Subtitle: (Ex)changing Ideas, Broadening Perspectives, and Mobilizing for Impact | Dates: 9-11th July 2025 | Location: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Open date: November 27, 2025
Submit applications by January 5, 2026
*Extended deadline* February 9, 2026
Email: malcolm.lee@ubc.ca
Office address: B1104 – 5955 University Boulevard, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1
Meet Marta Oliver Álvarez, a third-year PhD candidate from the University of Valencia (Spain) and a member of the Physical Activity, Education and Society (AFES) research group. To enrich her project and collaborate with a research group with shared interests, Marta completed two research stays with Dr. Erica Bennett and her team, from September to December 2024 and from July to October 2025.
What is your doctoral research about?
My doctoral research addresses experiences of humiliation in sport and Physical Education (PE) contexts through narrative pedagogy. To this end, we first conceptualized narrative pedagogy within Sport and PE, mapped the prior pedagogical interventions conducted in the field, and identified gaps for future interventions.
Then, we conducted a narrative pedagogy intervention with sport sciences students, based on reading and discussing a story about humiliation. Through this approach, we aim to raise students’ awareness of humiliation experiences, while also exploring how humiliation operates in such contexts.
What would you highlight from the work you accomplished during your time at UBC?
During my time at UBC, I led a seminar with the Psychology of Sport, Health, and Physical Activity Collaborative (PSYPAC), a group of faculty and graduate students in sport and exercise psychology who meet monthly to explore emerging research and shared scholarly interests.
In PSYPAC’s October meeting, I facilitated a thoughtful discussion on the use of narrative pedagogy within sport and PE settings. I presented key considerations for implementing narrative approaches in practice and shared preliminary findings from my doctoral work, which prompted rich dialogue about how educators and researchers might better attend to emotional experiences in physical activity environments.
Additionally, I also worked on the theoretical framework of my thesis, specifically on the conceptualization of humiliation in sport activities. For this, the regular meetings with Dr. Bennett were really helpful for tracking the progress, as well as her knowledge about emotions within narrative inquiry.
Why was UBC’s School of Kinesiology, and Dr. Bennett’s team in particular, a meaningful place for your research stays?
For me, it was really important to undertake my research stay in a place where I could both learn and enrich my work, while also feeling part of a supportive group. From the very beginning, Dr. Bennett’s group offered exactly that.
Before reaching out, I had read several of Dr. Bennett’s papers, some of which were among my favorites, and I knew we shared values and academic interests. The possibility of joining her group and learning alongside them was something I was very excited about. Once I joined the team, I immediately felt welcomed by everyone in the lab. My project was also very well received, and the regular meetings with Dr. Bennett helped me refine my ideas and move my work forward.
I also really appreciated that many members were at a similar stage in their academic journey to mine, which made our interactions very horizontal and enriching. This allowed me to learn from their experiences and projects in a very welcoming learning environment. I felt comfortable engaging in all our lab meetings, even though English is not my first language, which encouraged me to participate without fear of making mistakes.
How do you see your work contributing to more supportive/inclusive learning environments in sport and physical education experiences?
One of the most meaningful aspects is sharing and giving visibility to stories and lived experiences that have often been silenced or overlooked. I have witnessed how powerful it can be for participants in narrative pedagogy interventions to realize that not everyone experiences sport or PE in the same way, and how important it is to acknowledge and pay attention to those different experiences.
Additionally, because I conduct narrative pedagogy with future sport professionals and PE teachers, we are able to identify practical strategies for improving teaching practices. These strategies include moving away from authoritarian teaching styles based on power hierarchies, promoting more collaborative classroom dynamics and cultivating an ethic of care in which differences are not stigmatized but valued.
Ultimately in one of our recent publications , we propose a conceptualization of narrative pedagogy, which in my view, makes this approach more accessible to other professionals. This is important because it allows them to adapt and use it in ways that fit their own contexts and concerns, helping the field grow in diverse directions.
What are your future plans after your doctoral research journey?
For the moment, I plan to apply for a postdoctoral position to continue developing the work I started during my PhD and to explore where the path may lead. I have always enjoyed living abroad, so I wouldn’t rule out spending some time outside of Spain, and who knows, perhaps even returning to UBC!
Ultimately, Marta’s visit strengthened academic connections between UBC and the University of Valencia and opened the door for future collaborations between the two institutions. The School of Kinesiology extends its appreciation to Marta for her contributions during her stay and looks forward to continuing scholarly exchange.
Congratulations to Dr. Mark Beauchamp, who has been awarded a research allowance from UBC’s 2025 Distinguished University Scholars Award. This award is made to a select group of ten exceptional university faculty who have distinguished themselves as outstanding scholars in research and/or teaching and learning.
Dr. Mark Beauchamp leads the Psychology of Exercise, Health, and Physical Activity (PEHPA) Laboratory at UBC’s School of Kinesiology. The PEHPA laboratory draws from a diverse range of disciplines that include behavioral medicine, organizational psychology, and education.
The PEHPA lab aims to better understand the barriers to, and facilitators of, physical activity behavior across the age spectrum and ultimately, develop evidence based and conceptually sound interventions that are cost effective and sustainable.
Dr. Mark Beauchamp was selected for the Distinguished University Scholars Award for his innovative research examining exercise and health psychology, with a focus on developing effective and scalable interventions with and for various populations (e.g., military veterans, older adults, families, children).
This distinction underscores Dr. Beauchamp’s exceptional contributions to the field and his commitment to translating research into lasting, community-level impact. His scholarship continues to shape how we understand and support healthy movement across the lifespan.
Read more in the links below:
Dr. Mark Beauchamp: Professor/Distinguished University Scholar/Associate Director Research
Psychology of Exercise, Health, and Physical Activity Laboratory
What if a robot could show us how the brain keeps us balanced? UBC scientists from the School of Kinesiology (Faculty of Education) and Balance and Falls Research Centre built one – and their discovery could help shape new ways to reduce fall risk for millions of people. Read the accompanying UBC news article here.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia have engineered a robotic system that allows scientists to “virtualize” the human body, essentially disassociating the brain from the body. This allows researchers to alter properties of the disassociated body so it feels heavier, lighter, “stickier” or more “destabilizing” and then assess in real time, how the brain and nervous system interprets and compensates for these changes.
When you stand still, your brain is busy processing information that is already a few hundredths of seconds old. Those small delays – similar to the lag you experience when you watch a video that buffers – renders your balance more difficult to maintain. These delays are increase in older adults or people with neurological conditions.
In a recent paper published in Science Robotics, an international team of researchers from the UBC School of Kinesiology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Balance and Falls Research Centre and Erasmus Medical Centre (NL) asked healthy volunteers to stand on their robotic balance platform. They changed two “spatial” features of the body:
1. Inertia gain – how heavy your body feels (values below one make you feel lighter; above one make you feel heavier).
2. Viscosity gain – how much resistance you feel when you move (negative values push your body further in the same direction of movement; positive values resist your movement – similar to a damper).
as well as the “temporal” feature of the body by inserting a lag between balance-correcting motor actions and their resulting whole-body movements.
When the robot added negative viscosity to the participant’s body, their sway grew and they crossed the limits of standing balance more often, essentially inducing virtual falls. This pattern was similar to when participants balanced on the robot with a 200 ms sensorimotor lag inserted between their motor commands and resulting motion, where all individuals fell.
Next, the researchers asked participants to sense their balance under spatial and temporal body alterations virtualized by the robot. Participants instinctively chose a “lighter body” and a destabilizing “negative viscosity” setting as perceptually equivalent to the feeling of balancing with a temporal lag. Intriguingly, participants chose a virtual body that was “heavier” and “dampened” to replicate their natural sense of balance when a 200 ms delay was present, effectively cancelling their perception of instability associated with this lag.
To test whether the perceptions reported by participants could actually compensate the destabilizing effects of time delays for the control of balance, ten naive volunteers stood on the robot with the lag and “heavier” or “dampened” versions of their body. Remarkably, their balance instantly improved – no training required – and only one participant experienced a virtual fall.
A research team from the University of British Columbia has engineered a balance robot that can virtualize your body, essentially allowing the researchers to dissociate your brain from your body. Using this novel tool, the team can alter the properties of your body so it feels heavier, lighter, more “sticky” or more “destabilizing”, your muscles create motion in unusual directions (akin to a giving your brain a new body) and can even insert an artificial lag into the sensory signals that your brain uses to determine where your body is. By using this robotic tool, the researchers were able to assess, in real time, how the nervous system interprets and compensates for the lag, i.e. the information from the past it receives.
For the sense and control of balance, the results from these experiments show that the brain processes information regarding the spatial properties of the body similarly to the temporal aspects of body movements. Instead of strictly differentiating spatial or temporal information, the authors proposed that the nervous system maintains probabilistic maps between balance motor actions and associated multisensory feedback.
These maps appear to be largely indifferent to the precise spatial and temporal properties of the body and exhibit flexibly to the sensory consequences of our changing body. The authors further proposed that any updates to these maps will exhibit some overlap, enabling the neural structures responsible for standing balance to potentially benefit from specific combinations of space and time characteristics of the body. Thus, opening the door for applications enabling a future without falls!
Beyond the lab
Robotics: Most bipedal robots keep space and time separate in their control algorithms. The current findings suggest a single, higher‑order controller that blends space and time could prove useful to give robots more human‑like, robust balance.
Clinical outlook: Age‑related changes, diabetic neuropathy, multiple sclerosis and Friedreich’s ataxia can add neural delays that may contribute to falls. The current robotic advancements pave the way for the development of wearable or assistive devices to help at‑risk people stay upright.
The robot was engineered, built and validated in the UBC School of Kinesiology, Faculty of Education, with funding from NSERC (Research Tools & Instruments and Discovery Grants) and the UBC School of Kinesiology Equipment and Research Accelerator Fund.
Open date: November 20, 2025
Submit applications by January 31, 2026
This past summer, Dr. Erica Bennett and PhD student Kassi Welch travelled internationally to Basel, Switzerland, and Barcelona, Spain as part of the Forum Basiliense, an interdisciplinary platform that fosters critical dialogue among scholars across the humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and natural sciences.
In collaboration with an international, interdisciplinary research team led by Dr. Sarah Koch in the Department of Sport, Exercise and Health at the University of Basel, Dr. Bennett and Welch contributed to the INCLUDE Project.
The INCLUDE project is a three-year longitudinal study examining how gender, climate change, and urbanization influence physical activity experiences among older adults living with respiratory illness. This mixed-methods initiative is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under the National Research Programme 83: Gender Medicine and Health.
During their visit, Dr. Bennett and Welch co-led a three-day workshop attending to qualitative research design and its integration within mixed-methods frameworks. They shared insights and facilitated discussions pertaining to methodological approaches to study the intersections of gender, aging, and environmental health.
“This experience was incredibly exciting for me! Meeting and collaborating with international researchers provided an amazing opportunity to connect across disciplines and expand my academic network. I especially valued presenting on qualitative methods and fostering discussions about diverse methodological perspectives to enrich global health research.”
–Kassi Welch (PhD Student) reflecting on her experience abroad.
Additionally, they delivered a research talk at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, presenting their work on Canadian LGBTQ+ older adult’s experiences of aging, highlighting themes of resilience and resistance through physical activity participation.
Dr. Bennett and Welch continue to collaborate with Dr. Koch, Dr. Laura Delgado Ortiz, and the broader INCLUDE team, actively contributing to ongoing international dialogues on aging, physical activity, and the health impacts of climate change.
To learn more about Dr. Bennett and her research, visit here.
Congratulations to Dr. Janice Forsyth, co-author of Beyond the Rink: Behind the Images of Residential School Hockey, which has been named one of Indigo’s Top 10 Best Regional Books of 2025 (Ontario).
Teammates, champions, Survivors
In 1951, after winning the Thunder Bay district championship, the Sioux Lookout Black Hawks hockey team from Pelican Lake Indian Residential School embarked on a whirlwind promotional tour through Ottawa and Toronto. They were accompanied by a professional photographer from the National Film Board who documented the experience. The tour was intended to demonstrate the success of the residential school system and introduce the Black Hawks to “civilizing” activities and the “benefits” of assimilating into Canadian society. For some of the boys, it was the beginning of a lifelong love of hockey; for others, it was an escape from the brutal living conditions and abuse at the residential school.
In Beyond the Rink, Alexandra Giancarlo, Janice Forsyth, and Braden Te Hiwi collaborate with three surviving team members—Kelly Bull, Chris Cromarty, and David Wesley—to share the complex legacy behind the 1951 tour photos. This book reveals the complicated role of sports in residential school histories, commemorating the team’s stellar hockey record and athletic prowess while exposing important truths about “Canada’s Game” and how it shaped ideas about the nation. By considering their past, these Survivors imagine a better way forward not just for themselves, their families, and their communities, but for Canada as a whole.
Reflecting on this achievement, the authors commented; “We’re thrilled to see Beyond the Rink reaching such a wide audience. It’s clear that many people are still searching for direction and understanding, and survivors continue to offer both. Their stories show how they are still making sense of their experiences in a changing world, and they remind us of the work ahead—especially where sport meets Indigenous sovereignty. Our responsibility is to listen, to learn, and to confront how sport has erased Indigenous histories while also recognizing the power it holds to help reclaim them.“
Visit the links below to learn more:
November 14th, 2025
Depression is one of the most common and disabling illnesses worldwide. While existing treatments can help, many people continue to struggle, and recovery can take weeks or even months. At the University of British Columbia (UBC), we’re exploring a new way to make treatment faster, more effective, and more accessible.
Our teams at the Non-Invasive Neurostimulation Therapies (NINET) Lab, led by Dr. Fidel Vila-Rodriguez and Dr. Guy Faulkner’s Population Physical Activity (Pop-PA) Lab, are launching a pilot study testing the combination of short bouts of exercise with brain stimulation. The approach pairs 15-minute “exercise snacks” with a single day of intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS), a non-invasive form of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) that can enhance brain plasticity and improve mood.
We believe that exercise may prime the brain to respond more effectively to stimulation, creating a stronger and faster antidepressant effect. If successful, this project could lay the foundation for a new generation of treatments that are not only science-driven but also accessible and scalable.
Why This Matters
This pilot study will be the first of its kind to test this approach in people living with depression. With community support, we’ll be able to complete this critical first step by enrolling 10 participants and collecting the data needed to expand into a larger clinical trial.
How You Can Help
We’re raising funds to support:
Every donation — big or small — helps move us closer to a future where depression treatments are faster, more effective, and more accessible for everyone.
Join us in driving innovation in mental health care.
Together, we can make recovery possible.
🔗 Boosting Depression Recovery with Exercise + Brain Stimulation – Crowdfundraising UBC