Council 2021-2022

Updated: July 7, 2021

Members-at-large

Gail Bellward - Member at Large (2020-2023) and member of Finance Committee (2021 - )

Dr. Gail Bellward is a Professor Emerita of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences.  Her undergraduate teaching areas were cardiovascular and renal pharmacology, and general toxicology. Gail’s focus as a research scientist was the study of drug metabolism and drug interactions. She was Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the Faculty for a number of years, and served on many UBC committees, as well as on Senate.

Gail was a Killam Senior Fellow; won the YWCA Woman of Distinction award; and senior awards from the Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada and the Society of Toxicology of Canada. Gail was a Director of the Science Council of BC; and served on many national and international science boards, including the Medical Research Council of Canada, and the International Union of Pharmacology. Of note, she was the first woman president of two learned societies, the Pharmacological Society of Canada and the Society of Toxicology of Canada. After her retirement, Gail served as the Chair of the UBC Clinical Research Ethics Board for four years, followed by six years as a lay member for the Law Society of BC.

Sandra Bressler - Member at Large (2021-2023 and 2019-2021), Member Programs Committee (2019-), Member Transitions to Retirement Committee (2019-)

Sandra was recently awarded Clinical Associate Professor Emerita status. She is recognized for her contributions to education, coordinating numerous students in clinical placements, directly supervising  students, and supporting supervisory staff. Sandra also taught multiple courses for the Online Master of Rehabilitation Science Program and the Master of Occupational Therapy, in addition to helping develop a postgraduate program for clinicians in British Columbia.

Sandra’s many contributions to her profession include an instrumental role in supporting the development of the College of Occupational Therapists of BC, where she served as a board member from its inception from 2000 to 2004 and member of the Inquiry Committee from 2001-2016. She served as President of the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists and the President of the Canadian Occupational Therapy Foundation. After serving as CAOT Delegate to the World Federation of Occupational Therapists for nine years, she joined the Executive Management Team of the WFOT as Program Coordinator, Practice Development. Recognizing her long-standing contributions to the profession, Sandra was bestowed with the prestigious Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists Fellowship Award and received the Karen Goldenberg Award for outstanding volunteer achievement from the Canadian Occupational Foundation.

Margery Fee - Co-Chair of Communications Committee and Newsletter Editor (2019-2022)

Margery Fee, PhD (Toronto), FRSC, Professor Emerita of English, specializes in Canadian, post-colonial and Indigenous literatures and Canadian English. She held the David and Brenda McLean Chair in Canadian Studies (2015-2017) to work on early Indigenous oral and literary production. In 2008, as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence, she worked on racialization and genetics at the UBC Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. She edited the UBC journal Canadian Literature from 2007 to 2015.

With Jan McAlpine, she co-authored The Guide to Canadian English Usage (Oxford, 2nd ed., 2011), and, with chief editor Stefan Dollinger, edited DCHP-2: The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (2nd ed., online, 2017). Recent publications are Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015), Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America (Broadview, 2016) co-edited with Dory Nason; Polar Bear (Reaktion, 2019) and an edited collection of Jean Barman’s essays, On the Cusp of Contact: Gender, Space, and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia (Harbour, 2020). With Daniel Heath Justice, she is co-investigator on the SSHRC-funded project, The People and the Text, led by Deanna Reder (thepeopleandthetext.ca). 

Paul Harrison - Member at Large (2021-2024) and Member of Membership Committee (2021- )

Paul Harrison joined the Department of Botany in 1975 and retired as Associate Professor Emeritus in 2019. A marine ecologist, his research focussed on the effects of habitat disruption on marine communities, specifically on seagrass beds which are important rearing and feeding habitats for commercially important crustacean and fish species. Research took him to Atlantic Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and the Philippines as well as the Salish Sea. He taught marine ecology and introductory biology, the latter leading to a term  as Director of the First-year Biology Lab Program. His interest in student academic and personal development led him into roles as an undergraduate advisor for the Biology Program and the Faculty of Science and then Associate Dean, Students in Science from 1999 to 2017. He oversaw the growth of the Science Advising and Student Development units from a staff of two to a team of a dozen, making strong connections to other student-support units on campus and, for that work, was given the Margaret Fulton Award for Student Development. 

Paul has served on the Vancouver Senate for many years. Currently he serves as a “convocation senator” on the Academic Policy, Agenda, Nominating and Student Appeals on Academic Discipline committees as well as on the Elections committee of the (cross-campus) Council of Senates. Gardening, volunteering for his church, and staying in touch with distant children and grandchildren occupy much of his spare time.

Michael MacEntee - Member at Large (2019-2022), Chair Finance Committee (2019-2021) and Member Finance Committee (2021- )

Professor Emeritus MacEntee is past-president of the Royal College of Dentists of Canada, the Geriatric Oral Research Group of the International Association of Dental Research, the International College of Prosthodontists, the Association of Prosthodontists of Canada, and the Vancouver Institute. He received in 2009 the Distinguished Scientist Award for his research in dental geriatrics, and in 2015 became an elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. From 2012-2018 he was editor-in-chief of Gerodontology (the international journal of dental geriatrics).  

Alan Mackworth - Member at Large (2021-2024), Chair Finance Committee (2021- )

Alan Mackworth is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science. He works on constraint-based artificial intelligence with applications in vision, robotics, situated agents, assistive technology and computational sustainability. He is known for his work on constraint satisfaction, robot soccer, cognitive robotics, hybrid systems and constraint-based agents. He has authored over 130 papers and co-authored two books: Computational Intelligence: A Logical Approach and Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents.

Alan co-founded, and happily taught in, the pioneering UBC Cognitive Systems Program, spanning Arts and Science. He held a CRC in AI and served as President of three national and global AI societies: CAIAC, IJCAII, and AAAI.  He was the founding Director of the UBC Laboratory for Computational Intelligence and of the UBC Centre for AI Decision-making and Action (CAIDA). He also co-founded two NCEs, IRIS and AGE-WELL, and the AI network of BC (AInBC). He currently acts as a consultant and occasional lecturer. He is a Fellow of AAAI, CAIAC, CIFAR, AGE-WELL and the Royal Society of Canada.

Patricia Shaw - Member at Large (2021-2024)

As a linguistic anthropologist, Patricia A. Shaw founded the First Nations Languages Program at UBC, and continues post-retirement to work in collaboration with several Indigenous communities and scholars on endangered language documentation and reclamation initiatives.

She was the Founding Editor of the UBC Press First Nations Languages Series; Director of the Aboriginal Languages and Literacy Institute at UBC (2006); and Director of the BC Breath of Life Archival Institute for First Nations Languages (2017). 

International invited faculty positions include Semester at Sea; the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang); the UC Berkeley Breath of Life, and the Smithsonian National Breath of Life Archival Institutes for Indigenous Languages. As well, she served as President of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA).

She has been honoured with the UBC Dean of Arts Award (2015) and the SSILA Ken Hale Award (2017).

Richard Unger

Richard Unger - Member at Large (2020-2022), Chair Finance Committee (2021-22) and Member Finance Committee (2020-2022)

Richard W Unger is professor emeritus of history.  He joined the department in 1969 and was its head from 1986 to 1991.  While teaching concentrated on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance research included economic history and history of technology down to the twentieth century in the New World and Asia as well as in Europe.  He has worked on the design and construction of ships in the Netherlands and throughout the world in the age of sail, on the economics of the production and consumption of beer from its origins some 5,000 years ago, on medieval and Renaissance cartography, on energy consumption in Canada since 1800 and on works of art as sources for the study of technology.  He has been a fellow of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study. All Souls College, University of Oxford, The National Humanities Center in the United States and of the UBC Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Study.  He is the former chair of the Committee for Medieval Studies in the Faculty of Arts and former president of the Medieval Academy of America.  Recent publications include (with John Thistle) Energy Consumption in Canada in the 19th and 20th Centuries  A Statistical Outline, 2013; Ships on Maps: Pictures of Power in Renaissance Europe, 2010;“English Energy Consumption, Beer and the Impact of the Black Death,” European Review of Economic History, 24 (2020), 134–156, “Channelling violence at sea: States, international trade and the transformation of naval forces from the high Middle Ages to the age of steam,” The International Journal of Maritime History 31 (2019), 202–221 and “Shifting Energy Sources in Canada: An International Comparison, 1870-2000,” Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes D’Histoire, 53 (2018), 480-514.

Marvin Westwood

Marvin Westwood - Member at Large (2020-2023)

Marv Westwood is a Professor Emeritus in the Counselling Psychology Program, and recipient of the Royal Canadian Legion Professorship in Education. His major areas of teaching and research are focused on program development, teaching and delivery of group-based approaches to help clients make effective life transitions. Prior to coming to UBC, he taught at McGill  University (1973-80). and prior to that St. Francis Xavier University (1971-73).  Over the past 25 years he has led the development of the UBC Veterans Transition Program to help promote recovery from war related stress injuries for which he received both the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals in 2005 and 2013. In 2012 he established the Centre for Group Counselling and Trauma (CGCT) for teaching and research in the area of group work. He is advisor to the President’s initiative for the development of UBC Veteran Friendly Campus.  Currently, he is Senior Advisor for the Institute of Veteran Education Transition (IVET).