Entrepreneurs at companies like Slack and Hootsuite have put Vancouver’s $23 billion high tech industry on the map. But building the economy of tomorrow—not to mention a utopian, Star Trek future—means taking a step beyond the digital. We need fundamental leaps in computing power, clean energy, and smart materials.
Now a new set of innovators and disruptors are setting up shop in Vancouver, looking to harness the extremes of physics to build tomorrow’s technologies.
Join us as we chat with leaders at Vancouver quantum computing start-up D-Wave, magnetized target fusion pioneer GeneralFusion, and UBC’s world-renowned Quantum Matter Institute. These local, award-winning teams are on the long path in pursuit of game-changing solutions—warpdrive, transporters and holo-decks might be closer than we think.
This event took place on February 3, Wednesday 2016, 6:30-9:00pm at Roundhouse Community Arts Centre, 181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver BC.
Moderator
Lisa Johnson
Lisa Johnson is a reporter for CBC News in Vancouver. She specializes in science and environment stories, from E. coli and isotopes to carbon offsets and killer whales. As a general assignment news reporter, she’s also covered kidnappings, earthquakes, and has won a RTDNA award for her live reports from the Stanley Cup Riot.
Before she became a storyteller, Lisa thought she was going to be a scientist. She graduated from UBC with an Honours degree in biology after pipetting stickleback DNA, counting kelp, and watching fish mating dances.
She returned to UBC for her master’s in journalism, focusing on science and risk communications. She still takes interest in things that many journalists hate, including animal carcasses and math.
Panelists
Vern Brownell
President and CEO
D-Wave
Burnaby-headquartered D-Wave is a world leader in superconducting quantum computers—computers that hold the potential to solve some of the world’s more difficult problems. Its systems are being used by Lockheed-Martin, Google and NASA. Co-founded by UBC alumni Geordie Rose, D-Wave has been granted over 110 US patents.
Dr. Michel Laberge
Founder, President and Chief Scientist
General Fusion Inc.
Founded by UBC graduate Michel Laberge, GeneralFusion has emerged as a global leader in magnetized target fusion. The Vancouver company is working to develop a reactor that compresses magnetically-confined plasma to fusion conditions—in pursuit of clean, cheap energy.
Dr. Jenny Hoffman
Professor, Physics & Astronomy-UBC
UBC Quantum Matter Institute
Researchers at UBC’s QMI are pushing the boundaries of materials research, investigating the fundamental mysteries of super conduction, nano-structures, magnetism, and even more exotic phenomena. Questions being asked at the QMI hold the potential to revolutionize electronics, telecommunications, energy, and next-generation computing.
Dr. Jonathan Bagger
Director
TRIUMF
TRIUMF is Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and accelerator-based science. It brings together technical, engineering, and administrative staff; university researchers and students; private-sector collaborators and licensees; international collaborators; and publicly funded agencies supporting basic research in Canada’s interests. TRIUMF connects Canada to the global science and technology community, and as a bridge between the academic and private sectors, drives Canada’s innovation engine with collaborative and joint projects. TRIUMF’s mission is: To make discoveries that address the most compelling questions in particle physics, nuclear physics, nuclear medicine, and materials science; to act as Canada’s steward for the advancement of particle accelerators and detection technologies; and to transfer knowledge, train highly skilled personnel, and commercialize research for the economic, social, environmental, and health benefit of all Canadians.
Select Articles and Books Available at UBC Library
Haroche, S., DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books, & OpenEdition Books. (2013). Quantum physics. Paris: Collège de France. [Link]
Scheck, F., ebrary eBooks, & SpringerLink ebooks – Physics and Astronomy. (2007). Quantum physics. Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-49972-5 [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Catherine took up the Deanship of the Peter A. Allard School of Law in July 2015. Professor Dauvergne has been working in the area of refugee, immigration, and citizenship law for twenty years. She has written three books that take a broad perspective on the theoretical underpinnings of these areas of law, including considering how human rights principles and discourses fit into a migration and citizenship framework. Dauvergne has recently held a major research grant examining the failure of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect non-citizens. She is currently working on an Australian Research Council grant analyzing gendered aspects of refugee determination. From 2013 to 2015, Dauvergne was the Research Director for the Michigan Colloquium on Challenges to International Refugee Law. In 2012, Catherine Dauvergne was made a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation in recognition of her contributions to public discourse in Canada. Her book The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Societies will be published by Cambridge University Press early in 2016.
Dan Hiebert has two main research interests. The first, and most important to him, is international migration. At the broadest scale, this includes the issue of policy and regulatory systems and how they shape migration, and also how people become mobile, with or without the consent of states. Hiebert tries to understand Canadian immigration policy within this wider context, and consider it in relation to the policies of other countries, especially in Europe and Australasia. At the local scale he studies the consequences of immigration in Canadian cities, highlighting Vancouver’s situation (with a foreign-born population approaching one million). More specifically, he looks at the integration of newcomers in the labour and housing markets of cities, and how this changes their residential structure and social relations. This work is highly integrated with public policy, and Hiebert participates in advisory roles at the local and national level in Canada, and also has regular interaction with government agencies in several other countries. Second, he is working with a large network of scholars on the issue of national security and its relationship with human rights and is particularly interested in the way this relationship evolves in a society like Canada’s, with a high degree of ethno-cultural diversity and strong transnational connections.
Abstract