The August 2014 tailings dam breach at the Mount Polley Mine, BC severely disturbed downstream forest ecosystems through erosion and tailings deposition. The impacted area presents an opportunity to research using ecosystem legacies (ecosystem components that survive a disturbance) to rehabilitate disturbed areas. A field trial at Mount Polley is testing seedling establishment and soil […]

The risks related to Tailing Storage Facilities (TSF) failure are increasingly manifesting as financially material and impactful. My goal during this Globalink funded project is to identify the current tools that institutional mining investors are using to evaluate risk exposure associated with TSF. The overarching objective is to identify whether tailings dam safety is considered […]

Wearable electronics has become one of the most intensive research fields due to the ability to improve human life, enable interaction in the virtual world and the demand for portable electronics. Textiles with embedded electronic elements hold great potential for the next generation of health monitoring and human-machine interaction devices. Flexible sensors built on textiles […]

Wearable electronics has become one of the most intensive research fields due to the ability to improve human life, enable interaction in the virtual world and the demand for portable electronics. Textiles with embedded electronic elements hold great potential for the next generation of health monitoring and human-machine interaction devices. Flexible sensors built on textiles […]

Municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) generate a large amount of sewage sludge which requires tremendous operating costs for handling and treatment, and the final disposal of biosolids for land applications becomes less feasible because of the potential hazards (e.g., heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants) in the biosolids. In addition, some emerging contaminants have caused growing […]

The uses of Mechanically Stabilized Earth (MSE) walls and facings have gained widespread acceptance in North America for the past 30 years, as evidenced by the numerous completed structures. Exposure of MSE walls and facings to aggressive conditions could lead to early failure, and areas exposed to de-icing salts tend to present conditions similar to […]

Plant diseases damage crops in both yield and quality. Outbreaks of plant diseases can cause huge losses to crops, threatening food security globally. It is of great importance to study plant immunity and understand how plants respond to pathogen attacks in nature. My recent work in the model plant Arabidopsis identified a mutation in a […]

The use of natural gas as a fuel for on-road commercial vehicles offers significant benefits, including lower greenhouse gas emissions. Methane, the main component of natural gas, has many virtues as a fuel. One of these benefits is that it is a very stable molecule. This stability does introduce a challenge: it is hard to […]

Porphyry Cu-Au-Mo systems, especially those formed along continental active margins, are generally considered to have formed in contractional tectonic environments of crustal thickening, surface uplift and rapid exhumation (e.g., Sillitoe, 2010). The tectonic environment of porphyry systems formed in island arcs, such as those located within the Stikine terrane of northwestern BC, are not as […]

E-mental health, which is an emerging field that utilizes technology to improve access to care, has shown strong potentials to address the overwhelming demand for mental health services. Australia is currently undertaking an unified effort between clinicians, researchers, private sector, the government, and the users to provide a rigorously evaluated digital platform through Project Synergy. […]

Inspired by needs for haptic support of large motions on a surface in applications like embodied conceptual learning, commercial design, and 2D virtual/augmented reality, we at SPIN lab at the University of British Columbia made a ballpoint drive system called Magic Pen [1]. This novel approach circumvents conventional constraints by imposing a new one: motion […]

Carbon nanotubes are a tubular carbon-based material with extreme properties at the nanoscale. Scaled up production of macroscopic carbon nanotube materials is still expensive, and the bulk material falls short of the impressive nanoscale material properties. The aim of this project will be to mathematically characterize the structure of carbon nanotube aerogels produced using floating […]