09 Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of British Columbia, Canada

Vietnam’s forest ecosystems provide essential environmental, social, and economic benefits, including carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. However, deforestation and land degradation threaten these critical ecosystems, impacting Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) that rely on forest resources. Ensuring the integrity of Vietnam’s forestry carbon market requires forest carbon accounting and biodiversity assessments to support policy frameworks and private sector engagement.

The Carbon for Good: Enabling a High-Quality Forestry Carbon Market in Vietnam project focuses on developing high-quality, inclusive, and gender-responsive forestry carbon markets by strengthening governance frameworks, supporting biodiversity conservation, and ensuring equitable participation of IPLCs. The project aligns with Vietnam’s commitments under the Paris Agreement, the Glasgow Declaration, and the COP27 Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership.

An interdisciplinary team from North America, Asia, and Europe will collaborate with Vietnamese institutions, policymakers, and local communities to develop a database of carbon and biodiversity maps. The project aims to:

Develop a decision support tool to facilitate Vietnamese stakeholders in assessing carbon potential, evaluating biodiversity values and designing carbon projects that integrate biodiversity conservation principles

Facilitate policy dialogues between public and private sectors, IPLCs, and women-led organisations to strengthen legal frameworks for carbon markets.

Deliver technical assistance to national and provincial carbon accounting and monitoring authorities.

Develop training and capacity-building programs for IPLCs, particularly women, to engage in forestry carbon projects.

Support learning exchanges and networking among Vietnamese and Canadian stakeholders to enhance forest carbon and biodiversity assessment expertise.

A co-production and dissemination strategy ensures that project outputs contribute to national climate goals, strengthen governance, and build resilience in frontline forest-dependent communities. The project will also support early-career researchers and institutional capacity-building through long-term partnerships between Canada and Vietnam.

The postdoctoral researcher will be based at UBC for the duration of the project with periodic travel to Vietnam. The postdoc will contribute to research outputs, stakeholder engagement, and project coordination in close collaboration with the project PI and international partners.

The School of Biomedical Engineering (SBME) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver campus invites applications for a full-time Postdoctoral Research Fellow position in the Hedtrich lab (https://hedtrichlab.pharmsci.ubc.ca/). The initial appointment will be for one year with the possibility of reappointment subject to work performance and funding availability.

The Hedtrich lab strives to understand and tackle inflammatory and genetic diseases of human epithelia. Our research projects are highly interdisciplinary and routinely require close collaborations with groups from other disciplines. Our projects have a strong translational aspect with the ultimate goal to translate our technology from bench-to-bedside. Hence, interest in translational work at the forefront of science is a clear asset and people with entrepreneurial interests are encouraged to apply. Further, the establishment of an independent profile as well as tailored career-planning will be offered to the successful incumbent. These projects also provide the opportunity to closely work with world-leading scientists and companies in the area of gene editing and drug delivery.

The Faculties of Medicine and Applied Science have partnered to create the SBME, a new flagship entity at UBC, and a top strategic priority for the University and both Faculties. The SBME is a nucleus for education and training, research, and innovation in biomedical engineering, creating new knowledge, new academic and training programs, and fostering translation and innovation. UBC SBME distinguishes itself by deep training in biology, and engineering science and design, enabling SBME researchers to address the most pressing biomedical challenges of the day. Our SBME faculty conduct research that advances our fundamental understanding of human biology, and yields technologies and therapies that advance our health and wellbeing.

 The post-doc will work with Dr. Yi Qian (https://www.sauder.ubc.ca/people/yi-qian or   https://users.nber.org/~yiqian/), Dr. Hui Xie (https://www.sfu.ca/fhs/about/people/profiles/hui-xie.html) on research projects funded by Canadian Tri-councils (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada).  The research will focus on applying, developing, and implementing novel statistical methods for causal inference, integrative data analysis, and machine learning with large administrative heath and economic data. In addition to new methods development and evaluations, the job responsibilities include software development (mostly in R), possibly theory development, simulation studies, real data analysis, and writing manuscripts.

The annually renewable appointment is for 1-2 years, possibly extendable to year 3, conditional on satisfactory performance and funding availability. Salary is competitive and commeasurable with the experience and qualification.

Due to the proprietary data story and strict confidentiality, the post-doc has to work in-person at the designated location on campus, so candidates with Canadian status will be given preferences.

Applications are invited for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship supported by the collaborative research and training program Pacific Rim Ocean Data Mobilization and Technology (PRODIGY) and the Canadian Pacific Robotic Ocean Observing Facility (C-PROOF). The successful candidate will join the C-PROOF team and conduct research on ocean turbulence using observations collected by ocean gliders and other autonomous platforms. They will also contribute to the PRODIGY training program through interdisciplinary research, teaching, mentoring and stakeholder engagement.

Position Goals: The fellow will contribute to the PRODIGY and C-PROOF research missions by designing, executing and analyzing glider-centred process studies of ocean turbulence and its dynamical and/or ecological consequences in the NE Pacific Ocean. The foci of the studies can be tailored to the candidate’s interests and expertise in collaboration with the Project Leaders. Via collaboration with C-PROOF and PRODIGY partner Rockland Scientific, there is an opportunity to also engage in research that builds capabilities in sustained turbulence observation from autonomous platforms. As part of the PRODIGY program, the fellow will help to coordinate PRODIGY program classroom teaching and field schools, as well as engage with PRODIGY non-academic partners in government, industry and the NGO sectors.

The postdoc will contribute to the Silva21 research program, which aims to develop innovative strategies to enhance the resilience of Canadian forests in the face of increasing disturbances, such as wildfire and climate change. By integrating field research, remote sensing, and operational forestry insights, this project will generate data-driven tools and practical solutions to support sustainable forest management while balancing ecological health and economic viability (www.silva21.com).

Specifically, the postdoc will collaborate with the project team to integrate forest and wildfire management approaches. The research will include:

• Reviewing international experiences and best practices in resilient silviculture and sustainable forest operations.
• Evaluating innovative forest management strategies that align with wildfire mitigation and forest management objectives.
• Developing and recommending cost-effective operational approaches tailored to diverse forest types and communities across British Columbia.
• Exploring silvicultural prescriptions that balance economic return (e.g., lumber, pulpwood, and bioenergy) with ecologically appropriate management approaches.

The Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow (PDF) to join a dynamic and multidisciplinary team under the co-supervision of Dr. Anna Blakney and Dr. Jay Kizhakkedathu. The successful candidate will work on a project developing new lipid and polymeric strategies for RNA delivery. The Blakney Lab at UBC (blakneylab.msl.ubc.ca) develops next-generation RNA vaccines and therapies based on self-amplifying RNA and using interdisciplinary approaches including bioengineering, immunology, molecular biology and bioinformatics. The Kizhakkedathu lab (https://cbr.ubc.ca/our-people/investigators/jayachandran-kizhakkedathu/) develops novel polymers and biomaterials as therapeutics and devices.

Foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing. These are models trained on broad datasets with powerful generalization tasks such as the GPT series. There have been recent rise in vision foundation models such as GPT-4o, Instruct-BLIP and LLava. However, training foundation models has significant environmental costs tied to large scale datasets as highlighted in previous research. We propose to answer a meta question before building such models: “Can we analyze large-scale unlabelled datasets and quantify its relation to the pre-trained models’ generalization ability, without repeated training on such datasets and evaluation on downstream tasks?”. We aim to build a general purpose tool using multi-modal large language models to summarize datasets attributes without relying on annotations for these datasets, making it suitable for self supervised or vision language modelling. Such a tool can enable building foundation models with efficient cost in terms of the carbon footprint avoiding repeated training with each change in the dataset.

The project is funded through NSERC offering a postdoctoral position in the Computer Science department, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. The position is for one year with potential extension for a second year. The position is supervised by Dr. Mennatullah Siam. This project is in collaboration with our international partner RIKEN centre for Advanced Intelligence Project, Tokyo, Japan, where the postdoctoral fellow will collaborate with Dr. Naoto Yokoya and his team. We are looking for a self-motivated candidate with strong background in Computer Vision and Machine Learning.

The Industrial and Multiphysics Laboratory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver is looking for a postdoctoral research fellow (who has completed their PhD within the last five years at the time of appointment) to work on a newly industrial-funded 1-year postdoctoral research project. The successful PDF candidate will join a dynamic and multidisciplinary team under the supervision of Dr. Dana Grecov.

Dr. Grecov’s current research program studies complex fluids and their applications using numerical simulations and experimental methods. For more information about Industrial and Multiphysics Laboratory, please visit https://ibml.mech.ubc.ca/ and/or the LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/industrial-and-biological-multiphysics-laboratory/

As funders of this fellowship position, the scientists from the industrial partner will collaborate with and work alongside the successful candidate.

The successful applicant will be supervised by Director Dana Grecov and will work with the research team from the industrial partner. There are also opportunities to interact with various faculty in the Departments of Applied Science and Science at UBC. Therefore, a willingness to collaborate and mentor undergraduate and graduate students is advantageous.