Stay tuned for further details on the following physics panels.
Astronomy & Astrophysics
JJ Kavelaars
Dr JJ Kavelaars received his PhD in Physics from Queen’s University (Kingston, ON, 1989-1998), and was a post-doctoral fellow at McMaster University (Hamilton, ON, 1998-2002). He then became a part of the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre where he is now a Principal Research Officer and the Head of the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, which provides data archive and cloud computing services to 1000s of astronomers around the world.
Dr. Kavelaars is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria and University of British Columbia where he supervises graduate students. His research involves searching the sky for outer solar system objects and has discovered dozens of satellites of the giant planets and over 1000 minor planets in the distant solar system. He was the co-lead of the Canada-France Ecliptic Plan Survey and the Outer Solar System Origin Survey which have provided the standard model for the structure of the outer solar system. Dr. Kavelaars is currently a co-investigator on NASA’s New Horizons Kuiper Extended Mission.
Mandana Amiri
Mandana Amiri is a System Engineer and Project Manager at the Experimental Cosmology Lab in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. She joined UBC in 2003 and has contributed to the design, development, test and deployment of the FPGA-based control and readout electronics for TES detector arrays, currently in use in various experiments across the world. Her research interests are instrumentation and signal processing. She currently leads a multi-institutional team of scientists and staff responsible for design, commissioning and operation of the CHIME telescope and more recently CGEM telescope.
Darren Grant
Darren is a Professor at Simon Fraser University and Canada Excellence Research Chair in Astroparticle Physics with a research focus on observations of neutrinos, including studies of their fundamental properties and the sources of the high-energy astrophysical flux. They completed their Ph.D at Carleton University as a member of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory that provided the first (all flavour) measurement of the neutrino flux from the Sun, resulting in the discovery of solar neutrino oscillations. Following two postdoctoral research positions that involved searches for dark matter and high-energy neutrinos, as an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta (2010) they established Canada’s first program involving measurements with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (IceCube). Prior to their arrival at Simon Fraser, Darren was a Professor at Michigan State University (2018-2023) and a Program Director (Particle Astrophysics – Cosmic Phemonena) in the NSF Division of Physics (2021-2023). From 2017 — 2021 they were Spokesperson for IceCube, a period in the project that witnessed the first evidence of astrophysical neutrino sources. In 2016 they initiated Canada’s participation in the STRAW (STRings for Absorption in Water) pathfinder program for deep Pacific neutrino observations that has now evolved into the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE), with plans for a cubic-km-scale observatory off the cost of Vancouver Island. Their research contributions have been recognized with honours that include NSERC’s E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2017) and member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists (2017).
Physics Education
Joss Ives
I’m an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of
Physics and Astronomy at UBC – Vancouver. While completing my PhD in
experimental particle physics at UBC, my research interests started to shift
toward Physics Education Research, a field that continues to invigorate me
by allowing me to combine teaching and research into a larger scholarly
pursuit. My current interests focus on equity via teaching and assessment
strategies. I am also interested in the development of laboratory,
communication and computational skills throughout the undergraduate physics
Curriculum.
Sarah D. Johnson
Dr. Sarah D. Johnson received her Ph.D. in Experimental Particle Physics from the University of Rochester in 1993. Following graduation, she did postdoctoral research at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. Afterwards she transitioned to teaching at the university-level, working at three different four-year colleges in the United States before joining the Simon Fraser University Physics Department in the summer of 2005. As a university lecturer her duties include teaching physics, developing curriculum, and organizing public outreach activities, especially events aimed at high school girls such as Girls Exploring Physics. In 2021, Dr. Johnson was appointed Associate Dean – Learning in the SFU Faculty of Science. In this position, she leads teaching and learning initiatives across the faculty. She was the recipient of the 2018 CAP Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and in 2023, she was awarded a 3M National Teaching Fellowship in recognition of her teaching accomplishments and educational leadership.
James Charbonneau
I trained as a theoretical physicist under the supervision of Ariel Zhitnitsky. During my PhD I contributed to the discovery of a new kind of current, now called the Chiral Magnetic Effect, which much like the regular current you get out of the wall socket, but instead of requiring an electric potential (voltage) to flow, it requires a chiral potential, a very strong magnetic field and an imbalance in the number of left and right handed particles in a system.
I now apply this training to helping improve teaching and learning. The most well-known project I have worked on is the development of learning software called ComPAIR. ComPAIR provides an engaging, simple, and safe environment that supports two distinct outcomes: (a) students learn how to assess their own work and that of others in a way that (b) facilitates the learning of subtle aspects of course content through the act of comparing. Other things that I have worked a great deal on are 1) trying to measure interdisciplinarity in education and what, if anything, can break the silos that prevent learning transfer between disciplines and 2) studying the effect of spatial reasoning on a student’s ability to do electrostatics.
In the last 3 years I have taken on the role of Associate Dean, Students, in the Faculty of Science at UBC. My mission to improve teaching and learning has not changes, but it looks very different these days.
Biophysics & Medical Physics
Sabrina Leslie
SABRINA LESLIE, PhD. studied honours physics and mathematics at the University of British Columbia twenty years ago before moving to UC Berkeley where she obtained her PhD in optical physics in 2008, followed by her Mary Fieser post-doctoral fellowship in biophysics at Harvard University 2009-2011. There she invented the tether-free, high-throughput single-molecule imaging technology called Convex Lens-induced Confinement (CLiC), which established her as a pioneer in single-molecule investigations. In 2012, she became an Assistant Professor at McGill University and founded her research group in the Physics Department. There she developed CLiC into a platform technology and used it for new single-molecule studies of nucleic acids, proteins, nanoparticles, polymers, biologics and cells. In 2019 she was honoured with the Young Investigator Award from the Biophysical Society of Canada, and in 2020 she was elected to the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) College of New Artists Scholars and Scientists, an honour which includes her efforts to translate the value of her unique technology platform to society through the spin-out company from her lab called ScopeSys. In 2021, she and her team re-located to the Michael Smith Labs at UBC where her Associate Professor appointment is joint with the Department of Physics and Astronomy and affiliated with the School of Biomedical Engineering, Genome Science and Applied Technology and Bioinformatics programs. Dr. Leslie currently holds a Killam Accelerator Research Fellowship (2022-2024), to help accelerate her work and support the translation of her singlemolecule and single-cell microscopy and biophysics research to society.
Andrew Rutenberg
Andrew Rutenberg is a biological physicist who studies the physics of aging. He is the A.C. Fales Professor of Theoretical Physics at Dalhousie University. Andrew is probably also a statistician, and (as per xkcd) would be happy to be killed by what he studies. He maintains www.qbio.ca which links together biological physicists across Canada, and co-runs the regular Collagen Café and qbio online seminars. At Dal, he has been running a small group mentoring program for physics undergraduates for almost 20 years.
Eldon Emberly
Eldon Emberly did his PhD in Physics in the area of nanoelectronics. During his postdocs he switched into researching biological physics as he was always curious about how physics constrains what biomolecular machinery can do. He has been a faculty member in the Department of Physics at SFU since 2003 where his group has studied a range of biophysical problems, from spatial organization within cells to the folding of chromosomes. Currently they are using physics inspired data analysis methods to infer models of transcriptional regulation in prostate cancer and the neural encoding of patience.
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Physics
Michelle Kunimoto
Michelle Kunimoto (she/they) is an assistant professor in the Department
of Physics and Astronomy at UBC, where they also obtained their PhD.
They were previously a Torres postdoctoral fellow at MIT and
postdoctoral associate working on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey
Satellite (TESS) mission. Dr. Kunimoto aims to understand the
demographics and diversity of exoplanets, and does so by discovering and
characterizing exoplanets, searching for trends in exoplanet
populations, and developing new tools to analyze data from large
surveys. Their “Faint Star Search” project has identified over 3200 new
planet candidates, making it the most successful TESS planet search
effort by number of planets to date.
Katelynn Hubenig
Katelynn is a Ph.D. student in Physics at the University of British Columbia, specializing in Physics Education Research (PER). Her work focuses on promoting equitable and inclusive practices in post-secondary physics education. Katelynn began her journey in PER at the University of Calgary, where she engaged in student advocacy and restructured laboratory pedagogies as an undergraduate student. This experience led to a summer research position at the Cornell Physics Education Research Lab, where she explored equity and agency in undergraduate physics laboratories, igniting her passion for the field. She holds an M.Sc. from Kansas State University, where she quantitatively investigated graduation rates of women of colour in various STEM disciplines and examined equitable teaching practices. Katelynn is dedicated to advocating for change in physics culture through her research, EDI initiatives, and policy work, driven by her commitment to ensuring that others do not face the challenges that she and other diverse students have encountered. Outside of her research, you can often find her engaging in side quests (extracurricular work) that align with these passions.
Gwen Grinyer
Dr. Gwen Grinyer (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Regina who studies a wide variety of topics in experimental nuclear physics including the structure of short-lived radioactive nuclei, neutrinoless double beta decay, and explosive nuclear astrophysics. In addition to her physics research, she is a prominent advocate for women and 2SLGBTQ+ people in STEM and has had her work featured in Nature Careers and Discourse Magazine. She has given numerous invited public seminars on equity, diversity, and inclusion in STEM and has been active in outreach events all across Canada that focus on visibility and inclusion of underrepresented identities in physics. In 2024, Dr. Grinyer was named a Fellow of the Canadian Association of Physicists for her outstanding contributions to physics and for “championing equity, diversity and inclusion, and challenging the barriers faced by women and 2SLGBTQ+ people in STEM”.