Canada Research Chairs (CRC)
Established in 2000 by the Government of Canada, the Canada Research Chair Program helps chairholders achieve research excellence while improving Canada’s depth of knowledge and strengthening the country’s international competitiveness.
The following UBC Sauder faculty are current Canada Research Chairs:

Tim Huh
B.A., B.Math, M.Math (Waterloo), M.S., Ph.D. (Cornell)
Professor, Operations and Logistics Division
Professor in Operations and Supply Chain Management
Canada Research Chair in Operations Excellence and Business Analytics
"The Canada Research Chair has helped me to connect with companies and government agencies so that I can learn more about their problems and access their data. It has also helped me recruit outstanding graduate students."

Yanwen Wang
BA (Fudan), MPhil (UNSW), PhD (Emory)
Assistant Professor, Marketing and Behavioral Science Division
Canada Research Chair in Marketing Analytics
“My research greatly benefits from the wonderful collaborations I have enjoyed with faculty and students at UBC, as well as across the world. The Canada Research Chair has allowed me to get more collaboration opportunities outside my focal research area, get access to data sets from companies and government agencies, as well as conducting more inter-disiplinary studies. It has helped shape my research agenda in very positive ways.”

Ralph Winter
BSc (UBC), MA, PhD (Berkeley)
Canada Research Chair in Business Economics and Policy
Professor, Strategy and Business Economics Division
"The Canada Research Chair, along with the tremendous support of UBC Sauder, has allowed me a greater focus on research than is normally possible at a major business school. It has also allowed me to travel for seminars and to international conferences attended by the top scholars in my field."
Royal Society of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada (RSC) is the senior national council of distinguished Canadian scholars, humanists, scientists and artists. Today, more than 3,700 individuals have been inducted into the fellowship for their remarkable contributions in the arts, humanities and sciences, and Canadian public life.
The RSC College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists is Canada’s first national system of multidisciplinary recognition for the emerging generation of Canadian intellectual leadership. Members of the college have, at an early stage of their career, demonstrated a high level of achievement.

Izak Benbasat
BA (Robert College, Istanbul), MSc PhD (Minnesota)
Doctorat Honoris Causa, Université de Montréal (2009).
Fellow, Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences)
Sauder Distinguished Professor of Information Systems
Professor Emeritus, Accounting and Information Systems Division
"As Fellow of the RSC I have felt a greater sense of commitment and responsibility to represent Canadian scholars in Information Systems by advancing and disseminating knowledge in the use of Information Technologies for the benefit of individuals and society, and to be a role model and mentor to my junior colleagues and doctoral students."

Katherine White
BA (SFU), MA (Waterloo), PhD (UBC)
Professorship in Consumer Insights, Prosocial Consumption, and Sustainability
Professor, Marketing and Behavioural Science Division
Member of RSC College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists
"Being a member of the Royal Society of Canada is an honour and has given me the opportunity to share ideas with other scholars from across Canada. My advice to young scholars is to study what you love. When you love what you study, the process of research is much more enjoyable."
The Order of Canada
Created in 1967, the Order of Canada recognizes outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation. More than 7,000 people from all sectors of society have been invested into the Order. Those who bear the Order’s iconic snowflake insignia have changed our nation’s measure of success and, through the sum of their accomplishments, have helped us build a better Canada.
2020 Recipients
2019 Recipient
Past Sauder Winners of UBC Research Awards
UBC Jacob Biely Research Prize
UBC Sauder Research Excellence Award, junior category
For candidates who received their Ph.D within the last 10 years, the Research Excellence Award takes a broad view of research excellence and considers factors such as research contributions in scholarly journals, books, reports and working papers, among others.
The Research Excellence Award, Junior Category (for candidates at most 10 years post-PhD) has been awarded to Assistant Professor Yann Cornil. His research on eating behaviour and food marketing has made important contributions to theory and practice. For example, he has conducted programmatic research on the relationship between pleasure and portion size preference, finding that the pleasure of eating can be an ally (rather than a foe) of healthy eating. He identified a mindfulness-based intervention called “multisensory imagery”, leading people to choose smaller food portion sizes while expecting greater pleasure. He then corroborated these findings by developing personality scales and demonstrating that consumers who particularly value the sensory and aesthetic experience of eating (the “Epicurean eaters”) tend to prefer smaller portion sizes, and also tend to have a healthier relationship to food. His research has led to understanding of food satiation (i.e., how enjoyment declines over the course of a meal). His research also contributes to effectively labelling produce with cosmetic defects, and in doing so encourage purchase and waste reduction, and his research has profound theoretical implications for the understanding of the relationship between food marketing and obesity. Additionally, he studies heuristics in financial diversification, finding that investors with low financial literacy tend to erroneously perceive correlated investment assets as less risky than uncorrelated assets, and he presents several interventions to correct for this bias and improve financial decision making among lay investors
UBC Sauder Research Excellence Award, senior category
For candidates who received their Ph.D. more than 10 years ago, the Research Excellence Award takes a broad view of research excellence and considers factors such as research contributions in scholarly journals, books, reports and working papers, among others.
The Research Excellence Award, Senior Category (for candidates more than 10 years post-PhD) has been awarded to Professor Kai Li. Professor Li is a world thought leader on the economic consequences of corporate governance mechanisms, with a recent focus on cultural influences on corporate governance and innovation policy. She has an outstanding record of research and has made extensive contributions to the finance profession. She is a very highly cited scholar, with most papers appearing in the top journals in her field. Her prolific research output has garnered national and international awards, visiting professorships at universities around the world, with invitations for research seminars, public lectures, and conference presentations. She is a highly-regarded and sought-after panelist with nearly 40 invitations at research camps and mentorship/networking events organized by international professional organizations. Her research has been featured in more than 200 national and international media/TV/radio interviews, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, Time Magazine, Reuters, CNBC, Bloomberg, Dow Jones Newswire, New Yorker, BBC, BNN, CBC National, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, U.S. News & World Report, Harvard Business Review, and Yahoo! Finance. Kai has served on 10 editorial boards spanning the most selective journals in finance, international business, and management. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of International Business Studies, and Journal of Financial Stability. She has also worked tirelessly in mentoring junior scholars around the world, with more than 60 collaborators from 17 different countries and regions, including doctoral students in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. At UBC Sauder, she has served as supervisor, co-supervisor, or member of the supervisory committee for 22 doctoral students and as mentor for five Commerce Scholars.
The Killam Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching
The Killam Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching has been awarded to Associate Professor Chunhua Wu, who is being recognized for excellence in teaching his courses on Data Analytics, Market Research, and Data Visualization. He helps students set personal goals with concrete analytical examples to show what every student can attain with their efforts. Instead of the “dummy data” a typically adopted in most textbooks, most of the assignments in his class are based on real data that he has personally collected. For example, in his Market Research course, he provides students with diamond pricing and sales data from his research and guides them to discover the underlying secret pricing formula through regression analysis. In his Data Visualization course, he works with students to visualize a day in the life of taxi drivers and how recently-introduced mobile hailing apps change drivers' behaviours. He makes class engagement a top priority, designing student activities in topics ranging from case discussions to coding competitions in a way that helps students participate and learn in a collaborative way. He believes that course content is the fundamental source of student interest, with relevance being the key to drive engagement. He offers his students world-class undergraduate education unique to UBC Sauder.
The CPA Teaching Award for excellence in graduate teaching

Wayne Rawcliffe
BA (University of Saskatchewan), B. Ed (University of Calgary)
MBA (Royal Roads University), Ed. D. (Walden University)
Full-time Lecturer, Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources Division
Law and Business Communications Group
The CPA Teaching Award for excellence in graduate teaching
2020/2021 recipient
The CPA Teaching Award for excellence in graduate teaching has been awarded to Full-time Lecturer Wayne Rawcliffe. In re-designing his courses for virtual delivery, he went above and beyond the call of duty. He developed entirely new case analyses and debrief materials and simulation activities. Leveraging media, he designed reflection quizzes, discussion boards, and produced 24 hours of asynchronous video content in the Sauder Studios. He consistently receives very high teaching evaluations across all the graduate programs in which he teaches (MM, PMBA, IMBA, and MBA) and his qualitative student feedback is exceptionally positive. Beyond the classroom, he makes significant contributions through his involvement in UBC Sauder activities. For example, he attends all student graduation and other social events and he has been invited to speak at the MM graduation. Students keep in touch with him long after their graduation, updating him of their career progression. He enthusiastically accepts formal service requests to the benefit of his colleagues and students. For example, he led a Teaching Online Series session entitled “Tips and Strategies for Effective Student Teams.” He regularly volunteers as a faculty advisor to student groups (UBC HRM Club, Enactus UBC) and presents talks to student groups (UBC Seed). Last year, he led UBC Sauder’s HR case competition team to a first-place prize at HRC West. He has served on the Loran Scholarship Foundation committee and for the past five years has been involved with the Jump Start program.
The Alumni Talking Stick Award
The Alumni Talking Stick Award has been awarded to Associate Professor Jan Bena for his outstanding pedagogical innovation in several finance courses including COMM374: Applied Financial Markets, COMM387: Entrepreneurial Finance, BAFI520: Empirical Finance, and COMM695: Advanced Topics in Empirical Corporate Finance. Two of those courses, COMM374 and BAFI520, were new courses he developed himself, and significantly redesigned COMM387 along with Justin Bull. All of the courses he taught have greatly contributed to our BCOM/MBA/Ph.D. students’ experiential learning. The common theme underlying the pedagogical innovation is that these new and/or re-designed courses are grounded in finance and economic theory and enriched with current-date capital market information and real-world applications, resulting in rigorous curriculum and engaging learning opportunities for our students. All three BCOM/MBA courses have helped our students master (a) fundamental knowledge—understanding the roles of the investing public, corporate sector, and financial intermediation sector in national economy and how they interact in the capital markets; (b) practical knowledge—an ability to make sound financial decisions in both personal and job-related applications; and (c) reflective knowledge— an ability to adapt and adjust to fast evolving environments through self-reflection while still drawing on finance and economic theory.
University-wide Prizes and Awards
UBC Killam Faculty Research Prize
Year | Winners |
2019/20 | Daniel Skarlicki |
2018/19 | Kate White |
2015/16 | Darren Dahl |
2014/15 | Kai Li |
2010/11 | Ralph Winter |
2009/10 | Tan Wang |
2008/09 | Sandra Robinson and Yair Wand |
2007/08 | Keith Head |
2005/06 | Thomas Ross |
2004/05 | Dale Griffin |
2003/04 | Maurice Levi |
1999/00 | In Memoriam: Gerald Feltham |
1997/98 | Izak Benbasat |
1995/96 | Ilan Vertinsky |
1990/91 | Barbara Spencer |
1989/90 | In Memoriam: William Stanbury |
1986/87 | James Brander and Charles Weinberg |
UBC Jacob Biely Faculty Research Prize
Year | Winners |
2020 | Sandra Robinson |
1997 | James Brander |
UBC Killam Awards for Excellence in Mentoring
Year | Winners |
2011 | Adlai Fisher |

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Have a question?
Our team is happy to help.
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Get in touch
Jessie Lam
Manager, Research Support Services and Special Projects
+1 604.822.8399
jessie.lam@sauder.ubc.ca