prototype with enough power density to suit short- and medium-range commercial aircraft.

“Some of the most meaningful advances happen when expertise from different industries and disciplines comes together,” says Dr. Carmen Chuy, manager of the Technology Development Program at Unilia.

“We’re excited to bring our many years of experience developing fuel cells for demanding heavy-duty applications into this collaboration, while drawing on UBC’s aerospace, materials and systems expertise. That diversity of perspective will help us rethink fuel cell design around the very different requirements of aviation.”

The project also combines expertise from Dr. Előd Gyenge, a professor in the UBC Vancouver Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, who will lead research on fuel cell materials. Harbour Air Aerospace Services Ltd. will provide technical advice informed by its experience with aircraft design and electrification.

“This project reflects the strength of Canada’s aerospace innovation ecosystem, bringing together leading researchers and industry experts to advance promising hydrogen fuel cell technologies. Through INSAT’s support, we are helping accelerate the development of solutions that can enhance Canada’s competitiveness while contributing to a more sustainable future for aviation,” says Denis Godin, Chief Technology Officer and Deputy CEO of Strix.

The team will develop aviation-specific designs that improve fuel cell performance and durability. Their findings could help address technical barriers to using hydrogen fuel cells in future aircraft, notes Dr. Brinkerhoff.

“While further development and testing would be required before the technology could be used in commercial flight, this project represents a crucial step in advancing fuel cell technology for aviation,” says Dr. Brinkerhoff. “It’s very exciting. There is a huge need and potential for this technology.”

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Dr. Kathleen Martin Ginis, right, monitors research participants at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna.

Exercise prescribed according to international spinal cord injury guidelines can reduce the intensity of chronic pain when done in everyday settings, according to a new UBC Okanagan–led clinical trial. 

The study, published in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, is the first randomized controlled trial to test whether the guidelines can specifically help reduce chronic pain. Most people living with a spinal cord injury experience chronic pain, and many say it is more debilitating than the injury itself. Medications are the most common treatment, but they carry side effects and help only some people. 

“People with spinal cord injury have told us for years that they use exercise to manage their pain, but we didn’t have strong evidence on how to prescribe it,” says lead author Dr. Kathleen Martin Ginis, a professor in the School of Health and Exercise Sciences and holder of the Reichwald Family UBC Southern Medical Program Chair in Preventive Medicine.  

The trial enrolled 46 adults with spinal cord injury and chronic neuropathic or musculoskeletal pain. Half received a personalized aerobic and strength program, with support from certified fitness trainers and weekly exercise counselling. The others continued their usual activities. Participants exercised where it suited them, at home, local gyms or community centres. 

On the study’s primary measure of pain, which combines pain severity and interference, the results were inconclusive. But on a spinal cord injury–specific measure of pain intensity, the exercise group reported significant decreases at three and six months compared with the control group.  

At six months, eight of 18 exercise participants had a clinically meaningful reduction in pain intensity of 30 per cent or more, compared with two of 16 in the control group. The exercise group also reported less pain interference with daily activities and mood at three months, and greater vitality. 

Responses varied widely. Some participants saw large drops in pain, while others saw little change or an increase. Participants met the aerobic prescription more consistently than the strength prescription, and the team says aerobic exercise may be especially important. 

“This isn’t a cure-all, and we need larger trials to confirm these findings,” says Dr. Martin Ginis. “But it shows that a standardized exercise prescription can be delivered in real-world settings and may offer a drug-free option for some people.”  

The study was shaped by more than 150 people with spinal cord injury and 50 clinicians. It was also repeatedly interrupted by COVID-19 restrictions and wildfire evacuations, which limited recruitment to fewer participants than the 84 originally planned. Testing took place at the UBC campuses in Kelowna and Vancouver. 

Co-authors from UBC include Drs. Femke Hoekstra, Julia Baumgart, Jonathan Little and Kendra Todd from the UBCO School of Health and Exercise Sciences, Dr. Jennifer Davis from the UBCO Faculty of Management as well as Drs. Christopher West and John Kramer from the UBC Faculty of Medicine.  

They worked with supporting units from UBC’s Vancouver campus, including the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries and the Centre for Advancing Health Outcomes.

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Dr. Adam Yasunaga, left, and Ryan Riopel examine the microfluidic setup they used to develop Tether Force Spectroscopy, a new method for measuring the mechanical forces that drive molecular interactions.

Across every cell in the body, molecules are constantly pulling, gripping and releasing under mechanical strain. That force often decides whether a drug sticks to its target, whether a cell holds its shape or whether a disease takes hold.

The problem is that almost nobody is measuring that molecular tug-of-war, UBC Okanagan researcher Dr. Isaac Li says.

In a study published in the journal Science Advances, a team of chemists describes a new way to close that gap.

“Force is an important variable in many biological interactions, but it is not routinely measured in standard binding assays,” says Dr. Li, a chemistry researcher and the study’s senior author. “We wanted to develop a method that makes force measurements parallel and accessible.”

The method, called tether force spectroscopy, applies precisely controlled forces to hundreds of individual molecules at the same time and watches how each one responds. It’s a combination of scale, precision and affordability that existing tools have struggled to deliver together.

The researchers validated it against the field’s gold-standard instrument, then used it to measure molecules being stretched, unzipped and pulled apart at forces spanning the full range relevant to biology. They have filed a patent on the approach and are exploring how to turn it into a commercial product.

Standard lab tests can tell you if two molecules bind in a test tube, but these tests don’t account for the forces that molecules experience in our bodies.

To better understand how these molecules will behave in the dynamic environments of our cells, scientists use equipment to pull molecules apart with precisely controlled forces and measure how they respond.

While this approach is powerful, it currently comes with challenges that limit its use to a very small number of highly specialized labs. Many of these challenges come from the fact that researchers first need to attach molecules to microscopic objects like beads to grab hold of them and pull.

These beads add variability, skew results and complicate experiments, while often limiting measurements and requiring expensive equipment to control.

Tether force spectroscopy is a clever workaround which replaces those beads with a long strand of DNA tethered to a target molecule and then runs a current of fluid past it.

The DNA catches the flow like a sail, and the harder the current, the harder the sail tugs on the molecule anchored below.

By tagging both the sail and the target so they glow, researchers can watch in real time how a molecule stretches, shifts or comes apart in response to precisely controlled forces.

Two things make the approach stand out.

The first is scale. The gold-standard tools for this kind of measurement—instruments like optical tweezers—are precise but examine one molecule at a time, which makes them slow. The team’s DNA sails work in a crowd: hundreds of molecules in a single microscope image, all being tugged and watched simultaneously.

The second is access. Most force-measuring instruments are specialized, expensive and complex. Tether force spectroscopy runs on the fluorescence microscopes and simple pumps that ordinary labs already have.

“The important point is not simply that DNA can pull on a molecule,” says Ryan Riopel, a co-author and UBCO Master of Science student. “It’s that each DNA sail has a defined size and applies force through a single tether, which is what makes the readings trustworthy without exotic hardware.”

The team has filed a patent through Innovation UBC, and co-author Dr. Adam Yasunaga is developing the commercial case through the Mitacs Lab2Market program.

A Canadian-built version of the tool, the researchers note, could give the country a foothold in life sciences instrumentation, turning a university lab’s idea into equipment that other labs, and eventually companies, can purchase.

For now, the promise is broader than any single application. In drug discovery, being able to see how a candidate molecule holds up under physical strain—not just whether it binds in a calm test tube—could help researchers spot winners and losers earlier.

“The larger goal is to give researchers and companies access to force-resolved molecular interaction data,” says Dr. Yasunaga, a UBCO postdoctoral researcher. “These are currently difficult to obtain at scale.”

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Dr. Lesley Lutes is co-author of a new review in Canadian Psychology on integrating psychologists into Canadian primary care.

As Prime Minister Mark Carney prepares to host the inaugural Canada Investment Summit in Toronto this September, a new review co-led by researchers at UBC argues that the country is leaving one of its largest economic and health-care system opportunities untouched: the integration of psychological care into primary care.

Published in Canadian Psychology, the review synthesizes three decades of national and international evidence to make the case that Canada already has the workforce and the science to close one of the widest gaps in its health-care system, and that the missing piece is policy.

“One in two primary-care visits in this country now involves a mental-health concern, and family doctors themselves say they don’t have the training, the time or the team to handle that load,” says Dr. Michelle St. Pierre, a postdoctoral fellow in UBC Okanagan’s Department of Psychology and corresponding author on the review. “The model that works—integrated primary care—has been studied for decades. We just haven’t built it here at scale.”

The review also documents the cost of the status quo.

Roughly two in five Canadians with a mental-health condition say they are not getting the care they need. About 6.5 million individuals lack a family doctor, the highest rate among Canada’s peer countries.

Mental illness costs the Canadian economy an estimated $42 billion annually in treatment and support, with another $50 billion in lost productivity and absenteeism.

What the review found

Integrated primary care embeds mental-health specialists, including psychologists, directly within family-practice teams. Across studies from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, the pattern is consistent:

Wait times fall. One Canadian study documented drops of more than six weeks when a psychologist joined a primary-care team.

Patients engage. Up to 90 per cent of patients referred to co-located mental-health providers complete their treatment, outperforming traditional referrals.

Outcomes improve. Patients show measurable, lasting improvements in depression, anxiety and chronic disease management.

Physicians benefit. Doctors in fully integrated practices report lower burnout and greater professional satisfaction.

Costs come down. A Canadian economic analysis estimated that every dollar invested in publicly covered psychological services returns roughly two dollars in savings to society.

A working example in BC

Since 2023, a registered clinical psychologist has been embedded one day per week in the UBCO Student Health Clinic through the Primary Care Psychologist Program, a UBC Okanagan pilot developed by the review’s co-authors.

The psychologist works alongside the medical team to identify and treat mental-health concerns early. The program is now standard practice at the clinic, with evaluation of patient outcomes ongoing.

“What the Primary Care Psychologist Program shows is that the model is not theoretical—it’s a staffing decision waiting to be made at scale,” says co-author Dr. Lesley Lutes, Professor and Director of the Centre for Obesity and Well-Being Research Excellence.

“Our paper is not a critique of any one government. It’s an attempt to put the full evidence base on the table so the next conversation can move faster.”

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UBC Okanagan researchers analyzed nearly 500 records and found that a lack of reliable data keeps many wildfire studies on the shelf rather than in the field.

Canada’s 2023 wildfire season burned more than 18.5 million hectares, or an area larger than Greece.

As fires like these grow more frequent and unpredictable, a team of UBC Okanagan researchers has taken stock of two decades of work applying operations research to the problem and found a field that’s matured quickly but still struggles to get its best ideas out of the journals and into the field.

The review, published in Operations Research Forum, was led by undergraduate students Paria Rostamian and Kibele Sebnem Yildirim alongside Dr. Amin Ahmadi Digehsara and Dr. Amir Ardestani-Jaafari, all with UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Management.

“Wildfires are only getting more frequent and severe. Reactive, experience-based decision-making can’t keep up with how complex and unpredictable they’ve become,” Rostamian says. “Operations research gives fire managers a way to model that complexity directly, so decisions about where to send crews, when to call an evacuation and how to plan recovery are grounded in data rather than guesswork.”

The team screened 464 records down to 177 peer-reviewed studies published between 2000 and 2024, then sorted them by how they use mathematical optimization and simulation to support decisions before, during and after a fire.

Three main approaches emerged:

• simulation models that test how a fire might spread and how suppression crews might respond;
• stochastic and robust optimization, which plans for a range of possible fire and weather scenarios, including worst-case ones;
• decomposition and metaheuristic methods, built to handle problems too large and complex for standard solvers.

The review also identifies where the field is falling short. Data availability remains a major constraint: LiDAR mapping is expensive, satellite coverage is inconsistent, and real-time data from active fire zones is often unreliable. And even where the models are strong, most stay theoretical.

“Operations research has become a genuinely powerful foundation for wildfire management, but it’s still underused in practice,” says Dr. Ahmadi Digehsara. “A lot of these models are built and published as prototypes, not tools agencies can deploy. Closing that gap between analytical rigour and what’s usable on the ground during an active fire is where this field needs to go next.”

The researchers point to a few directions for closing that gap, including distributionally robust optimization—which blends probability-based and worst-case planning—and hybrid models that pair operations research with artificial intelligence and machine learning to adapt in real time as conditions change.

For governments and fire agencies, the review points to a few practical starting points rather than purely academic ones.

The authors call for investment in shared, standardized wildfire data, the kind of open, benchmarked datasets that would let agencies compare and validate models against the same conditions instead of rebuilding each time.

They also recommend closer, ongoing collaboration between researchers and agencies to test models against real operational constraints before deployment. They also call for a deliberate focus on interpretable, transparent systems. This would help the people making split-second calls on a fire line to understand and trust what a model is telling them.

“The tools to make wildfire response more evidence-based already exist. What’s missing is the bridge between the research and the fire line,” says Rostamian. “That’s how research becomes more than an academic exercise and starts helping the communities living with this risk every summer.”

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Pimjai Pimbaotham stands in front of a scientific poster illustrating her work during a visiting research fellowship at UBC Okanagan.

Pimjai Pimbaotham was not looking for the origins of life.

At Ubon Ratchathani University in her native Thailand, she studied catalysis, or the science of speeding up chemical reactions.

When she arrived at UBC Okanagan in 2024 on a visiting research fellowship, she was handed a project examining how the building blocks of life might’ve assembled four billion years ago. She found it disorienting.

“It was difficult for me to see the bigger picture,” Pimbaotham says.

What helped was a movie.

“One of my favourite movies is The Martian,” she says. “The story follows an astronaut on Mars who studies the environment and soil of the planet while trying to survive. Even though it’s fictional, it made me think about the possibility of life beyond Earth and whether life could have started somewhere else in the universe.”

Two years later, Pimbaotham is first author on a paper that reached the cover of Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, one of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s flagship journals..

Chemistry before biology

An artist’s rendering of the chemistry at the heart of Pimbaotham’s paper, which was featured on the cover of Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry.

The question the paper takes on is deceptively simple: how did life’s molecules stick together?

Proteins are the machinery of living things. They’re chains of amino acids linked by peptide bonds. Before there was any biology to do the assembling, those bonds had to form on their own, somewhere on a lifeless, hostile planet Earth.

Working with Dr. Robert Szilagyi, a computational chemist with UBC Okanagan’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, Pimbaotham mapped how two of the simplest amino acids join up and curl around to bite their own tails, forming rings—not in a lab, but on a computer simulating where every atom and electron sits at each instant of the reaction.

“Computational chemistry helps us understand what happens at the molecular level,” she says. “It allows us to investigate whether certain chemical reactions could have taken place on Earth before life existed.”

The team tested how the reaction behaves under conditions that would have been common on our younger planet: varying acidity levels, crushing pressure and heat. What set their approach apart was treating hydrogen atoms as quantum clouds capable of tunnelling through barriers that classical chemistry says should stop them.

The work does more than satisfy curiosity. It could also point toward cheaper ways to build complex molecules using abundant, low-cost ingredients. The team is now testing whether common materials like mineral surfaces and metal-bearing rocks could act as natural workbenches for these reactions, potentially opening new routes to manufacturing valuable chemicals and biological molecules.

Passing it forward

Pimjai Pimbaotham (centre) poses with academic supervisors Drs. Siriporn Jungsuttiwong and Robert Szilagyi.

In Dr. Szilagyi’s lab, Pimbaotham found herself in another unique position, as mentor. UBCO undergraduate student John K. Villanueva built and benchmarked part of the quantum computing code the peptide project required.

“Working with John was one of the best parts of my time in Canada,” she says. “One of my favourite moments was watching him present his research poster. I was proud to see how much he had improved and how confident he had become. Seeing someone grow through research is one of the best parts of being a mentor.”

The timing of Pimbaotham’s visit and the remarkable research progress led to presentations at UBC Okanagan, the Western Canadian Undergraduate Chemistry Conference and the Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition in Ottawa, alongside graduate and undergraduate students from the Szilagyi lab.

Pimbaotham’s path to Kelowna began at a science exchange she didn’t attend.

In 2024, her thesis advisor, Dr. Siriporn Jungsuttiwong, took part in the Sakura Science Program in Japan, hosted by Dr. Masanori Tachikawa of Yokohama City University. Among the researchers she met there was Dr. Szilagyi.

Dr. Jungsuttiwong hoped Pimbaotham could do a research exchange in Canada, but the cost of a year abroad was beyond her funding. Dr. Szilagyi pointed to the Canada-ASEAN Scholarships and Educational Exchanges for Development program, designed for students from Southeast Asia.

It was a conversation between Pimbaotham, her supervisors at UBCO and in Thailand, and Dr. Tachikawa that led to the research breakthrough.

Opening doors for researchers

The Visiting International Research Student (VIRS) program enabled Pimbaotham to conduct research full-time at UBC Okanagan.

The Visiting International Research Student (VIRS) program enabled Pimbaotham to conduct research full-time. The program welcomes undergraduate, graduate and graduate-equivalent students from universities around the world, as well as participants in UBC-recognized bridging programs like DAAD Rise Worldwide and Mitacs Globalink.

“VIRS has been part of how UBC brings students and researchers together for a number of years now, on our Okanagan and Vancouver campuses,” says Dr. Philipp Reichert, Director of the Global Engagement Office. “It creates opportunities for talented students to contribute to meaningful research while enabling our faculty to collaborate with emerging researchers from around the world.”

Through VIRS, students undertake full-time research under the supervision of a UBC faculty member while remaining enrolled at their home institution. There is no requirement to enrol in UBC coursework or pursue a UBC degree.

“What’s great about VIRS is how often it’s just the beginning,” says Dr. Dana Lowton, Assistant Director of the UBCO Go Global program. “Students come for a research placement, but the connections they build don’t end when they return to their home institutions. Those research relationships often continue for years, and we regularly see former VIRS participants return to UBC to pursue graduate degrees.”

Learn more through the UBC Okanagan Global Engagement Office.

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