Kinesiology Professor, Dr. Guy Faulkner has been elected into the Canadian Academy of Health Science (CAHS) for 2023.
Election to the Fellowship in the Academy is considered one of the highest honours for individuals in the Canadian health sciences community. Dr. Faulkner is among 48 new Fellows who are recognized by this honour for their rich and varied expertise.
“I would like to personally congratulate all the applicants that were elected as a Fellow in the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences for 2023. This recognition reflects their dedication and excellence in their field,” said Dr. Jan Sargeant, Chair of the CAHS Fellowship Committee. “We look forward to having their expertise further enrich the work of our Academy.”
Coupled with a broader research interest in public health, Dr. Faulkner’s research has focused on two inter-related themes: the development and evaluation of physical activity interventions; and physical activity and mental health. He was founding editor of the journal ‘Mental Health and Physical Activity’, which fosters the inter-disciplinary development of this research field. He led the development of, and currently coordinates, the Canadian Campus Wellbeing Survey, which is a health and wellbeing surveillance platform for the postsecondary sector.
Broadly speaking, our lab examines cellular mechanisms controlling the malleable nature of both skeletal muscles and adipose tissues, two organs important for modulating energy consumption and storage. In particular, we are interested in how histones, the proteins that help package our DNA neatly inside of the nucleus, regulate gene programs important for determining muscle/adipose development and metabolism, including adaptations to exercise training and perturbations in energy balance. We use numerous cellular and molecular techniques, coupled with deep metabolic phenotyping, to tease apart how post-translational modifications to histones impact these variables in the context of health and disease. Our work spans numerous levels of investigation, from cell, tissue, to whole organism.
Potential Students
Enthusiastic and team-oriented undergraduate and graduates students are encouraged to contact me at the address above. I am deeply committed to building and fostering an equitable, diverse, and inclusive research team and lab environment, where trainees feel comfortable and supported pursuing their goals and ideas. I strongly encourage members of underrepresented groups, including (but not limited to) racialized, 2SLGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, and persons with disabilities to apply within.
UBC’s School of Kinesiology is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Daniel Gamu as an assistant professor in Energy Metabolism, Exercise and Health.
Dr. Gamu joins the School following a postdoctoral fellowship awarded through Michael Smith Health Research in BC in the lab of Dr. William T. Gibson at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute. There, he studied how the development and functional adaptations of brown and beige adipose tissue, two types of fat uniquely specialized for energy expenditure, are regulated by epigenetic processes important for chromatin packaging and gene expression. Dr. Gamu’s work also aims to uncover how such epigenetic machinery is involved in fundamental aspects of skeletal muscle biology, including coordinating physiological adaptations to various types of exercise, and muscle disease.
Dr. Gamu received his MSc and PhD degrees in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Waterloo, where he studied how skeletal muscle Ca2+ handling contributes to muscle and whole-body energy expenditure, including its pathophysiological role in metabolic disorders like obesity and diabetes.
Dr. Gamu will begin his new role at the School on July 1, 2023.
How are humans able to acquire, retain, and adapt a seemingly limitless repertoire of skilled movements across the lifespan? Our lab aims to address this question and thereby shed light on fundamental principles of learning and memory in the healthy and diseased human motor system. Towards this aim, we combine theory with motor psychophysics, computational modeling, and patient testing. Our research into motor learning focuses on the control of goal-directed reaching, an ideal model system to understand interactions between cognition and action given that reaching involves high-level decision-making and low-level automatic processes.
The School of Kinesiology is excited to announce it will be participating in the Vancouver Summer Program (VSP) for 2023.
VSP is an annual, four-week program that provides international students with the opportunity to discover what it’s like to live and learn in Canada and build friendships across the globe.
The School has a long history of participating in VSP prior to the pandemic. Since 2013, KIN has hosted over 400 students from various countries, including China, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Taiwan.
This year, KIN will host 22 students from six countries who will participate in two academic courses: Sport and Exercise Psychology and Exercise Physiology. The courses will be taught by four Kinesiology instructors – Kay Anderson, Meagan Arbeau, Dev (Rōy) Roychowdhury and Jack Zhan. Participating students will also get to take part in socio-cultural activities, including Dragon Boating, visiting the Richmond Oval, and attending a sporting event.
The 2023 program will run from July 15 to August 14, 2023.
Learn more about VSP and stay tuned for updates once the 2023 program begins!
After crossing the stage on May 25, 2023, UBC Kinesiology graduates were joined by faculty, staff, friends, and family to celebrate and recognize their outstanding achievements at the School’s reception, held at Sage Bistro.
The class of 2023 is the largest in KIN history, with 303 undergraduate students and 29 graduate students (MKin, MSc, PhD) receiving their diplomas. Ahmed Masood and Vanessa Meneghetti addressed the reception as the respective undergraduate and graduate class speakers.
The School also presented awards to the heads of each undergraduate BKin stream:
Christopher Hansen-Barkun – Head of Kinesiology and Health Science (KINH)
Christopher Hansen-Barkun – Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology (CSEP) Undergraduate Student Award
Julia Miller – Head of Physical and Health Education (PEDH)
Kara Moscovitz – Head of Multidisciplinary Science (MDSC)
Yekta Saremi – Head of Neuromechanical and Physiological Sciences (NPSC)
Gaganpreet Dhami – Head of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBSC)
Keira Chan – Head of Interdisciplinary Studies (IDKN)
Keira Chan – R.W. Schutz Award (Head of Kinesiology Graduating Class)
We extend a huge congratulations to the class of 2023, and this year’s award winners! Check out photos from the day!
UBC Walking Club is looking for volunteers! The club is a passion project that started with seniors from the UBC community. Each week, the group gets together and walks for 1-1.5 hours. This is a great volunteer opportunity for individuals looking for in person experience working with a vulnerable population in an exercise capacity. We welcome volunteers of all experience levels who feel comfortable walking with our group. The program will run at the same time each week from May – September 2023. There is the option to continue on after September if you wish. The time will be set during office hours based on group availability.
Historical work on the foundations of movement systems is always interesting, but a significant acquisition by UBC Library Rare Books section two years ago opened up new opportunities for kinesiology historians to investigate aspects of body culture during Vienna’s interwar years. The library acquisition included a large and eclectic collection of photographs and documents (mostly in German) that had belonged to Hanne Wassermann, a Jewish gymnastic teacher who grew up during Vienna’s ‘golden autumn’. New developments in radium research, psychology, physiology and anatomy as well as gynecology led to a particular fascination for the body and the flourishing of a variety of functional gymnastic systems at that time.
UBC Kinesiology professor, Patricia Vertinsky, and graduate student, Aishwarya Ramachandran, have been tracing the development of Wassermann’s ‘gymnastic methode’, and her contributions to early developments in massage therapy and daily gymnastic systems, through a scattered collection of documents involving gestalt psychologists and celebrated physicians and scientists. Forced to flee Hitler in 1939, Wassermann eventually arrived in Vancouver in 1943 where she began to teach gymnastics and massage therapy to Vancouver’s Jewish elite. Her involvement in physical culture systems in Vancouver over the next several decades will be the focus of the next phase of research into the Wassermann collection.
