New Clinical Faculty Teaching Opportunity | PSYT Year 3 Medical Students

** Sent on behalf of Dr. Kathryn Fung, Undergraduate Program Director, Psychiatry **

Dear Clinical Faculty,

We are pleased to announce a new faculty teaching opportunity with our Year 3 Psychiatry medical students. As part of our program improvements, we are moving to a province-wide academic half day curriculum for students, while keeping the benefits of small group learning. The tutor materials have been piloted with success and will be ready for use in June 2024.

The format will include two standardized, case-based, small-group teaching sessions on Zoom on select Tuesday afternoons throughout the year. Each tutor will have a group of about 5-6 students. Each session will cover one core topic. The topics will repeat with each block of students.

These changes will impact our adult psychiatry content. Child Psychiatry will continue to be delivered as normal, and Geriatric Psychiatry content will continue to be supported by the Neurocognitive Disorders module and lectures in the IM-PSYT academic teaching sessions.

This is a wonderful opportunity for you to gain teaching hours from your own home or office. The role is to facilitate a discussion and student learning using the provided tutor guide. You do not need to be an ‘expert’ in a topic. You will be able to connect and work with students from all our sites – something that hasn’t been possible in this way before.

If you are interested, please complete the preliminary Sign Up Survey HERE.

Once recruitment begins, we will reconnect to arrange optimal scheduling of your sessions.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Eva (eva.angelopoulos@ubc.ca) or myself (kathryn.Fung@vch.ca).

Sincerely,

Dr. Kathryn Fung
Program Director, Undergraduate Medical Education
UBC Department of Psychiatry

I humbly acknowledge, with gratitude, that I live, work, and play as an uninvited guest on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil- Waututh) Nations. 

Dear Staff, Fellows, Residents, and Colleagues,

As you may recall, the Department, in partnership with BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute and the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, has been engaged in a recruitment process for a full-time academic faculty position in the area of youth depression. This opportunity was created for Psychiatry through the Faculty of Medicine Academic Renewal Program, intended to support the recruitment of tenure-stream faculty in Translational Science and Medicine.

Now that the recruitment process has been completed, I am delighted to announce that Dr. Tamara Vanderwal has been appointed as an Assistant Professor, Tenure Track, as of April 1, 2024. I believe many of you are already well acquainted with Dr. Vanderwal, a child psychiatrist based at BC Children’s Hospital and clinician scientist leading the Naturalistic Neuroimaging Lab. Prior to moving into her new tenure track appointment, she has held an Assistant Professor (Partner) appointment in the UBC Department of Psychiatry since 2018.

As a new tenure-stream faculty member, Dr. Vanderwal will develop a precision psychiatry research program to identify, characterize, and validate biomarkers to inform personalized care for high-complexity psychiatric youth with depression who are at higher risk of substance use, low social functioning, recurrent depression in adulthood, and suicide. She will also continue to build upon her innovative line of research using fMRI to study complex patterns of brain function under naturalistic conditions in child psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Vanderwal has been the recipient of several notable awards, including the UBC Health Innovation Funding Investment (HIFI) Award and the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund (JELF) Infrastructure Award, and was named among Brain Canada’s Future Leaders in Canadian Brain Research. I am confident that, in joining our tenure-track faculty, she will continue to be successful as she embarks on this exciting chapter of her career.  Please join me in warmly congratulating Dr. Vanderwal and welcoming her to her new academic appointment in the Department.

Sincerely,

Dr. Lakshmi N. Yatham, MBBS, FRCPC, MRCPsych (UK), MBA (Exec)
Professor and Head, UBC Department of Psychiatry
Director, Institute of Mental Health, UBC
Regional Head and Program Medical Director, VCH/PHC

The UBC Department of Psychiatry Administration Office respectfully acknowledges the land on which we live, work and play is the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-waututh).

On the morning of March 19th UBC Cybersecurity was made aware of a compromised account (see below) that was leveraged by malicious actors to send phishing messages internally within UBC and externally to other organizations.

Fortunately, they were able to quickly take action against the compromised account and secure it as well as extract the phishing message from affected recipients. However, if you have already clicked on the link in the phishing email and divulged your CWL login credentials, please do the following:

1. Initiate a full virus scan of your computer in case there were any malware droppers or malicious code on the website that downloaded and installed malware. If using Cisco Secure Endpoint you can follow these instructions: hXXps://ubc.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0016405

2. From a known clean computer perform a password reset through the CWL myAccount hXXps://www.myaccount.ubc.ca/myAccount/

3. When changing your password, make sure the new password is complex, hard to guess, not a reused password, and not a password that has been used elsewhere.

4. Consider using a password manager. UBC Privacy Matters has some tips and tricks for setting up a password manager here: hXXps://privacymatters.ubc.ca/password-manager

Please report future phishing emails to UBC Cybersecurity by sending the email as an attachment to security@ubc.ca.

Some examples of indicators of a phishing message:

• Asks you to divulge personal information
• Asks for login credentials, credit card number, etc.
• Isn’t personalized (uses generic greetings such as ‘Dear Customer’)
• Has links that don’t match what is displayed (when you hover over the link with your mouse)
• Has a false sense of urgency
• Is poorly written
• Is too good to be true
• Asks you to open an attachment

Additional resources:

Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre – hXXps://www.antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca/report-signalez-eng.htm

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s Identity Theft Guide – hXXps://www.priv.gc.ca/en/privacy-topics/identities/identity-theft/guide_idt/

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to UBC Cybersecurity at security@ubc.ca.