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Professor, Environmental Systems Engineering, Geo-Environmental Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering, University of British Columbia

Biography

Loretta Li joined the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia in 1995. She has a strong background in fundamental and applied work on the spread, degradation and treatment of contaminants in water/soil/sediment and the natural environment. Li led and founded the UBC Cluster for Microplastics, Health and the Environment in 2021 with a group of outstanding researchers.

Li’s research has helped influence strategic planning efforts and key policy decisions on issues related to contaminated sites and contamination by per- and poly-fluorinated alkyl substances (PFASs), as well as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). She has worked with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the Stockholm Convention, Environment Canada, Health Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the BC Ministry of Environment in addressing these chemicals of emerging concern.

In the past, Li has served as a project engineer and a junior structural engineer and worked with a number of professional societies and associations. She has made significant technical contributions to her profession. Her findings on metal dispersion and distributions along the highway were used by the B.C. Ministry of Transportation (MOT) and Infrastructure. Her research has also been used extensively in environmental assessments along the Sea-to-Sky, Gateway, Okanagan Lake Bridge and Highway 37 Widening projects.

Li’s education includes a PhD and an MSc in Environmental Soil Science at Queen’s University and an MEng in Geo-environmental Engineering at McGill University.

Professor, Chemical and Materials Engineering, ß÷ßäÉçÇø

Biography

Janet A. W. Elliott is a distinguished professor and Canada Research Chair in thermodynamics in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering and an adjunct professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology. Elliott was the first female graduate of the Engineering Physics Option of Engineering Science at the University of Toronto and received a MSc and PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Toronto. Elliott has also been a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics.

Elliott currently serves as editor-in-chief for the journal, Cryobiology. She also serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, B, & C , Langmuir and Advances in Colloid and Interface Science. She has previously served as a member of the Physical Sciences Advisory Committee for the Canadian Space Agency, the Board of Directors of the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering and the Executive Committee of the American Chemical Society Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry.

Elliott has won numerous honours and awards, including Fellowship in the Canadian Academy of Engineering (2023), Fellowship in Engineers Canada (2023) and Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada (2022).

As one student put it, “She could convince rocks to study thermodynamics.”

Professor, Computing Science, ß÷ßäÉçÇø

Biography

Richard Sutton is a recipient of the 2024 ACM Turing Award, the highest distinction in computing science. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. At the U of A and Keen Technologies, he teaches and designs learning algorithms for artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning. At the ß÷ßäÉçÇø Machine Intelligence Institute, Sutton is Chief Scientific Advisor and a Canada CIFAR AI chair. Previously, he studied at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts and worked at GTE Labs, AT&T Labs and DeepMind. His research emphasizes learning from experience — the interaction between an AI agent and its environment. His scientific publications have been cited about 150,000 times.