News

Check out our New in EOAS interview with Jason Yeung, Assistant Professor of Teaching in Geological Engineering who just started his position this September. Welcome Jason!

Q: Would you like to tell us a bit about yourself？

JY: I am a product of UBC's Geological Engineering program where I completed my undergrad and graduate degrees. After my undergrad I relocated to Edmonton where I worked in consulting, primarily in the Canadian sub-arctic region. Then I made my way back to Vancouver where I stayed in consulting and worked in the underground, tunnelling, and trenchless industry.

I was born and raised in Surrey with my two older sisters and a set of hard-working parents. My parents moved to Canada in the 80s from Brunei as ethnic Chinese immigrants. My sisters and I are first generation-university students, so the education my sisters and I received at UBC is something my family is very proud of.

Q: Is there any difference in the UBC Geological Engineering program between the time when you were in it and now?

JY: I think the students now are really bright and have a strong sense of awareness. You can see how they have a knack for using technology and how it is integrated into the way they think. The Geological Engineering program is great as usual, where students can build the fundamentals of geological engineering and the stepping stones to achieve whatever their goals are.

Q: What do you consider your major contributions and/or accomplishments so far?

In my practicing career, some of my proudest contributions are the range of projects I have been involved with. In the sub-arctic region, I was a part of some neat projects like setting up and operating from scratch an advanced soil testing laboratory in a remote region, to being the resident field engineer for the construction of a frozen core dam. Locally, I am proud to have been involved in projects that directly benefit the community, such as designing and constructing tunnels and river crossing forcemains in the Lower Mainland to improve seismic resiliency in our water distribution network and expansion of wastewater treatment plants.

But to be honest, being in this current position and being able to have this conversation is a big accomplishment in my personal and professional life. Being in a position where I can influence the next generation of geological engineers is a big responsibility. People often ask me if this is my “dream” job, however being in this position often felt outside the realm of reality for me, so I often say this is my “fantasy” position.

My role here enables my passion for helping and mentoring others. I have always been known as “the old man” in a group because I’m an open book on sharing my experience and knowledge with those wanting to listen. I have naturally gravitated towards mentoring people from less advantaged groups or people looking for advice navigating the system, since I am able to see their perspective from experience. With my role now, I am excited to interact with students and people from all walks of life.

Q: How is it different for you as a professor compared to when you were a student in the program?

JY: I think there are some differences, but I also see more similarities between being a student and a professor. As a junior faculty myself, I am still a student learning and honing my craft of teaching and constantly wanting to improve myself, so I feel fortunate to be in a department that has many great resources and teachers to still learn from.

I think the primary difference between being a student before and a professor now is that as a student you take a range of courses and try to get by. As a professor, you focus on your courses for the semester, however each course requires more effort, attention to detail, and oversight of things behind the scenes that you don’t see or think of as a student.  

Q: Speaking of courses, what courses are you teaching this term and in spring?

JY: I am currently co-teaching EOSC445—Engineering Design Project with Susan Hollingshead, which is the 4th year geological engineering capstone project that runs over two semesters. This course is a platform for students to bring together all the fundamental and foundational knowledge they’ve accumulated through their undergrad and apply it to real industry projects.

The other course I am teaching this semester is EOSC 330—Principles of Geomorphology. I am doing paired teaching with Scott McDougall and Brett Gilley. It has been a pleasure working with those two and Bean, and being able to learn from both their teaching styles.

In the spring term, I will also be co-teaching EOSC 240—Site Investigation with Susan Hollingshead. And next year, I’m planned to co-teach EOSC 210 – Earth Science for Engineers with Erik Eberhardt, which is a course where second-year engineering students even outside of the Geological Engineering program will get their first exposure to earth science.

Q: What do you hope the students who come to your class can come away with?

JY: Besides explicit learning goals, I hope that outside the classroom students can go outdoors and further appreciate the beauty of earth processes and the natural environment that surrounds us, especially in Vancouver.

In EOSC 240, I am excited about showing students how to manage geologic uncertainty. Imagine we are looking at a vast piece of land: What is this ground made from and how variable is it? How can we realistically gather information to characterize it? How can we put numbers to geology and assign design parameters to build on it? I hope they can take that philosophy of managing uncertainty and apply it to other aspects as well, like navigating through uncertainties of life.

In EOSC445, I hope that students can use this course as a platform where they can experiment with engineering design and team dynamics, and ultimately feel prepared for their journey after graduation.

Q: What research topics are you excited about now?
JY: My current interests are in engineering pedagogy and curriculum and course development in the geological engineering program. I want to make sure our program is constantly evolving and developing with current societal and industry trends, and to find ways to bring those concepts innovatively and effectively into the classroom. One of my other focuses is to constantly seek areas or ways that teachers and instructors can cultivate a sense of belonging for students in the classroom and the whole university experience. I have been exposed to many great resources from Skylight and CTLT on inclusive teaching practices and creating positive classroom climate, and I hope to be able to further contribute to that area.

Q: What do you hope to achieve in the next few years at EOAS?

JY: I hope to be a part of developing and evolving the geological engineering program. The geological engineering group is having preliminary discussions on creating a specific geological engineering field school, so I am looking forward to being involved in that. Besides that, I hope to bring more awareness on the role geological engineers have on societal trends, like climate justice or equity, diversity, and inclusion. Over the years, I hope to be seen as a figure or resource in helping students navigate through their programs and careers. Overall, I am excited to be in the university environment where I’m encouraged to still be a student, be innovative, and cultivate an environment that promotes learning and growth.

Q: What do you do outside of work?

JY: I am a foodie. The Metro Vancouver region is a great place to be a foodie because there is so much diverse food; it has any type of cuisine you can think of. Besides eating, I like collecting vinyl records. I’m always amazed when I put a record on and drop the needle, how a black plastic disc can reproduce such a vibrant sound.

During COVID, I picked up a few hobbies and one of them being cycling. I enjoy cycling because I find it a means of moving meditation. Whenever I’m on my bike, I forget about stress and have a moment to be present. My second COVID project is my two-year-old Labrador retriever, who makes my life interesting every day. She is just a big ball of energy! Her name is Ava and we named her after the artificial intelligence robot from the movie Ex Machina. On the weekends, you can find me on a long walk in Pacific Spirit Park, going for a bike ride, or spending too much time figuring out what to eat!

Elise Legarth, Vanier Scholar and PhD student in Atmospheric Sciences at UBC EOAS, originally from New Zealand

What path have you taken that has led you to a PhD at UBC EOAS?

I was not really sure what I wanted to do when I left school, but I had to pick something! I really liked Geography, so I chose to study a course called Earth Sciences and Agricultural Business at university, then went on to do a Master’s in Hydrology. Those are more related than they sound, especially because in New Zealand all agriculture is grass-fed, looking at the hydrological impacts on agriculture is a nice mix of hydrology and business applications.

In New Zealand, one key thing that we really struggle with in terms of getting our models to work is the lack of recent climate data, which is the input that has the biggest impact on your model results. We were using historical data to model the future, so it is not super accurate. This got me interested in how the climate and hydrology interact and I knew I wanted to move overseas, so I applied to come here to work in Dr. Roland Stull’s team.

What is your PhD project?

I am developing a new methodology to predict probable maximum precipitation and probable maximum flood. In layperson terms, it means if you need to build a bridge, you have to accommodate a certain flood level. How this is currently done is not particularly accurate, as we have seen here in BC and elsewhere with bridges being wiped out over the last couple of years. These current methods also do not take into account Climate Change, so I am working on a new and better method.

How will becoming a Vanier scholar affect the path of your PhD?

The obvious answer is the funding. This will help me attend conferences and a whole lot of things that our normal PhD funding would not cover. It also allows me to focus on my research and take up other opportunities rather than having to work part-time and as teaching assistant. Also, the prestige of it gives you a lot of connections.

Finally - what are you most excited about in the rest of your PhD project?

One of the things I am doing on the side that the Vanier scholarship has allowed me to pursue is to join the Atmospheric River Reconnaissance program run in San Diego. For this, we fly military planes out into atmospheric rivers and drop off a load of weather balloons into the middle of them, so we can better forecast them in future. I am part of the forecast team who helps decide where we should place the balloons to get the best data. But in simple terms, I am going to go to San Diego and fly into the center of huge storms in an Air Force plane – pretty cool!

Davi de Ferreyro Monticelli, Vanier Scholar and PhD student in Atmospheric Sciences at UBC EOAS, originally from Brazil

What path have you taken that has led you to a PhD at UBC EOAS?

I found out that the Atmospheric Sciences program at UBC is very prestigious and has good funding for international students, which has always been an important part of the decision of where to study for me. I also realized that the scholars who are part of the group are great names in meteorology and atmospheric sciences in general, so I knew that in terms of next steps for my research pathway, I would be able to study and research with some of the best.

I also did a one-and-a-half-year exchange program at the University of Auckland in New Zealand in my undergrad, which allowed me to realise how important a good education could be in terms of what you get when you study at a world’s top 100 or 50 university, so I knew I had to leave Brazil to study in an environment where I could thrive.

Lastly, my supervisor and the type of research she does here was a really big draw for me. She does a lot of research with real-time measurements and data of atmospheric pollutants, which is something that I did not see much in my undergrad and Master’s study. I have a background in dispersion modelling but I knew I had to come up with a way to be involved with instrumentation and real time measurements. I know this is the future and would complete my education portfolio.

What did you study at undergrad/masters?

For my undergrad I did Environmental Engineering in Brazil. I watched a lecture from my (future) Master’s supervisor in air quality in urban regions and it completely caught my attention. I realized I really had to study this further because I was so interested in it, so ever since then I started doing co-ops and internships with scientific research groups and consultants related to air quality. Then for my Master’s degree, I continued in Environmental Engineering but with more of a focus on air quality as well. I was driven into modelling in both my undergrad and Master’s, but now I am doing something a little different to complete my portfolio.

What is your PhD project?

I came to Canada to study the air quality impacts of the cannabis cultivation industry, which has recently been changed to both medicinal and recreational usage. This change, however, happened without accompanying (and necessary) studies about the environmental impacts of this industry. Not that this is the industry with the highest impacts as there are many others which are higher (e.g., cars, construction), but still, it is an industry with immense potential to grow so we need to take some steps before we get to the point when it is hard to change what has already been done. We do not want industrial practices to get so entrenched that we can not change them before we know if there is a better way of doing things, as we have seen in many other industries.

When I applied for the position here, I talked to my supervisor who said that there was this ongoing project available. Some of the pollution from the cannabis cultivation industries (CCIs) is in the form of unpleasant smells, which is something I had experience of from my research back in Brazil.

The first year has been pretty good. I dedicated a lot of my time to doing a literature review which was published earlier this year, and over summer I spent a lot of time in our PLUME portable laboratory doing fieldwork. Now I will start analysing that data and dive deeper to see what actually is the impact from this industry locally.

How will becoming a Vanier scholar affect the path of your PhD?

The Vanier scholarship has created a change in my Ph.D. that was not totally expected, but at the same time, if I had thought about it in greater detail I would have perhaps foreseen.

When I first came here to do my PhD, my stipend was paid by a grant that was dedicated to seeing how the CCIs would change air quality. So essentially, my PhD would have to respond to the funding I was given, so I did not have as much flexibility. But now with the Vanier scholarship, I am essentially self-funded, so I have more liberty to choose the direction I want to take my PhD project in.

This does not mean I am going to stop researching about CCIs, which was what I put on my Vanier application; it means CCIs can be part of my PhD and do not have to constitute the whole thing anymore. Instead, I am able to focus on wider-reaching research on how smells affect air quality in the Greater Vancouver area, using public data collected via an app (“smell Vancouver”) to identify regions that warrant further investigation with the PLUME van. Therefore, I think I will end up shifting my research a little bit to the relationship between odours and air quality and what I can do about it.

What advice would you give to anyone applying for the Vanier scholarship?

The scholarship considers three things in equal measure: your academic performance, your research potential, and leadership qualities. The leadership part is really what makes this scholarship different from most scholarships that are out there, and also the part which is hard for students, and especially international students, to have the necessary background.

There are many ways you can express leadership, such as volunteering, committees, participating in department meetings, advocating for something. What I would say is you should seek out these opportunities as one third of your evaluation is based on that. I think this really puts you ahead of other applicants who may be lacking a little in this aspect.

Finally, what are you most excited about in the rest of your PhD project?

I hope to help the most people I can in terms of connecting smells and air quality, and especially the health effects aspect of this research. So far in the literature, smells have been associated a lot with annoyance but health implications have been overlooked. I hope in the next two years or so I will be able to put out some good science to answer questions related to this topic and help the most people possible.

In the past summer, Darius Kamal, EOAS Ph.D. student in Geological Sciences supervised by Dr. Kenneth Hickey, went on fieldwork in the Mackenzie Mountains, western central Yukon.

“The focus of my research is on the world-class Howard's Pass Zn-Pb district located on the border of the Yukon and the Northwest Territories,” said Darius. The cluster of 15 deposits is the world's largest undeveloped Zn-Pb resource, but despite decades of geological work, the structural geometry and kinematic history of the deposits and surrounding region are poorly understood. To understand what happened in the past for the deposits, Darius is undertaking a project to define the geometry and kinematic evolution of Neoproterozoic to the latest Paleozoic rocks in the region between Macmillan Pass and Howard’s Pass in the Selwyn Mountains.

During the fieldwork this summer, Darius collected data to assess the role that faults on the margin of NW Laurentia in the Siluro-Devonian may have played in the localization of shale-hosted massive sulfide Zn-Pb deposits, and whether these faults were preferentially reactivated and controlled the pattern of crustal shortening during the Cretaceous Cordilleran orogeny. He is also looking at the chemical, mineralogical and textural effect of Cordilleran deformation of the Zn-Pb orebodies themselves, especially the remobilization of sphalerite.

“This study will help constrain the role deformation plays in affecting the geometry, distribution, and economic viability of shale-hosted massive sulfide deposits. It will contribute new lithostratigraphic and structural maps towards future exploration within the Selwyn basin and provide useful analogies for exploration within other inverted sedimentary basins globally,” said Darius.

EOAS’s very own Dr. Kendra Chritz was featured on BC’s Fossil Bounty to explain how she uses fossil teeth to investigate ancient earth environments. The episode follows her science journey from a curious childhood, to her beginnings as a young researcher reconstructing the paleoecology of ancient Ireland using stable isotope analysis of Irish Elk teeth fossils. Scroll down to watch the episode.

Today, Dr. Chritz remains fascinated by stable isotope analysis and its power to tell us about the chemistry of past environments. She continues using stable isotope methods, but now in human rather than elk fossils, to investigate the connection between humans and the environment. Dr. Chritz’s research shows that humans have had a strong influence on their environment since our very beginnings. The earliest members of our genus, Homo erectus, evolved 2.6-2.8 million years ago. Their emergence coincided with the advent of hunting tools and the conspicuous collapse of several large mammals in Africa. Since then, major ecological transformations have occurred following periods of human technological advancement, such as the advent of fire and farming. The Anthropocene, the geological epoch defined by humans’ reshaping of the environment, has been formally defined as beginning in 1950. However, Dr. Chritz challenges this definition and questions if the Anthropocene should be redefined as beginning with the very emergence of the earliest members of our lineage. 

To answer her questions about the braided evolution of mammals and Earth’s environment leading up to the Anthropocene, Dr. Chritz applies stable isotope analysis methods to the teeth of ancient mammals. In addition to human teeth, Dr. Chritz studies mammals like Oriodonts (ancestors of today’s pigs and cows). By analyzing the carbon isotopes in tooth enamel, she can reconstruct the diet of ancient organisms to determine what food was available at the time and the role different organisms played in the ecosystem.

Dr. Chritz's work with fossils has led to a passion for natural history museums. In addition to her research position, Dr. Chritwz has stepped into the role of Fossil Director at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum with the goal of preserving and highlighting BC’s abundance of fossils for future scientists and public appreciation. 

Watch the BCs Fossil Bounty Episode:

In September 2019, nearly 100,000 Vancouverites walked out of their offices, workspaces, and classrooms to join the climate strike. Just prior to the city-wide march, an estimated 4,000 - 5,000 students and faculty assembled for a UBC climate strike to demand climate action from the University leaders with a focus on climate justice. The movement ultimately led to the university declaration of a climate emergency and a resolution to offer courses explicitly centering climate education. 

EOAS Professor Tara Ivanochko heard this call to action and began building an interdisciplinary course list together with Professors Jessica Dempsey and Nina Hewitt of the Dept. of Geography and a number of full time student consultants. Thus, the Climate Action and Studies certificate program was born. The 18 credit certificate program focuses on issues of climate science literacy, climate justice, and community building. The program, which was designed to be accessible to as many students as possible, offers an interdisciplinary climate education with courses across science, arts, forestry, and nursing disciplines. In fact, Dr. Ivanochko says one of the most surprising challenges the program has faced is that demand for the certificates is currently exceeding its 60 student capacity. 

Each week students participate in two climate action labs. The action labs have two components: 1) students work in teams on real-world climate issues with outside collaborators, and 2) students reflect on their own climate action and involvement. This year, students are working in groups of four alongside the City of Vancouver to educate Vancouverites on the most effective ways they can reduce their carbon footprint. The City has found that although 88% of citizens are concerned about the climate, only 6% were able to correctly identify central heating and hot water as the greatest sources of carbon in Vancouver. Through this city engagement project, students have the chance to further develop partnerships with the City of Vancouver’s climate action team. In the future, students may continue to work with the city, taking on new challenges to contribute to the city’s climate action. Meanwhile, Professor Ivanochko is continuing to adapt the program so it may take more students in the future, as demand for climate education increases.