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Civil engineering professor Tarek Sayed explored how the size of road markings affects collision rates.

Increasing the width of road markings substantially reduces collisions.

“We hope to ignite a sense of amazement and curiosity in visitors as they imagine this majestic sea creature swimming through a Cretaceous sea.”

Last September, UBC’s Earth Sciences building gained a 13‑metre‑long occupant when the cast of an Elasmosaurus skeleton was suspended in the glass atrium as a permanent installation of the Pacific Museum of Earth. (The museum already houses a Lambeosaurus skeleton – a duck‑billed, hooded dinosaur – and Canada’s largest blue whale skeleton is installed at UBC’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum.) In case your Elasmosaurus knowledge is spotty, here are a few facts you can casually drop into your next conversation about Late Cretaceous creatures:

UBC Climate Strike is included as a short source-linked brief in the September edition.

United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson sent Britons Googling this past fall when he said “a stitch in time saves nine” to describe actions to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The phrase means it’s better to spend a little time solving a little problem now to prevent spending more time on a bigger problem later. As the BBC reported, it’s a sewing reference that can be traced back to 1723.

The newest member of UBC’s Athletics & Recreation team is an autonomous line-painting robot, known to his colleagues as Robby. Robby may not be very talkative, but he paints lines with the precision of a master — using GPS to create sports field pitches in a fraction of the time it would take a team of several people, and using less paint. The first of his kind in Canada, Robby can even be programmed for logos.

“Robby and I have the closest relationship, and I do refer to him like he is a co-worker,” says groundskeeper Andre Dionne. “There are days when we don’t get along, mostly because he glitches and doesn’t connect to the satellite transmitter or loses Wi-Fi connection, but I’ll still take him on his bad days. With Robby on the team, we’re able to focus more on sports field maintenance and irrigation repairs, or ongoing tasks, like mowing, weeding, and line trimming.”

On a chilly morning in late March, 2021, Dr. Pieter Cullis left his lab on the fifth floor of UBC’s Health Sciences Building, took an elevator to ground level, and crossed the street to the COVID-19 vaccination clinic in Pharmaceutical Sciences. There was nothing outwardly remarkable about this brief walk, yet to 75-year-old Cullis it felt like the journey of a lifetime.

A photograph of Vancouver taken from a helicopter above the Stanley Park area. It shows West Georgia Street, with False Creek and Science World at the end, and East Vancouver in the background. Photo: Jeremy Lee (@jw.klee)

There may be no such thing, but Vancouver has shown the world an admirable model.

In space, no one can hear you scream. Also, the food is terrible. Due to safety protocols, astronauts have no ovens, microwaves, or stoves. They can’t fry eggs or make toast. They aren’t even allowed to boil water. If you could describe space food in one word, it would be “mushy.”

Grain silos in yellow canola fields, Beiseker, Alberta, Canada. Frank King via Getty Images

A complex problem in need of a complex solution. It’s going to be tough, says UBC prof.

Yes, we should get rid of tipping in Canada. Tipping tends to be a feature of interactive service work in which the service worker interacts directly with the customer, granting a degree of supervisory power to the customer. This is useful in workplaces where the service provided cannot just be standardized and dictated to the worker but rather lies in the worker’s ability to respond to the individualized needs and wants of the customer. But most of us tip habitually, not in response to service quality, and tipping amplifies the power dynamic between customer and service worker, potentially introducing pressure for the worker to cater to unreasonable or demeaning expectations and/or to reinforce social inequalities that already structure social interactions (like biases associated with race, gender, age, or body size, for example). If tipping doesn’t actually do what it is supposed to do, workers should just be paid fully for their work, and managers – not customers – should assume responsibility for service quality.

Chair in Business and Professional Ethics, Sauder School of Business; Director, W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics (SPPH)

AMS president Esmé Decker in the students building, affectionately known as the Nest. Photo by Geoff Lister

Advances in technology, a global pandemic, and the steep cost of living are shaping Gen Z’s experience of university – and they, in turn, are leaving their mark on campus.

Rockstars, rankings, and ruminants is included as a short source-linked brief in the September edition.

As I wrap up my first year as UBC’s president, I might not be “the new guy” anymore, but I still remember the excitement of stepping onto campus for the first time. That feeling of starting a new adventure is one I share with the thousands of students who arrived in Vancouver and the Okanagan this September, ready to start their own journeys.

Dr. Simon Donner’s glass‑half‑full perspective on our impending climate apocalypse began with a beat‑up Mazda Protegé.

Following the Arab Spring uprisings of the early 2010s, there was a flood of optimism about social media’s potential to unleash democracy around the world. “If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet,” said activist and Google executive Wael Ghonim after Egypt’s Mubarak regime was toppled. Many believed that Facebook, Twitter, and other digital platforms would amplify marginalized voices and hold the powerful accountable.

Raptors, robots, and royalty is included as a short source-linked brief in the September edition.

For most of human history, aging was an inevitable and inscrutable process—a slow unravelling that began after reaching adulthood and ended, if you were lucky, somewhere north of your 40s. And while today’s generations can expect to live a good deal longer, those extra years are not necessarily healthy ones.

In 2017, UBC set a record for the tallest hybrid timber structure in the world. Standing 18 storeys high and constructed mostly of prefabricated wood, Brock Commons Tallwood House was designed to prove a point: that sustainable timber can replace the vast majority of the steel and concrete typically used in towers. With Brock Commons as proof of concept, even taller timber buildings have since sprouted up across the world.

Students, staff, and faculty surrendered their dignity to race each other on tricycles. Photo courtesy of AMS Archives.

Bill Millerd, CM, OBC, BA’65, LLD’09. Photo courtesy of the Arts Club Theatre Company.

Describe the place you most like to spend time.Denman Island, BC.

Every day, tens of thousands of people make their way to UBC from across Metro Vancouver. Many rely on a bus system that is stretched beyond capacity. At peak hours, a bus arrives at UBC’s Point Grey campus every 44 seconds. And still, it’s not enough to meet demand.

UBC Firsts is included as a short source-linked brief in the September edition.

Do you remember this classic essay prompt: “Compare and contrast A and B, outlining their similarities and differences”?

alumni UBC posed this challenge to our audience with the question: Who is UBC’s most famous alum?

For several decades, Margo Jacobson built her teaching career on a simple principle: before learning academics, children must be taught kindness and respect.

Construction underway on new location for UBC Learning Exchange is included as a short source-linked brief in the September edition.

We can plot out a career path as best we can, but often life has other plans. Sometimes a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity comes your way, and you have to drop everything to take it. Sometimes the path you planned for doesn’t unfold how you imagined, but if you stick with it, it will be even more rewarding than you expected. Sometimes a tragedy (or a blessing) shifts your entire perspective on life. In fact, the way you respond to unexpected events might be what truly shapes your career—as these UBC grads know all too well.

UBC-developed ‘wood foam’ enters production as Indigenous-led pilot plant opens in Vancouver is included as a short source-linked brief in the September edition.

Four graduates make up the inaugural cohort of UBC Okanagan’s Bachelor of St’át’imc Language Fluency. The degree was built with community partners and follows earlier Interior Salish language programs at UBCO.

The source reports fewer than 50 fluent speakers in the northern St’át’imc area, making the cohort’s work part of a much larger effort to keep language in use. Graduates described applying what they learned in early-childhood education, at home and in continued study.

The story’s most durable image is not a credential alone. It is a circle of learners who supported one another across distance, then returned that learning to families and communities.

UBC is welcoming nine of the 64 research chairs announced in the program’s first round: eight at Vancouver and one at Okanagan. Their appointments span fields where research capacity is also a question of public capability.

The announcement highlights the return of Canadian talent, the arrival of international expertise and the training of people who will carry the work forward. A chair is therefore more than a title; it is time, infrastructure and a place to build a team.

The alumni connection is indirect but important. Universities change through the people they attract, the students they train and the questions they make possible next.

Starting kindergarten is both an event and a process. The UBC guidance connects readiness with learning that continues beyond the first weeks, while keeping the focus on what adults can do to make the transition less abrupt.

The advice is deliberately ordinary: build routines, make room for questions and notice the child’s signals. The larger point is that readiness is shaped by relationships and environments, not just by a checklist carried into the classroom.

That is a useful alumni lens too. Educational pathways are built from small acts of preparation long before anyone can see the final destination.

UBC’s announcement describes a $40-million gift from alumni Matthew and Natalie MacIsaac, the largest donation ever made to a Canadian school of nursing. The school and its new health building will carry the MacIsaac name.

The gift is intended to support education, research and clinical learning. Its strongest promise is practical: students will have purpose-built spaces for simulation, teamwork and the habits of care that cannot be learned from a lecture alone.

Alumni giving is often described as looking back. This one is also a bet on people the donors will never meet, learning in a building they helped make possible.

The quiz moves through mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, asking readers to identify species from photographs and clues. It is light in form, but the context is serious: the province’s biodiversity is under pressure as the climate changes.

The piece also marks the first anniversary of the Beaty Biodiversity Centre expansion, a $45-million project that brings researchers, students and community partners together around biodiversity questions.

A quiz cannot measure ecological knowledge or protection. It can make the names of local species harder to forget, which is a small but useful beginning.

The final instalment of UBC Magazine’s Readers Write career series asks alumni to look backward without treating the past as a plan. Their stories include sport, design, food, science and other interests that reappeared after apparently unrelated work.

One contributor moved from competitive skiing through film production, sales and business development before finding a way back to sport. The value of the account is not a universal formula for career change; it is permission to notice which skills travelled with the detour.

A career can be nonlinear without being incoherent. Hindsight supplies the connective tissue, but the next move still has to be chosen in the present.

The article reports five takeaways from an alumni UBC MEDTalks session on lifelong brain health. The experts frame dementia risk as influenced by more than genetics, with midlife behaviour and the surrounding environment both relevant.

Social connection is one of the themes. The piece also points to modifiable factors and the idea that beneficial changes are not limited to one age bracket. These are educational points from a public discussion, not a personal diagnosis or treatment plan.

For an alumni audience, the connection is direct: staying mentally well is not only an individual project. It can involve relationships, habits, care and the communities that make those habits possible.

An epishelf lake forms when freshwater is held behind an ice barrier. The study confirms that Canada’s last known example is gone, ending a millennia-old ecosystem that researchers had been monitoring at the edge of the Arctic.

The loss is both specific and representative. It names one ecosystem, while also showing that places once considered relatively protected can be exposed to rapid change.

The source’s strongest lesson is about attention: a refuge is not a guarantee. It is a condition that has to be observed, understood and defended while it still exists.

The book begins with a public problem: democratic tensions are rising, and disagreement can harden into a story that other people no longer belong. The UBC perspective looks at the conditions that make polarization durable.

The source does not reduce democratic health to a single institution or a single election. It points toward habits of citizenship, the quality of public conversation and the work of resisting easy division.

For an alumni audience spread across professions and communities, the question is practical. What do we do when our shared life becomes harder to recognize as shared?

The analysis starts with a geopolitical question and follows it through institutions, trade and the choices countries make when a familiar relationship becomes less stable. The idea of an associate relationship with the European Union is presented as a possibility to examine, not a settled outcome.

That distinction matters. International alignment is built through negotiations, incentives and political willingness, not through a headline alone. The article uses the present pressure as a way to ask what alternatives could look like.

For alumni working across borders, the piece is a prompt to watch the connective tissue: rules, markets and relationships that often become visible only when they are under strain.