Psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, significantly reduces aggression and activity in a small, naturally combative fish, according to a new UBC Okanagan-led study.

A new study led by a UBC Okanagan biologist has shown that psilocybin—the active compound in so-called magic mushrooms—significantly reduces aggression and activity in a small, naturally combative fish.

The findings, published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, point to new possibilities for using fish as a model to study psilocybin’s therapeutic potential in humans, particularly for conditions involving aggression, anxiety and impaired social functioning.

“We know psilocybin shows real promise for treating depression and anxiety, but its effects on social behaviour are barely understood,” says Dr. Suzie Currie, the study’s senior author and biology professor in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science.

“What we’ve shown is that even in a species hard-wired for aggression, a single low dose changes how these animals interact with each other.”

Dr. Currie and her collaborators at Acadia University and Université de Moncton studied the mangrove rivulus (Kryptolebias marmoratus), a small fish found in mangroves of Florida and Central America with two unusual traits that make it valuable for this kind of work.

It can self-fertilize, producing genetically identical offspring that allow researchers to control for genetic variation. And it’s notably aggressive toward other members of its own species, a trait that gave the team a clear behavioural baseline to measure against.

The researchers paired size-matched fish from different genetic lineages and recorded their interactions before and after the focal fish received a 20-minute waterborne dose of psilocybin.

After treatment, the fish showed significantly less overall movement and far fewer “swimming bursts,” or rapid, aggressive darts toward other fish.

“The fish weren’t sedated or impaired,” says Dr. Currie, who is also UBCO’s Vice-Principal and Associate Vice-President of Research and Innovation. “They were just calmer. They engaged less aggressively with a rival they would normally challenge.”

Fish are an increasingly important tool in neuropharmacology because they share a surprising amount of genetic and physiological architecture with humans, including the serotonin system that psilocybin acts on.

The drug binds to the same family of serotonin receptors in fish brains as it does in human brains, allowing researchers to study how it works at the cellular level in animals that are easier to maintain and observe than mammals.

According to the study, dose analysis showed the resulting concentration of psilocybin’s active form in the fish was comparable to plasma levels measured in humans receiving a low to moderate therapeutic dose.

The next phase of the work will examine serotonin pathways in the fish brain to better understand how psilocybin produces its calming effect.

Dr. Currie cautions that the work is foundational, not clinical.

“Fish models have a strong track record of pointing researchers toward mechanisms that hold up in mammals, including humans. If psilocybin works on aggression in a vertebrate this distantly related to us, that tells us something about how deeply conserved the underlying biology probably is.”

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The rise of Earth’s continents may have tuned ancient oceans to just the right boron concentration for life to emerge, according to a new research study.

Earth’s earliest continents may have set the chemical stage for life by regulating boron levels in ancient oceans, a new study in Terra Nova suggests.  

Scientists have long proposed that boron helps stabilize the fragile sugars needed to build RNA—the molecule thought to have preceded DNA in early life—making it an essential ingredient in life’s origins.  

But boron operates within a narrow window: too much, and it becomes toxic to biological systems; too little, and it may never have contributed to life getting started. 

“What we’re talking about is a geological control system for Earth’s surface chemistry,” said Dr. Brendan Dyck, Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences in UBC Okanagan’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science. “The growth of continents didn’t just reshape the surface of the Earth—it may have helped set the chemical conditions that made life possible in the first place.” 

Dr. Dyck and collaborator Dr. Jon Wade from the University of Oxford found that before significant landmasses emerged more than 3.7 billion years ago, boron concentrations in Earth’s early oceans were likely dangerously high. The rise of granite-rich continental crust, they argue, changed that. 

The key was a boron-containing mineral called tourmaline, popularly known as a semi-precious stone that’s also abundant in continental rock.  

Tourmaline forms readily within granite-rich crust, locking boron away over geological time. As Earth’s crust grew and weathered, boron was slowly and steadily released into surface waters, eventually stabilizing at concentrations close to those found in modern seawater.  

This was within the range that, according to current scientific thinking, life can use. 

That stabilization, the researchers suggest, may have been especially important on the early Earth, where without it, the fragile chemical building blocks of life would have broken down before they could combine into more complex structures. 

The findings also raise questions about the search for life on other planets. Rocky planets lacking granite-rich continental crust, such as Mars, are unlikely to have surface waters with boron in a form life can use, suggesting that the geological evolution of a planet may be as important to habitability as its distance from the sun. 

“This work reveals that the slow geological evolution of a planet’s interior can meaningfully shape the surface environment in ways that may be critical for life.” 

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UBC Okanagan engineering professor Dr. Anas Chaaban is part of a team researching how to improve wireless networks as AI and 6G technologies come online.

Wireless communication is about to get stronger, clearer and more secure thanks to a new idea from UBC Okanagan researchers.

Dr. Anas Chaaban and his team in the School of Engineering are exploring a method to improve the way stacked intelligent surfaces (SIS) can process electromagnetic waves more efficiently.

SIS is an emerging alternative to conventional wireless hardware, Dr. Chaaban says, as layers of specially engineered materials are used to directly manipulate electromagnetic waves.

“Electromagnetic waves travel through special surfaces that consist of several elements. These elements mimic neurons in a computerized neural network,” Dr. Chaaban says. “As the waves move through the surface, each element changes them slightly. When the waves come out, they are captured by antennas that send the signals to digital processors for further analysis.”

Unlike traditional systems that rely on complex and power-hungry circuitry, SIS technology enables fast, low-energy signal processing by controlling how signals propagate through space.

This new research, published recently in IEEE Wireless Communications, introduces a nonlinear architecture, enabling these surfaces to behave more like artificial neural networks. By incorporating nonlinear behaviour into each element, the system can process signals in more complex ways—similar to how modern AI systems handle data.

Until now, most SIS designs have relied on linear operations, so they could only perform relatively simple signal transformations. As a result, these designs cannot take full advantage of advanced communication techniques.

“Nonlinearity unlocks a fundamentally new capability for intelligent surfaces, allowing them to perform tasks that linear systems simply cannot achieve,” says Omran Abbas, who is the study’s co-author and a UBCO doctoral student.

The idea of using an SIS in this way is not new, he adds, but by using the nonlinear elements, the system can have more intelligence to perform AI-like operations.

In a simulated wireless system, the nonlinear system demonstrated improved communication reliability, reducing symbol error rates compared to conventional designs.

The improvement comes from the surface’s ability to create complex wave patterns that are more resilient to noise and interference.

Dr. Loïc Markley, a co-investigator on the project with a background in periodic structures and metamaterials, says they are working on the physical design of a non-linear unit cell to build a prototype.

“We are very excited to design a system that incorporates non-linear responses so we can test our theoretical predictions in a real-world environment,” he says.

Dr. Chaaban adds that beyond performance gains, the technology also shows promise for enhanced wireless security as these non-linear transformations are characteristically harder to predict and harder for unintended receivers to intercept or decode signals.

Although more research is needed to validate real-world deployments, the findings highlight the untapped potential of non-linear intelligent surfaces as a powerful new tool for next-generation communication systems.

“This innovation could play a key role in enabling future wireless technologies, including 6G communications,” Dr. Chaaban says.

“We are analyzing the ideas and investigating them further, and we are also working on testing a nonlinear SIS. This technology could significantly improve reliability, efficiency and security in next-generation networks.”

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UBC Okanagan researchers analyzed more than four decades of satellite data to identify where climate unpredictability poses the greatest threat to Canadian biodiversity.

Climate change is making Canada’s seasons more erratic, its weather more extreme and its ecosystems less predictable—and UBC Okanagan scientists have now produced the first national map of exactly where that unpredictability is hitting hardest.

Their findings, published in the Nature Portfolio journal Communications Earth & Environment, reveal a troubling mismatch: the regions best shielded from climate chaos are among the least protected by Canada’s national network of parks and conservation areas.

“We’ve been calling this ‘predicting the unpredictable,’” says Dr. Michael J. Noonan, assistant professor of biology and head of UBCO’s Quantitative Ecology Lab.

“Some parts of Canada tend to be relatively stable year after year, while others swing wildly. What we’ve shown is that this pattern of instability has real, measurable consequences for biodiversity. And our protected areas weren’t designed with any of this in mind.”

The research team, including master’s student Rekha Marcus, doctoral student Stefano Mezzini and undergraduate student Dwija Desai, analyzed more than four decades of daily satellite vegetation data stretching from 1981 to 2025.

Using this record (the longest and most detailed of its kind applied to Canada as a whole) they built precise, location-by-location estimates of how unpredictable environmental conditions have become across the country’s roughly 9.8 million square kilometres of land.

The technical term for this unpredictability is “stochasticity,” or the random, hard-to-forecast variation in conditions that species must navigate.

The researchers found it has been rising steadily for four decades and, crucially, that it is not distributed evenly.

More unpredictability means fewer species

The study found a strong, negative relationship between environmental instability and species richness: regions where conditions fluctuate more unpredictably support a significantly lower diversity of plants and animals. The effect holds even after accounting for how productive an ecosystem is.

Environmental stochasticity across Canada has increased steadily since 1981.

The team found pronounced geographic patterns: some ecozones—including parts of the Pacific Maritime, Montane Cordillera (southern BC and southwestern Alberta, including the Okanagan) and Atlantic Maritime—experience consistently higher instability, while others remain comparatively stable.

Unstable environments also suffer more extreme temperature events. Areas with high unpredictability were also more likely to experience months with extreme temperatures relative to historical baselines, compounding the stress on wildlife.

Canada’s protected areas are misaligned with where they’re needed most.

The researchers found no meaningful relationship between environmental stability and whether a region is currently protected.

Many of Canada’s most stable, biologically productive landscapes remain outside the protected areas network.

“High environmental variability can increase extinction risk and make protected areas less effective at safeguarding biodiversity, and climate change is expected to increase that variability,” said Marcus, the lead researcher.

“By analyzing how environmental conditions vary across Canada, we identified a significant number of areas that should be priorities for biodiversity conservation.”

The team identified more than 2.7 million square kilometres of unprotected land that ranks in the most stable and productive 30 per cent of the country. These areas could help meaningfully strengthen the resilience of Canada’s conservation network.

Implications for Canada’s 30 by 30 commitment

Canada has committed to protecting 30 per cent of its land and ocean habitat by 2030. With only 13.8 per cent currently under formal protection, the country faces an urgent task of identifying more than 1.7 million additional square kilometres for designation in the next four years.

The UBC Okanagan team argues that conventional approaches to identifying protected areas, which typically focus on average environmental conditions, are not enough.

Ignoring how conditions vary around that average, they say, risks building a conservation network that looks good on paper but cannot buffer wildlife against the increasingly erratic climate Canadians are already experiencing.

The study also identified another gap: areas that experience the most extreme temperature events, primarily in Canada’s northern regions, are underrepresented.

“As climate change makes the world around us increasingly less predictable, our protected areas may not have the capacity to buffer against this,” Dr. Noonan says. “This research gives decision-makers a new set of tools to identify where protection will be the most effective. Not just for today, but for decades to come.”

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More than 350 students took part in UBC Okanagan’s Capstone Design Showcase and Competition at the KF Aerospace Centre for Excellence.

A semi-autonomous boat that measures Okanagan Lake’s water quality earned top honours at UBC Okanagan’s Capstone Design Showcase and Competition at the KF Aerospace Centre for Excellence on Friday.

The Semi-Autonomous Depth-Resolved Water Quality Unmanned Surface Vehicle team—Nathan Carscadden, Kevin Cserhalmi, Connor Kirkpatrick, Wesley Wang, Adiyar Yelyubayev and Yuriy Storozhuk—also claimed a $1,200 cash prize courtesy of Kelowna law firm FH&P.

“Kelowna is where we grew as engineers, and this project gave us the chance to put that education to work for the community directly,” Cserhalmi said, on behalf of his team.

“We went through several iterations to refine the problem and solution alongside the city, and landing on something that addresses a real operational need made the win feel particularly meaningful. We’re preparing a white paper for the city and are excited to see where it takes us.”

The winners built a semi-autonomous catamaran equipped with a winch-deployed sensor for studying turbidity and temperature at the City of Kelowna’s four drinking water intakes, creating readings at different depths.

Fifty-nine groups competed at the event, which drew more than 350 students and an audience of faculty, family and industry partners. Capstone is the culminating requirement for School of Engineering graduates.

Projects spanned automotive and aerospace, community and humanitarian engineering, infrastructure, software and data systems as well as sustainable and environmental solutions.

They included a power-assist device designed in collaboration with Accessible Okanagan, an AI tool to support smart construction and an amenity building for Greyback Construction’s Skaha Hills development.

UBCO’s Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Lesley Cormack, said the work on display went well beyond student exercises.

“When you walk through the showcase, you don’t just see projects—you see applied solutions that can have an impact on our region’s distinct challenges and opportunities,” she said.

For the third consecutive year, the top prize went to a student-owned entrepreneurial team that identified its own problem, secured a client and delivered a working solution.

“Entrepreneurial teams must bring their own problem forward to solve and then secure a client to work with,” said associate professor Dr. Alon Eisenstein, who co-led the event. “Our school continues to invest in the entrepreneurial education of our students, to add to their impressive engineering skills.”

The judges for the competition included 12 regional business leaders and six graduate students. Several judges are UBCO engineering alumni who previously competed in the capstone event.

School of Engineering Director Dr. Will Hughes framed the moment in broader terms.

“The world needs not only great engineers; it needs good engineers,” he said. “We need engineers who bring ingenuity, but also humility, kindness, resilience and a willingness to put the greater good before themselves.”

Category winners

• Automotive and Aerospace
  Tire Cooling Solution for Mining Haul Truck (client: Kal Tire Mining Tire Group Innovation Centre)
• Community and Humanitarian Engineering
  Acting on Limitations: Improving Front Drive Power Assist Devices (client: entrepreneurial capstone)
• Infrastructure and Construction
  Skaha Hills Amenity Building (client: Greyback Construction)
• Innovative Devices and Systems
  Novel Area Thermal Pressure Relief Device (client: Hexagon Agility)
• Software and Data Systems
  BIM-AI Integration for Smart Construction (client: Dr. Qian Chen, UBCO)
• Sustainable and Environmental Solutions and first place overall
  Semi-Autonomous Depth-Resolved Water Quality Unmanned Surface Vehicle (client: City of Kelowna)

Nathan Carscadden, Kevin Cserhalmi, Connor Kirkpatrick, Wesley Wang, Adiyar Yelyubayev and Yuriy Storozhuk claimed top honours and a $1,200 cash prize sponsored by Kelowna law firm FH&P at UBC Okanagan’s Capstone Design Showcase and Competition.

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UBC Okanagan engineering students will be displaying their year-end projects at a number of design competitions next week.

As the academic year winds to a close, UBC Okanagan engineering students are getting ready to show how the knowledge they’ve learned in class can make a real-world difference.

There are three opportunities next week for the public to learn about the innovation, ingenuity and community partnerships taking place at UBCO.

What: Manufacturing Engineering 330 final design competition
When: Tuesday, April 7, from 2 to 3:30 pm
Where: EME 4218, Engineering, Management and Education building, 1137 Alumni Avenue, UBC Okanagan

On Tuesday, five third-year student teams will present their final designs from a hands-on collaborative project. This year, they designed and built a fully functional pneumatic press made up of five distinct, yet integrated, subcomponents, explains Dr. Ray Taheri, Professor of Teaching.

“This project is meant to feel like a real engineering design environment, where teams build complex systems through interdisciplinary teamwork, communication and iterative problem solving,” he says. “Through this process, students are expected to apply core principles of manufacturing, mechanical design and systems integration while also gaining valuable experience in collaboration, project management and functional design.”

The final presentations start at 2 pm and will showcase each team’s technical quality as well as the collective effort required to bring the complete machine from concept to implementation.

What: Applied Science 171 final design competition
When: Thursday, April 9, from 2 to 6:30 pm
Where: Upper and lower foyer, Engineering, Management and Education building, 1137 Alumni Avenue, UBC Okanagan

As the School of Engineering’s longest-running flagship design showcase, this annual competition highlights creativity, innovation and experiential learning within the UBCO engineering program, says Dr. Taheri.

The competition takes place on April 9 and features first-year engineering students competing against their peers as they present their design solutions.

“This showcase has become an important event for both the university and the community, highlighting the ingenuity of our students and the school’s focus on design-based education and socially relevant engineering practice,” says Dr. Taheri.

There are two themes this year. Students were tasked with designing a product to support older adults with their daily activities, while improving overall quality of life through practical and user-centred engineering.

The second project focuses on climate change. Students will present projects that explore wildfire mitigation, flood resilience, individual and community carbon footprint reduction and living more sustainably.

“Together, these themes encourage students to engage with important issues and consider how engineering design can contribute meaningfully to human wellbeing and environmental stewardship,” adds Dr. Taheri.

More than 70 first-year student teams have shown their designs so far, and the top 20 teams will advance to the live competition on April 9. The competition encourages creativity and gives students experience presenting their ideas to a panel of professional judges.

What: School of Engineering capstone project showcase and competition
When: Friday, April 10, from 2 to 4 pm
Where: KF Aerospace Centre for Excellence, 5800 Lapointe Drive, Kelowna

The capstone event highlights the work of more than 340 final-year engineering students who will present 59 projects developed with industry and community partners from the Okanagan and across Canada.

The projects represent a range of themes, including automotive and aerospace, community and humanitarian engineering, infrastructure and construction, innovative devices and systems, software and data systems, as well as sustainable and environmental solutions.

The event is the culmination of years of learning and hard work by the students, with their projects aimed at providing solutions to real problems in the Okanagan and around the world.

Some of the unique ideas include a wheelchair-friendly snow shovel, a chemical-free way to control Eurasian watermilfoil, an educational robotics kit for low-resource communities, sustainable solar power solutions for Cuba, micro-farm domes and sustainable solutions to help rebuild Camp OAC after the McDougall Creek Wildfire.

A panel of industry leaders and engineering faculty will judge the projects. Winning teams will be announced at the closing ceremony at 3:30 pm.

“While many of these projects are done with industry partners, some are student-led, making this event a launch pad for their entrepreneurial ideas,” explains Dr. Alon Eisenstein, Associate Professor of Teaching in the School of Engineering. “We are incredibly proud of the graduating students’ creativity and skills, and the is invited to see the ingenuity these students will bring to their future careers.”

As part of the year-end design competitions, engineering students will explain their product design to a panel of judges.

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Dr. Shahria Alam, Professor of Civil Engineering, stands near the reaction wall inside the High Head Lab at UBC Okanagan.

It took a full day to pour.

The reinforcement cage inside was so dense—steel bars packed so tightly that placing, aligning and inspecting every rod demanded exacting care—that the formwork required a complex external bracing system just to hold against the pressure of the wet concrete.

The result, now standing in the School of Engineering‘s High Head Lab at UBC Okanagan, is a massive L-shaped concrete wall—12.5 metres long on one face, 4.5 metres high on the other, and built for one purpose: to not move.

Not when hydraulic actuators push on it. Not when researchers apply up to 2,000 kilonewtons of force through four anchor points simultaneously. Not when tests simulate the compound forces of earthquakes, environmental decay and decades of stress.

The wall just stands there, taking everything that researchers can throw at it.

That’s the whole idea.

From one direction to every direction

Until now, the High Head Lab could apply force in a single direction at relatively modest magnitudes. This was enough for exploratory or small-scale work, but not enough to replicate what real structures experience.

The new reaction wall changes the parameters entirely. Because of its L-shape—two reinforced wings meeting at a corner, each bracing the other—hydraulic actuators can be mounted on both faces simultaneously, pushing and pulling in perpendicular directions at once.

“Structures like bridges are under constant push and pull, at different rates and cycles, when you consider all the variables of the vehicles and other forces that act on them,” says Dr. Shahria Alam, a professor of civil engineering at UBC Okanagan. “And those are the typical stressors, before you add in something like an earthquake.”

The wall allows researchers to apply four to five times more force than was previously possible at large scale, and in multiple directions at the same time—conditions that more closely reflect real conditions.

One lab, networked across a continent

No laboratory can hold an entire bridge. But a network of laboratories can. Using a technique called distributed hybrid simulation, researchers at multiple institutions test different structural components simultaneously—physically, in their own labs—while computational models link the experiments in real time, allowing each site’s results to inform the others.

Kelowna might be testing a repaired bridge pier while the University of Toronto tests the deck above it, and Polytechnique Montreal runs a complementary frame analysis. The results run in parallel, integrated by software, as though the structure were assembled across thousands of kilometres.

“This capability places UBC Okanagan among a small group of Canadian institutions equipped for this kind of synchronized, multi-site experimentation,” says Dr. Alam. “It opens the door to new national and international research partnerships in seismic resilience and infrastructure performance.”

The new reaction wall, purpose-built with the connection points and load capacity to anchor this kind of work, makes UBCO a node in that network. In terms of size and testing capacity, the wall is believed to be unique in Western Canada.

The first experiments

The lab is preparing to study low-carbon concrete barriers for roadside safety, structural wall and column testing using a multi-axial loading system, and integrated shake-table experiments that replicate seismic ground motion.

The common thread is multi-hazard thinking: not just how a structure performs under one event, but under combined stresses—an aging bridge hit by an earthquake in a region experiencing climate-intensified flooding, for instance.

“The wall will help us to keep moving our work forward in resilience, sustainability and multi-hazard performance,” says Dr. Alam. “The work responds to real needs in cities and municipalities across Canada and around the world as climate change increases risks.”

Dr. Shahria Alam’s High Head Lab gives engineering students access to full-scale testing equipment, helping them build job-ready skills before they graduate.

A teaching lab

The wall is a research asset, and a classroom.

Undergraduate and graduate structural engineering students will use the facility for coursework. They’ll test reinforced and prestressed concrete beams, work with full-scale structural elements and use the same tools they’ll encounter in professional practice.

“We are always working to create opportunities for students to engage with the same tools and challenges that they will encounter in professional practice,” says Dr. Alam, “so they are ready to make an impact as soon as they enter the workforce.”

Built through partnership

The reaction wall was funded through the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the BC Knowledge Development Fund, with Dr. Alam serving as co-principal investigator alongside researchers at the University of Toronto. Additional support came from UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering and Office of Research Services.

Industry partners also contributed directly: Emil Anderson Construction provided financial support, while Kon Kast Concrete Products, and Harris Rebar and DSI America offered cash contributions and material discounts, respectively. Construction was completed by Ledcor in January 2026, with WSP Global serving as the engineer of record.

Infrastructure for a world we haven’t built yet

The wall makes it possible to study infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist—structures designed for new climate conditions, seismic demands and emerging materials. The experiments run on this wall will inform how engineers design and build for decades to come.

“The more we understand how infrastructure behaves, the better we can design and build it to perform when it matters most,” says Dr. Alam. “We’re excited about what this new tool means for resilient engineering research, materials and practice in British Columbia and beyond.”

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New research UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering shows how engineers can dramatically speed up simulations used to test high-voltage electricity systems.

As power grids add more renewable energy and large-scale battery storage, utilities face a growing challenge: how to stress-test tomorrow’s electricity systems before investing billions to build them.

Wind, solar and battery-backed grids behave differently from traditional power systems. They are faster, more complex and harder to predict, especially during faults, extreme weather or sudden demand spikes.

But using today’s simulation tools to test those scenarios can take days, which limits how many “what-if” questions engineers can realistically ask.

New research led by UBC Okanagan School of Engineering doctoral students Walid Hatahet and Jared Paull, and associate professor Dr. Liwei Wang, points to a way forward.

The research, published in IEEE Xplore, shows how engineers can dramatically speed up simulations used to test high-voltage electricity systems—the backbone infrastructure that moves power from renewable sources to where it’s needed most.

The work focuses on helping utilities and system designers make better predictions.

“Before utilities invest billions in new infrastructure, they need confidence that systems will behave safely under stress,” says Hatahet, a member of the Flexible Power Transmission Lab. “Our goal was to make those tests faster and more practical, without sacrificing accuracy.

“This work can shorten the path from idea to tested and validated design.”

The challenges come from modern power converters, the digital control systems that regulate electricity flow and are often paired directly with batteries. They are essential for integrating renewables, but they’re also so detailed that conventional simulation tools can struggle to handle them.

The work also reflects close collaboration between academia and industry. Co-author Wei Li is with OPAL-RT Technologies, a Montreal-based firm whose real-time simulation platforms are used by utilities and grid operators worldwide. The research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

For industry partners, the implications are obvious.

“This research directly addresses the computational bottlenecks our users face,” says Jean-Nicolas Paquin, Vice-President of Engineering and Electrical Expertise at OPAL-RT Technologies. “It helps utilities test complex systems more realistically, using the hardware they already have.”

Dr. Wang’s team tackled the problem by rethinking how these systems are modelled and how computing power is used. By separating fast and slow processes and running simulations across CPUs and GPUs in parallel, the researchers achieved speed gains of up to 79 times compared with conventional methods while still matching high-accuracy reference models.

That difference could change how grids are designed.

While the study itself is technical, its impact is simple: better simulations lead to better decisions. As Canada and other countries modernize their power grids, those decisions will influence reliability, resilience and cost for decades to come.

“Faster simulations mean engineers can test more scenarios, explore edge cases and identify risks much earlier,” says Dr. Wang. “That improves reliability and reduces uncertainty as renewables and storage are added to the grid.”

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UBC Okanagan researchers and Canadian egg farmers have created a practical tool to help producers balance environmental and economic trade-offs.

Researchers at UBC Okanagan and Canadian egg farmers have built a practical decision-making tool to help producers balance environmental, economic and management trade-offs on their farms.

The project developed software that brings together key sustainability indicators in one place to help farmers establish benchmarks for their farms, compare options and understand the consequences of different green technology adoption and management choices.

“Too often, sustainability tools work in theory but fail in practice, or lack buy-in from their intended audience,” says Dr. Vivek Arulnathan, an alumnus from UBCO’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program. “By involving farmers throughout the design process, we built something that reflects how decisions are actually made on farms.”

Farmers were involved throughout the process, shaping what information mattered, how it was presented and how it could be used to inform operations on the ground.

The study, published in Sustainability, was led by Dr. Arulnathan, a researcher with UBCO’s Food Systems Priority Research for Integrated Sustainability Management Lab, alongside Dr. Eric Li from the Faculty of Management and Dr. Nathan Pelletier, an associate professor of sustainable food systems at UBC Okanagan.

The research team worked directly with egg farmers to shape how sustainability information is presented, interpreted and used in daily decision-making. The approach recognizes that these measures only matter if they align with the realities of farm operations, regulatory pressures and economic constraints.

Farmers involved in the project helped identify the most useful sustainability measures, decide how to show results and make the trade-offs more transparent.

The study also highlights how the approach works as a scalable model for other agricultural sectors facing similar challenges, from livestock production to crop systems. By involving stakeholders early, the sustainability tools are more likely to be trusted, adopted and maintained over time.

According to Dr. Pelletier, the work links sustainability science and agricultural practice.

“Producers are under increasing pressure to measure sustainability performance and demonstrate improvement over time, but the tools available to them rarely reflect their operational context. This research shows how co-design can bridge that gap.”

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