Congratulations to Dr. Jeffrey Brubacher for being promoted to the rank of professor, with grant tenure, with the UBC Department of Emergency Medicine (DEM). The appointment will take effect immediately.
“I am honoured by this promotion. This was a very long process and I’m deeply grateful for the guidance and support I’ve received from my colleagues in the Department of Emergency Medicine at UBC. I look forward to supporting other researchers within the DEM and continuing my own research,” said Dr. Brubacher.
Dr. Brubacher has been with UBC since 1996 and the department since its inception. His research interests focus broadly on injury prevention with a special interest in road safety including drug impaired driving, traffic policy evaluation, road trauma outcome, active transport injuries and the association between road trauma and socio-economic factors.
Dr. Brubacher is principal investigator of a national study that monitors the prevalence of drug-impaired driving in 17 Canadian trauma centres. That study has been ongoing for over a decade and provided data that was used to evaluate the impact of cannabis legalization on road safety. In a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Brubacher reported that the prevalence of injured drivers in British Columbia with high THC levels approximately doubled following cannabis legalization. To complement this observational research, his research group recently acquired a high-fidelity driving simulator which will be used to study driving outcomes in medical cannabis patients.
Dr. Brubacher is also PI on a prospective cohort study that is recruiting injured cyclists, pedestrians and micromobility users (e.g., e-scooters) from four BC emergency departments in order to study the circumstances of active transport injuries and their long-term outcomes. His research includes analyses of population-level auto-insurance, police and health datasets. These analyses include an evaluation of the impact of ICBC’s new “Enhanced Care Coverage” on return to work, an in-depth report on cycling and pedestrian injuries in British Columbia and an investigation of the risk of traffic injury, and severity of injuries, for disadvantaged peoples and places in British Columbia.
In addition to his new appointment as professor, Dr. Brubacher is also director of UBC’s Road Safety and Public Health Research Lab, emergency physician at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) and director of the Emergency Medicine Research Program at VCHRI.
Dr. Brubacher received a Scholar Award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in 2011 and a Health Professional Investigator award in 2017.
The University’s decision to promote a faculty member to the rank of professor is the product of a multi-leveled, rigorous review of performance by immediate colleagues and those within the larger University community. It represents one of the most important decisions made by the academic community at UBC as contributions to teaching, graduate supervision, service, and overall education leadership assist the University in meeting its vision as a globally influential university.
Congratulations to Dr. Brubacher on his new appointment!