Past Principals

Anne Junker, Past Principal (2022-2023) and Vice-Principal (2021-2022)

Anne Junker is an Associate Professor Emeritus in Pediatrics.  She earned her medical degree at the University of Calgary, undertook her training in pediatrics at UBC/BC Children’s Hospital (BCCH) and completed her pediatric immunology subspecialty training at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1983, she began her career at UBC/BCCH as an Assistant Professor and over the next 35+ years, held a variety of roles in addition to her clinical practice: Department of Pediatrics Resident Training Program Director (1984-89); Senior Director for Medical Specialties at BCCH (1995-2010); Director for Clinical Research, BCCH Research Institute (2001-12); and Associate Head for Faculty Development in the Department of Pediatrics (2012-19).

During her term at the BCCH Research Institute she established the Clinical Research Support Unit and the Children & Women’s site Research Ethics Board and held a major role as Chair of the Quality Committee (2010-2016) in the development of the BC Clinical Research Infrastructure Network, now Clinical Trials BC, which now forms a part of Michael Smith Health Research BC.

In this last decade, she served as the Scientific Director of the national Maternal Infant Child & Youth Research Network which links the 3 largest maternal and all 17 pediatric academic health centers in Canada. She held a significant role in representing the child & maternal health research community at CIHR and Health Canada; in representing Canada internationally; and bringing experience to invited international working groups of the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health on research ethics and data management.

Joost Blom, Principal 2021-2022, Allard School of Law

Joost Blom joined the Allard School of Law in 1972, served as Associate Dean 1982-85, and as Dean 1997-2003. His teaching subjects were Contracts, Torts, Conflict of Laws, and Intellectual Property. He became Professor Emeritus in 2017. He continues to teach at the law school part-time. He received the Faculty of Law Teaching Excellence Award 2005. He has been a Visiting Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School 1981, Part-time Lecturer at the University of Victoria 1979-81, Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Canadian Studies Centre at the University of Trier (Germany) 1996, and Senior Fellow, Faculty of Law, University of Melbourne 2006. Joost's research and writing have been concentrated in the areas of Contracts and Torts, focusing on the relationship between them; and in Conflict of Laws (Private International Law).

Joost served as President of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers 1983-84. He was elected by the lawyers in Vancouver District as a bencher of the Law Society of BC for four terms 2004-11 and became a Life Bencher as of 2012. He is currently Chair of the Mackenzie King Scholarship Board of Trustees (since 1986) and a Titular Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. He has also been Chair of the Board of Trustees of the UBC Faculty Pension Plan 2004-20. He was awarded the designation of Queen's Counsel (for B.C.) in 1985.

Graeme Wynn, Principal 2020-2021, Department of Geography

Graeme Wynn is Professor Emeritus of Geography. Born and raised into his early teens in South Africa, Graeme entered graduate school in Toronto by a circuitous and serendipitous route that included time in a naval training college, a year at a newly-established comprehensive school in England, and an undergraduate education in the University of Sheffield. Trained as an historical geographer, he has had a career-long fascination with and involvement in environmental history. Rooted in these two disciplines and engaged with the environmental sciences, his research is interdisciplinary, and its foci have broadened over time from eastern Canada to New Zealand, and (to a lesser degree) Australia. He has contributed broadly to Canadian Studies. He taught at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in the mid-1970s before relocating to the University of British Columbia in January 1976. At UBC he was variously Associate Dean of Arts, Head of Geography, holder of the Brenda and David McLean Chair Professorship in Canadian Studies and a long-term member of the UBC Press Publications Board, which he chaired between 2009 and 2016. He also served as editor of BC Studies for eight years before his retirement in 2016. Elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2008, he is the current President of the American Society for Environmental History.

Donald Fisher, Principal 2019-2020, Department of Educational Studies

Don Fisher is Professor Emeritus of Educational Studies, Faculty of Education. He joined the Department of the Foundations of Education (later Educational Studies) in 1976 by way of the University of Birmingham and the University of California, Berkeley. He has served as President of four national organizations, most recently with the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. He was elected to the UBC Senate in 1999 and served as Head and Chair of the Department of Educational Studies, 2010-2013. He retired in 2014 but immediately took on the role of Vice-Principal of Green College and served as Acting-Principal, 2015-2016. He continues in his role as Vice-Principal, with the particular responsibility for liaising with Green College Society Members. Using an historical sociology approach, Dr. Fisher’s research focuses on the impact of large scale philanthropy on university education, boundary work within the social sciences and between that group of disciplines and other knowledge areas, academy-industry relations and the marketization of university systems, and the formulation and implementation of higher education policy. He enjoys hiking, swimming and skiing.

Dianne Newell, Principal 2018-2019, Department of History

Past-Principal Dianne Newell is Professor Emerita, Department of History. She joined UBC in 1980 and retired in 2013; since 2015, she has held a post-retirement faculty appointment with UBC’s new Institute for the Oceans & Fisheries (IOF), where she is involved with the Aboriginal Fisheries Research Unit. Her research and publishing interests span a range of subjects within these broad areas: Canadian social and economic history; science and technology in late industrial society; Pacific/Northwest Coast fisheries and anthropology; women in Cold War science fiction and 1970s radio journalism; and First Nations women working in the industrial era.
These days, in addition to her activities at the College and the IOF, she is an ongoing Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Technical University of Munich, where she has collaborated on several fascinating interdisciplinary projects, including on historic climate change in the Western Greenland-Labrador coastal areas since the late 1700s using a data base which has been created with several centuries of daily instrumental recordings of weather by the Moravian missionaries who were stationed there.