Career Opportunities

Whether you are a prospective PDF looking for a position at UBC or a current UBC PDF seeking the next step in your career, this section provides valuable information to help you advance.

Becoming a PDF at UBC

Eligibility

Postdoctoral research fellowship eligibility can be found in UBC Policy AP10, Postdoctoral Fellows. In order to be eligible for a postdoctoral fellowship, a postdoctoral fellow generally must be within 5 years of being awarded a PhD or within 10 years of being awarded a M.D. or D.D.S. degree.

First Steps

The first step in finding a PDF position at UBC is to search the research interests of individual faculty members to locate a potential supervisor. Faculty members can be contacted directly to discuss potential PDF appointment opportunities, and applications can be made directly to faculty members.

Postdoctoral appointments at UBC are managed through individual faculties and departments. The Postdoctoral Fellows Office does not accept applications nor are we involved in the hiring process.

Post a Position

If you are a UBC faculty, department/unit, or laboratory and are interested in posting a position, please refer to the Job Ads page on the G+PS Faculty & Staff portal. Positions can be cross-posted to a number of job search websites, including EurAxess and LinkedIn. For additional information, contact the PDFO.

UBC PDF Postings

While most PDF positions at UBC can by found by contacting a faculty member directly, some positions may be posted on individual faculty websites. Please visit Faculty Career Opportunities for a comprehensive list of links to UBC's faculties. Postdoctoral Fellowship positions may also be posted on UBC's Faculty Careers Workday portal.

The following faculty members have indicated to us that they are actively looking to attract Postdocs.

Show Faculty Interested in Postdocs

Research Interests: global health, access and use of medicines and health services among vulnerable populations, community readiness, improving patient/client self-efficacy to engage effectively in their health care processes and decision-making, implementation and evaluation of patient care and health promotion programs, and capacity building of current and future frontline health professionals

Potential project areas:

Global Health - Improving child malnutrition in low-resource countries

Research Interests: Optimization, Control and Operations Research, Solar and Wind Energy, Artificial Intelligence, Large Scale Optimization

Potential project areas:

My research group focuses on the design and implementation of large-scale local and global optimization algorithms to tackle problems that arise in diverse decision-making paradigms such as machine learning, stochastic optimization, and optimal control. Our algorithms combine mathematical techniques and emerging high-performance computing hardware to achieve computational scalability.

The problems that we are addressing are of unprecedented complexity and defy the state-of-the-art. For example, in our recent work, we developed a novel global optimization algorithm capable of solving k-center clustering problems (an unsupervised learning task) with up to 1 billion samples, while state-of-the-art approaches in the literature can only address several thousand samples.

We are currently using our tools to address engineering and scientific questions that arise in diverse application domains, including optimal decision trees, optimal clustering, deep-learning-based control, optimal power system planning, AI for bioprocess operation, and optimal design of zero energy buildings.

 

Selected publications

K. Hua, J. Ren, and Y. Cao. “A Scalable Deterministic Global Optimization Algorithm for Training Optimal Decision Tree on Large Datasets.” Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022.

Y. Li, K. Hua, and Y. Cao. “Using stochastic programming to train neural network approximation of nonlinear MPC laws.” Automatica, 146, 110665, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.automatica.2022.110665

M. Shi, K. Hua, J. Ren, and Y. Cao. “Global Optimization of K-Center Clustering.” International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/shi22b.html

K. Hua, M. Shi, and Y. Cao. “A Scalable Deterministic Global Optimization Algorithm for Clustering Problems.” International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2021. http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/hua21a.html

M. Mehrtash, and Y. Cao. “A New Global Solver for Transmission Expansion Planning with AC Network Model.” IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 37(1), 282 – 293, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPWRS.2021.3086085

Research Interests: Arthritis, Models of Care, Health Services Research, Medical Help-seeking, Web-based Interventions, Life-style Interventions Physical Activity., Arthritis & Joint Health

Potential project areas:

  1. Physical activity promotion using digital technology
  2. Shared-decision making
  3. Patient self-management
  4. Integrated knowledge translation - patient engagement in research
  5. Implementation science

Visit the Arthritis & Implementation Science Program website for a current list of Dr Li's research projects: http://arthritis.rehab.med.ubc.ca/

Research Interests: Free accredited education, Preventive medicine

Potential project areas:

I perform occasional domestic and global intervention research on physicians' and medical students' health practices and their effects on patients, on climate change, THC policy in Canada and the US, the built environment and health, and other topics of interest where I can make a particular difference [more on that here:  https://ubcmj.med.ubc.ca/becoming-a-health-advocate-an-interview-with-erica-frank/ ].

My primary research is on NextGenU.org, essentially the world's first free university (NextGenU.org is for credit, for free, unlike any other organization).  Starting with a focus in the health sciences, NextGenU.org's accredited courses are being used in 191 (of 193) UN Member States/Countries, and we have just launched our ultimate outcome:  U.S. accreditation for the first globally free degree, a Master's in Public Health [more about that MPH here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J9eS-jX32sINrqcFmtrG3gC86RtuSSyH/view?usp=sharing ]

Courses available for trainees and for research span from college-level pre-health sciences and community health worker trainings, through public health graduate training, and a MedSchoolInABox (codeveloped with Stanford, U of Toronto, and U Central Florida) that includes Graduate Medical Education. This educational system is not a set of Massive Open Online Courses -- courses are competency-based, and include online knowledge transfer, a web-based global peer community of practice, skills-based mentorships, and a free certificate. NextGenU.org's accredited partners, North American universities that are outstanding in each particular course topic, give learners credit for this training (or institutions can adopt them and use them with their students), all for the first time ever cost-free, and also advertisement-free, barrier-free, and carbon-free.  

Founded/invented by me in 2001 (predating MOOCs by 7 years), we globally launched our first full course in March 2012, with a dozen free, tested, and accredited health sciences courses currently offered at NextGenU.org.  We will enroll our first residents (in Texas) in July 2020; we are developing these Preventive Medicine residencies with the American College of Preventive Medicine, CDC, European Lifestyle Medicine Organization, Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Harvard, Stanford Medicine, WHO, and others to create the first globally-available Graduate Medical Education.

We have tested and published on this free model in North American medical, public health, and undergraduate students, and in community health workers and primary care physicians in Kenya and in India, demonstrating as much knowledge gain and greater student satisfaction than with traditional courses, and the creation of a global community of practice.  You can see those publications here:  https://nextgenu.org/static/publications.html

And finally, NextGenU.org has a sustainable business model.  While we don't have $ currently designated for graduate students or postdocs, we have a $20 million endowment (from the Annenberg Physician Training Program) that covers many core expenses, and receive additional grants and contracts to create, test, and disseminate trainings from governments (e.g., $1.4 million from Grand Challenges Canada, US CDC), quasi-governmental organizations (e.g., NATO Science for Peace, WHO), universities, foundations, professional societies, and individuals.

I also have an appointment in CENES https://cenes.ubc.ca/profile/erica-frank/ exploring at the intersept of Exile Reintegration, Holocaust Studies, and Public Health.

Research Interests: genomics, bioinformatics, cellular and molecular neuroscience, genetics, disorders of the nervous system

Potential project areas:

Please visit https://pavlab.msl.ubc.ca/research/ for more information on our research.

Research Interests: Spanish Cultural Studies, Catalan Literature and Culture, Gender Studies, Masculinities, Feminisms, Self-writing, Hispanic Cinemas

Research Interests: American literature, twentieth century and contemporary, Faulkner, Psychoanalysis, Vietnam, the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan

Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Pathology, Cancer Genomics, Computational Biology, Digital Pathology, Image Processing, Machine Learning, Ovarian Cancer, Signal Processing, Multi-modal Learning

Research Interests: Cataloguing and classification, Cultural Institutions (Museums, Libraries, etc.), Impacts of New Information Technologies, Information practice, Museum anthropology, Science and technology studies

Research Interests: conflicts and governance issues around resource extraction and intensive land use, transnational land investments, promotion of monoculture plantations at the expense of more biodiverse systems, private sector sustainable governance initiatives

Potential project areas:

I'm especially seeking folks with experience (and language skills) in China, Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia. I'm also excited to mentor non-native English speakers, non-traditional students broadly defined, and folks committed to fostering diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. See my website (https://julietlu.com) and the Interdisciplinary Biodiversity Solutions website (https://ibios.ubc.ca) for a sense of the work we might do together.

Online Career Resources

After your first position at UBC, you may move to a PDF or faculty position at another university. Postings external to UBC may be found at the following websites:

The UBC Postdoctoral Association also maintains a Jobs page on their website.

UBC Faculty Careers

For current PDFs looking to embark on the next phase of their academic career, please visit Faculty Career Opportunities for a list of current UBC faculty opportunities. Please also visit UBC faculty websites for available positions within each specific faculty.

Current postings outside UBC