University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine
Print and Digital Publishing
Single or Special Issue
Gold
The University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty of Medicine is a leader in the science and practice of medicine, ranked in the top 25 globally in the 2025 QS World University Rankings. Pathways, the Faculty’s digital and print magazine, takes readers to the frontiers of contemporary medicine and explores the how, the why, and the what-next of research and innovation at UBC and beyond. Our latest edition is devoted to the pressing global issue of brain health, at a time when one in three people lives with a disease, disorder, or injury of the brain, according to the World Health Organization. The question is, How can we create better brain health at every age? In this edition, we explore how the brain develops, functions and ages across the lifespan and show how Faculty of Medicine scientists are translating breakthrough discoveries into new tools and treatments to increase the brain’s resiliency at each stage of life and reduce the burden of common and potentially devastating neurological issues — from birth-related brain injuries in newborns to mental health disorders to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Pathways invites readers to imagine how we can transform brain health for people of all ages.
What was the most impactful part of your entry?
Pathways generated strong engagement from our target audiences, including government, academic and health partners, media, and the general public. To date, the digital edition has attracted more than 71K pageviews, 1.2 million social media impressions (with 23K engagements), and media mentions in top-tier national and international outlets, including feature stories in national media such as The Globe and Mail and Global News (TV), as well as Washington DC News, Asian News International, and Radio-Canada.
Syndication across UBC media also generated significant interest and exposure for the issue. Pathways stories occupied the top spot on the University of British Columbia homepage (UBC.ca) for five weeks, attracting an additional 1.25 million impressions. Content from the issue went viral on TikTok, attracting over 800K additional impressions. Research highlighted in the issue has also seen a notable increase in visibility, with one of the featured papers ranked in the 99th percentile for online attention across all academic journals, according to Altmetric.
What is one thing you learned from your entry/experience?
The brain is incredibly complex, and even the most well-known neurological disorders and disease can be difficult to understand without specialist knowledge. With this mind, we took special care to explain the work of UBC researchers in an engaging and digestible way, always in the everyday context of patient impact.
Through a series of 14 stories and a special multimedia Interactive Explainer, readers discover how the brain develops and changes across the lifespan, what can go wrong at each stage, and what UBC scientists are doing to tackle a wide range of neurological issues. The issue features striking yet unadorned portraits of people of all ages and from all walks of life, which complement the clear, concise copy. They are a visual reminder of the urgency of this work.
We took great care to translate the dynamic content of the digital edition into a print version of the magazine that is equally innovative and engaging within the constraints of that medium. For example, the portraits from the digital edition are woven through the entire physical magazine in the form of full-page, fold-out chapter intros that anchor the individual stories. As our readers explore the print edition, each fold-out marks a different stage on the brain’s journey from birth to old age, reminding them, as they progress, of the current and potential impact of the Faculty’s work in brain health on people of all ages.
Contact: Katie White
communications.med@ubc.ca