Download the "CFIS Fact Sheet" pdf here.

CFIS is:

• composed of 174 staff (with twenty-one staff in the Principal's office), supporting 77 tenure-stream faculty who carry out world-class research in eleven schools, institutes, and centres, and teach over 650 students in eleven graduate programs
• led by Principal Michael Burgess, UBC Chair in Biomedical Ethics and Professor in the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics 
• a faculty like any other at UBC, but mandated by Senate to support interdisciplinarity across all of UBC
• an acronym: College For Interdisciplinary Studies - we are "for" nurturing interdisciplinarity
• located on the main floor of the CK Choi Building (1855 West Mall), an award-winning "green" building housing CFIS and two of our units, the Institute of Asian Research and the Institute for European Studies

CFIS supports collaborative, interdisciplinary research and teaching addressing complex, societal issues in  sustainability, health, and social policy.

CFIS importantly also provides the infrastructure and support allowing for collaboration between researchers in other disciplines, in industry and government, and in local and international communities, to find solutions to problems that cannot be as readily solved within the confines of a single discipline.

The resulting research is groundbreaking and global in its impact:

• Professor Pitman Potter's Asia Pacific Dispute Resolution program is seeking to predict conditions that would lead nations to coordinate compliance of international trade and human rights standards at local levels
• Professor William Rees' ecological footprint analysis concept is now used around the world to weigh the ecological footprint of organizations and countries
• Professor Daniel Pauly's global fisheries database (FishBase, EcoSim, etc.) and insights (fishing down the food chain and shifting baselines, for example) are helping other researchers to map global fisheries and ocean ecosystem decline
• Professor Karen Bartlett's research tracking the spread of the killer fungus Cryptococcus gattii - normally found in tropical climates - across the Pacific Northwest points to the effect of climate change on public health.
• Professor Rashid Sumaila's intergenerational discounting approach to valuing resources (valuing fish as if they are those of our grandchildren) is being applied by mathematicians and in other disciplines
• Professor Lawrence Frank's research linking suburban development, car usage, and obesity is compelling, and is being factored into urban redevelopment projects around the world
• Professor Sid Fels is finding innovative applications of digital media in the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC) including visual analytics (and a recent partnership with Boeing), cybergloves, and context-aware applications
• Larry Beasley helped develop the "Vancouver" model of urban development during his career as Vancouver city planner, and he is now teaching (at UBC's School of Community and Regional Planning) and applying the underlying precepts and processes to major urban development and redevelopment projects as far afield as San Diego and Abu Dhabi.