Career Opportunities

Research Interests: modeling, analysis, and control of electric power systems.

Research Interests: Human cognition and social attention in complex settings behavioral, neuropsychological, and functional neuroimaging research

Research Interests: Law, Constitutional Law, Gender and Law, Legal and Critical Theory, Prison Law and Policy, Refugee Law, Tort Law

Research Interests: Partial differential equations, mathematical physics

Research Interests: control engineering, data-driven modeling and control, robust and linear parameter-varying control, modeling and control of floating offshore wind turbines and wind farms, modeling and control of COVID-19 outbreak, modeling and control of solar themal systems, control of automotive engines, optimization

Potential project areas:

Floating offshore wind farm control and optimization

Control of an integrated solar thermal system

Modeling and control of metal additive manufacturing processes

Research Interests: Neurorehabilitation, spinal cord, brain

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.