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.”

The post UBCO researchers lay out the case for integrating psychologists into primary health-care settings appeared first on UBC's Okanagan News.

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.”

The post Closing the gap between wildfire modelling and real-world response appeared first on UBC's Okanagan News.

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.

The post A movie about Mars led one student across the world and back in time appeared first on UBC's Okanagan News.

The post Making the case for access, at home and worldwide appeared first on UBC's Okanagan News.

The post When the feed goes dark, distrust spreads as fast as the flames appeared first on UBC's Okanagan News.

Melius MicroBiomics Inc., a biotechnology company spun out of UBC Okanagan, is preparing to take its engineered microbial therapeutic to human trials in Australia this summer.

A probiotic bioengineered by UBC Okanagan researchers to thrive in the inflamed gut is set to enter human clinical trials, capping a decade-long effort to turn a beneficial bacterium into a treatment for inflammatory bowel disease.

The strategy, detailed in a proof-of-concept study published in Gastroenterology, tackles a stubborn problem in microbiome medicine: getting beneficial bacteria to survive in a gut that’s actively inflamed.

An inflamed gut is why probiotics have largely failed to produce clinical effects, as UBCO’s Drs. Deanna Gibson and Andrea Verdugo-Meza have previously demonstrated.

Trials are scheduled to begin in Australia this August.

“We worked for over a decade to get to this point,” says Dr. Gibson, a professor of biology in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science and the study’s senior author. “Probiotics tend to wash out of the gut exactly when patients need them most—during a flare. We wanted to flip that and engineer the probiotic to use inflammation as fuel.”

The research focuses on Escherichia coli Nissle 1917, a probiotic that has been safely used in humans to treat intestinal conditions for more than a century.

On its own, it may help keep ulcerative colitis in remission but does little once active disease sets in. The UBCO team added a set of genes that lets the bacterium use a compound produced during inflammation as fuel, giving it a competitive advantage precisely when the gut is inflamed.

The study was carried out by Dr. Verdugo-Meza, who completed her PhD in Gibson’s lab, and Sandeep Gill, a former MSc student in Dr. Gibson’s lab.

Dr. Verdugo-Meza led the work to understand and validate how the technology functions, conducting immune cell and live animal studies at the heart of the research.

“What’s encouraging is the breadth of the effect,” says Dr. Verdugo-Meza. “We saw improvements in the gut barrier, the immune response and the microbial community—not just one pathway. And it worked with low, infrequent dosing and without antibiotics.”

The modified strain bloomed during active colitis in mice, then receded as the animals recovered. It outperformed both the unmodified probiotic and standard first-line drugs for mild to moderate ulcerative colitis.

In one chronic model, untreated mice and those given the standard probiotic developed severe colitis, while no mice in the engineered-probiotic group did by the 16-week mark.

The strain is patented by UBC and licensed to Melius MicroBiomics, a UBC Okanagan spin-off company co-founded by Dr. Gibson.

The UBCO live biotherapeutic appears to strengthen the gut’s protective barrier, shift the immune environment toward a calmer state and nudge the resident microbiome toward more beneficial bacteria.

The pending human trials come after testing in several mouse models and lab-grown human colon tissue. The researchers have also completed a successful porcine trial to support human regulatory approvals.

The researchers indicate the approach could open a broader path for microbiome medicine.

“If we can design microbes to colonize exactly where and when they’re needed,” says Dr. Gibson, “we open up a whole category of treatments that work with the body’s biology rather than against it.”

The post Researchers engineer a probiotic that’s heading to human trials appeared first on UBC's Okanagan News.

UBC Okanagan hosted a BC government delegation for a site tour highlighting wildfire technology, research and prescribed fire training.

Cameras that can detect wildfires as soon as they ignite, sensors that track local weather data and person-to-person training on how to use fire to build resilience were on display for a BC government delegation at UBC Okanagan recently.

The visit comes as a recent Senate of Canada report identified wildfire as an existential challenge for the country. With the BC interior at the epicentre of Canadian wildfire, according to the report, UBC’s Okanagan campus is in a unique position to lead the national development of the next generation of research, technologies and strategies that mitigate the risks.

“For many parts of Canada, wildfire is an increasingly common occurrence, even in regions that rarely, if ever, had seen it before,” says Dr. Lesley Cormack, Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for UBC Okanagan, who hosted the demonstration. “For the Okanagan, fire has long been part of the natural cycle of the ecosystem. Extreme wildfire events are becoming more intense and widespread, however, and there is ever greater need for the leading expertise and direct experience of a top-tier university like UBC.”

The delegation included Niki Sharma, Deputy Premier and Attorney General; Kelly Greene, Minister of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness; Spencer Chandra Herbert, Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation; Rick Glumac, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence and New Technologies; and Darlene Rotchford, Parliamentary Secretary for Armed Forces Development and Veterans Affairs.

Students and researchers highlighted campus-led innovations, including an AI-powered wildfire camera network being developed with the BC Wildfire Service and a low-cost network of internet-connected sensors that refine local wildfire weather-risk forecasting.

They also showcased the Canadian Prescribed Fire Training Program, Canada’s first national prescribed fire training initiative, which trains practitioners to restore fire resilience to the landscape and aligns directly with the Senate report findings.

“There are more than 30 researchers at UBC Okanagan working with partners across the province and the country to drive advances in wildfire mitigation and management,” says Dr. Lael Parrott, Professor of Sustainability and Dean of the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science. “The urgent need for this work is growing every day due to the increased risks that communities are facing, not just in Canada but around the world.”

Dr. Parrott pointed to collaborations such as those with BC Wildfire and the First Nations’ Emergency Services Society of British Columbia as prime examples of how researchers and practitioners are combining Indigenous knowledge, cultural burning practices and the latest techniques to help communities across Canada learn to live with this new reality.

“We have built great momentum in this space, and wildfire resilience is now a core priority for UBC, but there are still considerable gaps that our campus is ideally positioned to fill,” Dr. Parrott adds, pointing to investments like a dedicated Canadian wildfire research facility, high-performance computing to power the machine learning algorithms behind the sensor networks, and hands-on learning spaces for prescribed fire practitioners.

That momentum now has a next step.

UBC is designing a dedicated space on the Okanagan campus to house its wildfire research and training with the intention that it becomes a home for the kind of work highlighted in the demonstration.

Among the technology showcased was a province-wide network of wildfire-detection cameras being built with the BC Wildfire Service. Modelled on a similar network in California, the platform streams landscape views and uses computer-vision AI developed on campus to spot smoke early.

This public safety platform gives responders better situational awareness, enables faster decision-making and fewer costly smoke-chasing dispatches.

The delegation also saw the low-cost weather sensors developed by Dr. Mathieu Bourbonnais’ Fire Ecology and Remote Sensing Lab. BC’s weather station network is too sparse in many areas to capture wildfire risk that can vary sharply from one valley to the next.

This creates gaps that can lead to under-resourced initial attacks when risk is misjudged. The sensors pair locally relevant data with machine learning to close those gaps and sharpen wildfire-risk forecasts

Living with fire over the long-term also means restoring resilience to the landscape, and prescribed fire is central to that future. With the support of an $8-million donation from the Weston Family Foundation, UBC Okanagan’s Prescribed Fire Training Program will equip practitioners across the country, including the Canadian Armed Forces, to plan and apply prescribed fire safely.

“For most of my career, much of the wildland fire community was focused on suppression,” says Jane Park, the program’s manager and a former wildland fire incident commander with Parks Canada. “More and more agencies now recognize that the right fire, in the right place, at the right time, is one of the best tools we have for making our forests and communities more resilient.

“This program, once fully developed, will give practitioners all across the country the training to plan and implement prescribed fire safely and well.”

The post BC ministers find the wildfire tech, training Canada needs now at UBC Okanagan appeared first on UBC's Okanagan News.

Evidence is mounting that lifestyle and nutritional support can help Type 2 diabetes patients return their blood sugar to back to normal.

What: Diabetes Dialogue: A Fireside Chat–Perspectives on Type 2 Diabetes Remission  
When: Thursday, June 18, 7 to 8 pm 
Where: Trinity Baptist Church, Kelowna
Cost: Free; registration required  

For decades, a Type 2 diabetes diagnosis came with a hard message: the condition is chronic, progressive and lifelong.

UBC Okanagan researcher Dr. Jonathan Little has spent the last 10 years conducting research to challenge that assumption. On Thursday, June 18, he and a panel of clinicians and patients will talk with Okanagan residents about who remission may help, common misconceptions and what the future holds for remission practices in BC.

“For years, people diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes were told it was a lifelong, progressive condition,” says Dr. Little, a professor in UBCO’s Faculty of Health and Social Development and investigator in the Southern Medical Program’s Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management. “Today, we know that some people can achieve remission through lifestyle changes or bariatric surgery. That message brings hope and opens new conversations about what diabetes care can look like.”

Diabetes Dialogue is a free in-person event hosted by UBCO’s Exercise, Metabolism and Inflammation Lab. It will pair the latest science on diabetes remission with the perspectives of a physician, pharmacist, dietitian and a person who has lived it. The format is a fireside chat followed by open discussion, with attendees encouraged to ask questions and join the conversation.

The panel bring together perspectives from research, medicine, pharmacy, nutrition and lived experience:

• Dr. Little, professor and researcher, UBC Okanagan
• Dr. Sarah McCorquodale, physician, UBC Faculty of Medicine
• Lysa Leong, pharmacist
• Celeste Lavallée, registered dietitian
• Will Autio, who has lived experience with remission approaches

The stakes are significant. More than 90 per cent of diabetes diagnoses in Canada are Type 2, and a growing body of evidence, including UBCO clinical trials, shows that with medical and nutritional support, many patients can bring their blood sugar back to normal and may be able to stop using glucose-lowering medication.

Dr. Little is a UBCO Principal’s Research Chair in Metabolism and helped write Diabetes Canada’s clinical practice guidelines on remission. He’s also built one of the few labs in Canada that can study diabetes remissions from the molecular level through to community-based research.

“At this fireside chat, we’re bringing together research, clinical insight and lived experience—including exciting work being done right here at UBCO—to explore what Type 2 diabetes remission means for our community,” Dr. Little says.

The post Discover how remission is possible for people living with Type 2 diabetes appeared first on UBC's Okanagan News.

Rena Patrick, Audrey Casper, Angelina Hopkins-Rose and Deborah Doss-Cody wait for their names to be called during convocation ceremonies at UBC Okanagan on Thursday afternoon. The four make up the inaugural graduating cohort of the Bachelor of St’át’imc Language Fluency.

UBC Okanagan has conferred its first Bachelor of St’át’imc Language Fluency degrees, marking a milestone in the university’s ongoing partnership with Interior Salish communities to protect and revitalize one of British Columbia’s most critically endangered Indigenous languages.

Four graduates crossed the stage at UBC Okanagan on Thursday, completing a degree shaped by years of immersion-based learning, community-engaged scholarship and a collaboration between UBCO, the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology and the Lillooet Tribal Council, through its St’át’imc Education Institute.

Rena Patrick (N’Quatqua), Audrey Casper (Tsal’alh), Angelina Hopkins-Rose (New Westminster) and Deborah Doss-Cody (Xáxli’p) make up the inaugural cohort.

St’át’imcets is an Interior Salishan language spoken in the territory around the middle Fraser and Lillooet rivers. Fewer than 50 fluent speakers remain in the northern St’át’imc area, nearly all of them elderly, making the arrival of university-credentialed, immersion-trained graduates a significant moment for St’át’imc communities.

In communities like N’Quatqua, which sits between the northern and southern St’át’imc dialects, only a handful of silent speakers remain—people who understand the language but rarely speak it aloud.

“It’s so important to keep it going, keep it flowing, because we’re losing it,” says Patrick, an early childhood educator who already uses the language daily with the children in her care and hopes to establish a language nest in her community.

The Bachelor of St’át’imc Language Fluency is the third of UBCO’s four Interior Salish language degrees, offered through the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies. It follows inaugural cohorts in Nsyilxcn and NłeɁkepmx, with Secwépemc welcoming its first cohort in 2025.

Students complete a two-year diploma at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology before transferring to UBCO for third and fourth-year study, combining intensive immersion coursework, domain-specific language acquisition, culture courses and language revitalization theory.

Graduates are not only learning to speak their language, but also to become practitioners capable of leading community-based revitalization work.

Much of the program was delivered online, which the graduates say made it accessible to students spread across distant communities. They also forged a tight bond as a result.

“Anytime we had assignments or were challenged with deadlines, we really leaned on each other,” says Doss-Cody. “We always worked together and supported each other pretty steadily, pretty hard.”

For Hopkins-Rose, who grew up in the city with no exposure to the language, the degree has reshaped her path. She now speaks the language at home with her two children and continues her education in Indigenous language revitalization at the University of Victoria in July.

“The trajectory of my life completely shifted,” she says. “To hear my children speak the language is incredibly inspiring. I have a lot of hope for our language.”

Casper, who returned to the language decades after first being drawn to it as a child, says completing the degree has connected her to the relatives who came before her.

“Regaining our language has really made me feel closer to the ancestors who have passed,” she says.

All four graduates plan to continue working with the language. Hopkins-Rose begins a Master of Indigenous Language Revitalization at the University of Victoria in July. Patrick is beginning a community-based Bachelor of Education program this fall, and Doss-Cody also plans to pursue a Bachelor of Education with the goal of teaching.

“My heartfelt congratulations to the St’át’imc graduates and the communities that support them. We look forward to future collaborations with our partners in the newly formed Interior Salishan Studies Centre,” says Dr. Jeannette Armstrong, the Interior Salish Languages program coordinator.

Chief Justin Kane, chairperson of the Lillooet Tribal Council, says the working relationship between the Interior Salish Nations and post-secondary institutions has taken another significant step forward in supporting students and language revitalization.

“This is such a momentous achievement and will serve our longstanding mandate to revitalize our St’át’imc language,” he says. “This has always been an important part of the work led by our elders, and it will go a long way toward ensuring our language and culture remain in place for future generations.”

UBCO’s Interior Salish language degrees are among a small number of university-level immersion programs in Indigenous language fluency in Canada.

More than 2,600 students receive degrees from UBCO this week, joining 435,000 alumni spread across nearly 150 countries.

Three more ceremonies are set for Friday in Kelowna:

8:30 am: Faculty of Health and Social Development (School of Health and Exercise Sciences, School of Nursing, School of Social Work); College of Graduate Studies

11 am: Faculty of Education (Okanagan School of Education); Faculty of Management; College of Graduate Studies

1:30 pm: Faculty of Applied Science (School of Engineering); College of Graduate Studies

Ceremonies will be livestreamed at graduation.ok.ubc.ca.

The post UBC Okanagan graduates carry an Interior Salish language forward appeared first on UBC's Okanagan News.

The next installment of MEDTalks will address diet, exercise and blood sugar management on May 26 at UBC Okanagan.

What: MEDTalks: Diet and exercise in the management of blood sugar, presented by UBC’s Southern Medical Program
Who: Dr. Javier Gonzalez, Professor of Nutrition and Metabolism, University of Bath; Dr. Sarah McCorquodale, UBC Regional Associate Dean, Interior, and local family physician
When: May 26, 7-8 pm
Where: Reichwald Health Sciences Centre, 1088 Discovery Ave., UBC Okanagan; virtual attendance is also available

People living with—or at risk of—diabetes might feel they’re being swamped by advice. Every scroll brings a new diet, a new workout or a new miracle fix. And most of it contradicts the last thing they read.  

A free public lecture on May 26 offers an antidote: what the science is actually saying. 

Dr. Javier Gonzalez, a metabolism researcher from the University of Bath, and Dr. Sarah McCorquodale, a Kelowna family physician who treats diabetes and metabolic syndrome, will unpack how the body regulates blood sugar as well as what diet and exercise do to glucose during and in the hours after a workout.  

Attendees will learn how physical activity helps control glucose levels, which dietary patterns hold up to scrutiny and how to apply the evidence without chasing trends. 

Dr. Gonzalez is an award-winning scientist who regularly works with health, sport and nutrition groups to translate research into practical advice.  

Dr. McCorquodale is a family physician and Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine. Her clinical practice focuses on perinatal care and helping people manage metabolic syndrome and diabetes through lifestyle changes.  

MEDTalks is a health education lecture series exploring current and emerging trends in medicine. Hosted by the Southern Medical Program at UBC Okanagan, the series features researchers and health professionals sharing their insights and expertise. 

The event is free and open to the public with in-person and virtual options available, but registration is required. 

To register or learn more, visit: smp.med.ubc.ca/community-engagement/medtalks 

The post Forget the fads, hear what the science is saying about blood sugar appeared first on UBC's Okanagan News.