Deans Message for LFS Community Connects: December 2020

December 17, 2020

Deans Message for LFS Community Connects: December 2020

With the holidays approaching, I hope you have the chance to take a breather and recharge.

It will indeed be an unusual holiday season. Like many of you, I will not be travelling to celebrate with family, but will sit tight here at home in B.C. Most Decembers, I look forward to travelling back east to Ontario to see my children, in-laws, extended family and to catch up with former colleagues.

As I reflect back on 2020, some thoughts jump out at me:

Our LFS students have shown great perseverance, resiliency and patience in adapting to online studies. They’ve been creative at connecting with their peers socially through Wednesday night dinners, and finding new ways to welcome our incoming students.
I’ve been so incredibly impressed by the hard work of faculty and staff. They quickly adapted and moved everything online, from teaching curriculum to experiential learning opportunities for our students and the community at large.
UBC has pivoted to try and meet the varied health and wellness needs of our students, faculty and staff members during the pandemic. UBC recently announced an extended winter break to provide relief for our undergraduate and graduate students, and to provide more time for instructors to prepare for Term 2.
I’ve discovered a sense of connection in simple things, such as 7 a.m. walks with another early-riser, Professor Les Lavkulich.
I have become a great fan of audio books, old recordings of programs and podcasts to keep me occupied during my walks. Here are some recommendations from my 2020 listening list:
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance
Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
Various replays of CBC’s The Sunday Magazine, especially Michael Enright’s “In conversation with Christopher Hitchens”
Various episodes of Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café
And importantly, our own podcasts from LFS 400: Audio Storytelling – we have amazing student storytellers!

Like all living beings, we’ve proven that we can adapt to change and I’m sure that you have examples of coping mechanisms that you’ve taken to as well.

Looking ahead, the Faculty continues its strategic planning process. We aim to finalize our strategic plan by the new fiscal year in April 2021, and will be sharing this with our alumni and friends soon afterwards. Stay tuned…

In the meantime, please try to take time away from constant Zooms and recharge. All the best to you this holiday season. Stay safe and well, and here’s to a less challenging 2021!

Rickey Yada

Professor and Dean

Tagged with: 2020, Faculty

Tagged with 2020, Faculty
Categories: ReachOut

Postdoctoral Research Fellow Receives a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Trainee Award

December 14, 2020

Postdoctoral Research Fellow Receives a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Trainee Award

Larissa Rossen, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Faculty, is a recipient of the Research Trainee Award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. This award recognizes exceptional health researchers in B.C., and supports them in the training phase of their research career.

Originally from Sydney, Australia, Dr. Rossen received her PhD from the University of New South Wales. Her studies focused on infant development in the early years, following women during their pregnancies and the first year of motherhood.

Currently, she is the Co-Investigator of the Away We Grow Toddler Development Study, led by Associate Professor Yvonne Lamers, Faculty of Land and Food Systems, and Professor Tim Oberlander, Faculty of Medicine. Based out of the B.C. Children’s Hospital, this study will look at the nutrition needs of young children by comparing the effect of drinking regimens on toddler growth and development from 18-24 months of age.

The study is currently recruiting participants. For more info, please visit their website: bcchr.ca/nutrition-metabolism-research-home/participate/away-we-grow-toddler-development-study.

You can also follow the study on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for updates.

Tagged with: Awards, Graduate

Tagged with Awards, Graduate
Categories: News

UBC Alum Harold Steves to Retire From Civic Politics

December 1, 2020

Tagged with: 2020, Alumni

Tagged with 2020, Alumni
Categories: News

Supporting Students During COVID-19

November 23, 2020

Tagged with: 2020, Faculty

Tagged with 2020, Faculty
Categories: News

New Dietetics Crowd Fundraiser

November 19, 2020

Tagged with: 2020, Dietetics, Staff

Tagged with 2020, Dietetics, Staff
Categories: News

Wine Centre Poised for Growth

November 18, 2020

Wine Centre Poised for Growth

Jacques-Olivier Pesme

Simone Castellarin

The Wine Research Centre has expanded to Kelowna campus!

The Centre is now a dual campus initiative as it sets down roots at UBC Okanagan, in the heart of B.C.’s wine region. It is led jointly by Land and Food Systems and UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Management and Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science.

Jacques-Olivier Pesme, who’s worked with the B.C. wine industry since 2012, is the Centre’s new Director. Based at the Kelowna campus, he works in the Faculty of Management, and is also a Professor in Wine Business at the University of Adelaide (Australia).

The Centre’s new Associate Director is Simone Castellarin, Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Viticulture and Plant Genomics. An LFS Associate Professor, Castellarin has been involved with the Centre for six years, providing continuity and research expertise. We caught up with Jacques-Olivier (JO) and Simone to discuss the Centre’s expansion.

What do you think will be the biggest impact for students at UBCV and UBCO?

JO: The wine industry contributes more than $3 billion per year to B.C.’s economy. It has created more than 10,000 jobs. It offers many opportunities for the younger generation because the world of wine, historically traditional, is evolving and new skills are needed. New courses, co-op, events, certificates, etc… there is a lot to come for UBC students.

Simone: UBCV and UBCO have outstanding scientists and instructors, from wine chemistry to wine business and geography, sustainability of grape and wine productions, and climate change. The new WRC will favor student exchanges across campuses. Students interested in studying wine and grape production will have access to courses and labs that cover those topics.

What industry collaborations are most promising now that the Centre has a base at the Kelowna campus?

JO: Proximity is the key word. Wine is a non-relocatable good. A wine from the Okanagan cannot be produced anywhere else and the Okanagan Valley represents more than 80% of B.C. wine production. To work with the industry, we have to be where the wine is made and where most of the visitors come for a B.C. wine experience. That being said, we’re based in Kelowna and Vancouver, but we do work with all sub-regions of B.C., including the nice wines from Vancouver Island.

Simone: UBC Okanagan labs are conveniently located closed to vineyards and wineries where most of the grape and wine research is conducted. While the WRC has always had strong ties with the wine and grape industry in the Okanagan Valley, having its headquarters in Kelowna will strongly increase the opportunities for research collaborations.

The Centre already has international collaborators for its research, how do you see this changing in the future, if at all?

JO: As the wine market is a global market, full of small- and medium-sized enterprises, international collaborations are essential to gather and disseminate knowledge. I want to reinforce this aspect with key partners in Europe, Oceania and North America. In that spirit, we have recently joined Oenoviti (oenoviti.com), the largest oenology and viticulture research community in 2019 and the International Vine and Enology Society (IVES – ives-openscience.eu) in 2020.

Simone: The new WRC groups together about 20 UBC professors with various expertise and research interests. This new endeavor will enhance existing relationships and create research initiatives with international collaborators from well-recognized wine institutes.

Each of you brings different experience and perspectives to the Centre. How do you complement each other?

JO: Wine is a complex product and what is in the bottle starts with what is in the vineyards. Viticulture is Simone’s expertise. Mine is about strategy and wine regional competitiveness. I strongly believe in a multidisciplinary approach. In a sense, Simone works for improving the quality of B.C.’s grapes and I work for strengthening the recognition of B.C.’s wines around the world. Nevertheless, at the end of day, a global reputation requests very high quality standards.

Simone: I agree with Jacques-Olivier. In short, my work and interest is funded in plant science and viticulture, while Jacques-Olivier’s background is in economics. Both of us are passionate to help push the wine industry forward and support it through innovative research and education.

What is special about B.C. wines? What do you find most exciting about our local wines?

JO: Their diversity. Even if I am not sure about the reason for such diversity. Most exciting… there is a lot to say, but to me the most exciting is the next vintage and the new developments to come at the WRC. We are entering a new promising cycle.

Simone: The strong commitment of wineries to high quality that results in continuous improvements to the wines, season by season. The industry is further expanding in new wine regions and we look forward to supporting them.

To learn more about the UBC Wine Research Centre, visit wine.ubc.ca.

Building a Resilient Food System Starts with the Soil

November 18, 2020

Building a Resilient Food System Starts with the Soil

Seeing empty shelves in grocery stores last spring was a shock to many consumers, as most of us have never experienced that in our lifetime. It shone a spotlight on the vulnerabilities of our food system, and opened discussions on how we can better enforce this essential service.

While the food system and supply chain was quick to recover from any shortages, Associate Professor Sean Smukler looks at it as an opportune moment to study the impacts and prepare for any future setbacks. “This year has really helped to identify how fragile our food system is, throughout all stages of it,” he says. “If we want to avoid situations like this in the future, I would argue that resilience needs to start at the farm and specifically with the soil.”

Smukler is the principal investigator of the Sustainable Agricultural Landscapes (SAL) Lab. The lab’s goal is to contribute to understanding the ecology of and management for an agricultural system that meets current needs, without compromising the needs of future generations. “We work with farmers and managers of agricultural landscapes, to find ways to better monitor, protect and enhance biodiversity and the availability of ecosystem services.”

“In terms of impact, the COVID-19 pandemic happened very quickly, but we were also able to recover quickly,” says Smukler. “Something like climate change, which is happening on a slower scale and therefore harder to see, presents a much more challenging problem. The effects of which could be much more challenging to a vulnerable food system.”

The SAL lab works closely with farmers in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, and hopes to turn some of the future challenges they may face into opportunities. “Studies have shown that temperatures in the valley are expected to increase over the next couple decades, which on the one hand is good news, because farmers can expect to have significantly more growing days. On the other hand, it may introduce new challenges, such as new pests or crop diseases, or an increase need for irrigation as precipitation patterns change.”

For all of these challenges, it helps to start by looking at the foundation of food: soil. “Soils are the basis for building resilience,” says Smukler. “They are the key to any production, as they store water, cycle nutrients, help to resist disease and ultimately grow healthy crops.”

An important measure of soil quality is soil organic carbon. Siddhartho Paul, a recently graduated PhD student in the SAL lab, is the lead author on a paper published this summer that measured soil organic carbon in the Fraser Valley from 1984 to 2018. The paper was co-authored by Smukler, Lyndsey Dowell (another graduate student from the SAL lab), Nicholas Coops in the Faculty of Forestry, Mark Johnson in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, Maja Krzic with the Faculties of Land and Food Systems and Forestry, and Dieter Geesing, the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture Provincial Soil Specialist.

In their findings, the group determined that on 61% of farms, soil organic carbon was in decline.

“With soil organic carbon being a key indicator of soil health, the findings of our study is alarming,” says Smukler. “We really need to see levels increasing.”

The study looked at land use change and agriculture production. Some management practices on farms that have been in continuous use since 1984 have been identified as possible reasons for the decline in soil organic carbon, such as intensive tillage which increases losses of carbon to the atmosphere and a lack of cover crop use which helps sequester the carbon back into the soil. The next step of the research will be looking to evaluate which specific methods are contributing to changes in soil organic carbon, and working with farmers to find solutions.

While resilience for the food system begins at the farm, a resilient farm is really a shared challenge. “Scientists need to work directly with farmers, consumers need to understand the situation that farmers are in, and policy makers need to understand what the science is saying and provide the resources to address it,” says Smukler.

New Faculty Profile: Risa Sargent

November 18, 2020

New Faculty Profile: Risa Sargent

Risa Sargent joined the Faculty in July 2020 as an Associate Professor in the Applied Biology program. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa. She has a BSc from the University of Calgary, and a MSc from Simon Fraser University, where she studied the timing of pollen production and stigma receptivity as a mechanism to prevent selffertilization, particularly in fireweed.

She completed her PhD at UBC with the Biodiversity Research Centre, where her research took a macroevolutionary turn.

“I was interested in the role animal pollination could have played in driving specialization and diversification in flowering plants,” says Sargent. “The theory of animal pollination may help answer why there are so many flowering plant species in comparison to conifers.” She was also a postdoctoral research associate at the University of California, Berkeley, where she took a more community approach to understand why certain plant species can co-exist, and the role that pollination may have in it.

Sargent’s current research focuses on how ecological context impacts plant-pollinator dynamics.

“There are around 450 species of bees in B.C., and around 800 in Canada. They are found everywhere, in gardens, parks, agricultural areas, forests and natural areas,” says Sargent. A large percentage of the food we produce in agricultural areas is reliant on bees. Key crops that at least partly rely on wild bees for pollination include cherries, peaches, apples, blueberries, squash, tomatoes, and many more. Even in plants that we do not eat the fruit of the crop (e.g., carrots, lettuce, beets), bees are important if we want to save the seeds for future plantings.

Yet for such an important species, we have very little data about them. “About 90% of the bee species in B.C. are solitary, meaning they do not live in colonies or hives,” says Sargent. “A solitary female bee will raise her young in cavities dug into the ground or sometimes in wood or other plant debris, depending on the species. This makes it difficult to study them, but there is a general concern that they are at risk. One of their primary threats is the conversion of wild lands to agriculture and urban use, which is where my lab’s current research lies.”

Canada is a good place to study this, as wild areas are regularly urbanized by our growing cities. “We should be asking ourselves, could we design cities and the landscapes around cities to provide better habitat for bees? Actions such as banning urban pesticide use that harm both pests and beneficial insects, or planning strategies that would dedicate more to wild habitat, would be very beneficial to bees and other species, like birds and butterflies,” says Sargent. “Cities that harbour a high diversity of wild species also tend to be nicer to live in.”

That would be good news for city dwellers with backyard or balcony gardens, which also rely on bees for pollination.

New Faculty Profile: Lindsay Cuff

November 18, 2020

New Faculty Profile: Lindsay Cuff

Lindsay Cuff is enjoying her return to Vancouver.

“It’s like a homecoming for me. I love the smell of the forest after it rains and the salty air fills me with joy.”

She joins UBC as an Assistant Professor of Teaching with a joint appointment in LFS and Forestry.

She lived in Vancouver from 2007-2009 while completing a UBC Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Since graduating from UBC, she’s had the chance to travel and work around the world. While her global experiences have been diverse, a common theme for Cuff is engaging with organizations that work towards social change and education.

One of these organizations is the New York City-based Karuna-Shechen, a non-profit that provides services to vulnerable populations in the Himalayan Region. These services include accessing health care, education and vocational training – programs to improve quality of life or livelihoods.

She worked as Karuna-Shechen’s Communications Director for two years and had the chance to travel abroad from her New York base to engage with program stakeholders.

“One program we ran actually trained grandmothers to be solar engineers!” says Cuff.

Karuna-Shechen worked with the community to select female volunteers who could be trained to become solar technicians at India’s Barefoot College or at their facilities in Kathmandu. The women would return to install and manage solar lighting systems in their villages. Access to light allowed children to study once the sun set, encouraged more social activities, and transformed life in villages.

Cuff lived in New York for six years, moving there with her husband, Yana Kehrlein, a documentary filmmaker who was attending graduate school at Columbia University. While in New York, Cuff also worked as a freelance writer and was a writer-inresidence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

After living in the U.S., Cuff returned to B.C. and lived in Kimberley. She worked as Communications and Philanthropy Manager for six years at Wildsight, a charity that provides environmental education and initiates sustainable community initiatives through lobbying and mobilizing people to take action.

She worked on the Jumbo Wild campaign, which aimed to protect grizzly bear habitat in B.C.’s Purcell Mountain Range (Jumbo Valley) from being developed into a ski resort. After more than 20 years of lobbying, the Ktunaxa Nation, with support from the provincial and federal governments, declared the Qat’muk Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area in early 2020, protecting the 700-square kilometre area in Jumbo Valley from development.

Cuff comes to UBC from College of the Rockies where she taught Scholarly Writing, and Advanced Professional Communications, at its main Cranbrook campus.

“LFS is all about transforming learning into meaningful change in the world. This is fundamental for me – our classrooms are a microcosm of the world and have the power to affect change beyond what we can imagine.”

For fun, Cuff plays a 100-year-old banjo and loves being outdoors. In Kimberley, she skied and tried to visit every swimming hole she could find, and now that she’s back in Vancouver, Cuff is taking advantage of swimming in the ocean at Locarno and Jericho beaches.

New Faculty Profile: Thorsten Knipfer

November 18, 2020

New Faculty Profile: Thorsten Knipfer

Thorsten Knipfer joined the Faculty’s Applied Biology program in September 2020 as an Assistant Professor in Plant Physiology. Originally from Bavaria, Germany, Knipfer completed his MSc at the University of Bayreuth, where he studied the water relations of roots in corn plants. He then
received his PhD from University College Dublin in Ireland, where he continued his work using micro-manipulation techniques to study the link between cell and root water relations and aquaporin activity.

“I was trying to understand how water travels through roots at the cellular level, where transport resistance may occur, and how this impacts whole-plant water movement” says Knipfer. “With this knowledge, we become aware of the plant’s ability to regulate water flow dynamics and how it can adapt to different soil moisture conditions.”

Knipfer was also a postdoctoral research associate with the Department of Viticulture & Enology at the University of California, Davis, where he continued his work on water relations, this time in grape vines. “I was looking closely at the xylem, which is the tissue that transports water and nutrients from the soil to the canopy,” says Knipfer. “Drought being a reoccurring feature of California’s climate, we wanted to test the resistance of various varieties of grape vines and better understand their water requirements.”

For the first time, Knipfer was able to use x-ray computed tomography to witness the formation of gas embolism under drought stress and elucidate the underlying repair mechanisms in the intact plant – a similar methodology used in medicine to look internally at bones.

“This work was conducted at the Advanced Light Source synchrotron facility in Berkeley. We essentially brought our garden into the facility, and used the machine to take more than 1000 images on a 180-degree rotation. We then created a 3-D visualization of the tissue anatomy of the plant, so we could see the network of xylem that water is flowing through and detect the weak points where air is entering the system. This provided a good understanding of plant anatomy in relation to plant function.”

Knipfer is confident that farmers utilize this information to make management practices more sustainable through water savings. “If we want to use less water without sacrificing yield, we need to understand the physiological processes of what is happening inside of a plant, and exactly how much water the plant needs to maintain those processes. Only then can we avoid over- or under-watering.”

Here at UBC, Knipfer’s research portfolio will fill in key gaps in plant physiology, with bridges to soil-plant-atmosphere interactions and genomics.

He has already begun collaborating with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada on a project to investigate the poplar genus-types, using the synchrotron at the Canadian Light Source. He has also been in touch with B.C. hazelnut growers, helping them to screen hazelnut varieties to identify drought-resistant types.

“This field continuously fascinates me, as we are able to obtain an advanced understanding of drought stress responses in plants at both the micro- and microscopy level using a combination of cutting-edge and traditional research tools.”

Deans Message for LFS Community Connects: December 2020