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Kimberly Phillips is a committed arts leader, educator and writer of Welsh-Irish settler ancestry, based on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Skwxwú7mesh and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh peoples. For the past 20 years, in her roles as gallery director, curator and teacher, she has worked to amplify the voices of under-acknowledged artists and practitioners, to ethically vision and build organizational capacity, and to create meaningful and unexpected ways for contemporary artists and their publics to find one another.

Since 2020 she has held the position of Director at SFU Galleries (and now the Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum). Previous to this she was Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) in Vancouver, where she oversaw the gallery’s exhibitions, publications and artist residencies. She served as Director / Curator of Access Gallery (2013 – 2017), a Vancouver artist-run centre committed to emergent and experimental practices, and as Curator of Interpretation at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2009 – 2013). Phillips holds a PhD in art history from the University of British Columbia (2007), where she was an Izaak Walton Killam Doctoral Fellow.

Phillips’s curatorial practice maintains a particular interest in the spectral and the resistant, as well as the conditions under which artists work. She has curated over 60 exhibitions and public art projects and has edited numerous books and catalogues. She looks for unlikely collaborations that create platforms for investigating the conditions of our contemporary world; while at Access Gallery, Phillips developed the internationally recognized residency and exhibition programme Twenty-Three Days at Sea, which saw artists travel across the Pacific Ocean aboard working container vessels. 

Phillips maintains an active teaching practice. She looks to steward opportunities for learners to inhabit the art museum as a place of open inquiry, develops curriculum and instructs courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels in visual culture and curatorial practice at Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she was awarded the Ian Wallace Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2015.

Joanna Woo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics. An astrophysicist by training, her research focuses on galaxy evolution, including stellar populations, galaxy environments, and the use of advanced observational data, simulations, and machine‑learning techniques in astronomy. She earned her PhD in Astrophysics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has held postdoctoral fellowships at ETH Zurich and the University of Victoria. Dr. Woo is also an award‑winning educator, having received SFU’s Excellence in Teaching Award (Early Career), and is actively involved in undergraduate teaching and astronomy outreach at SFU. https://www.sfu.ca/physics/people/faculty/jwa304.html

Levon Pogosian is a Professor of Physics and Chair of the Department of Physics and a leading theoretical cosmologist whose research uses cosmological observations to test fundamental physics. He received his PhD in Physics from Case Western Reserve University, following earlier degrees from Yerevan State University (BSc) and West Virginia University (MSc). After holding postdoctoral fellowships at Imperial College London, Tufts University, and Syracuse University, he joined SFU in 2006, where he co‑founded the university’s theoretical cosmology group. Professor Pogosian’s research focuses on cosmic acceleration, dark energy, modified gravity, the cosmic microwave background, large‑scale structure, primordial magnetic fields, and topological defects such as cosmic strings. His work is widely cited and has contributed to resolving key cosmological challenges, including the Hubble tension. In recognition of this work, he shared the 2021 Buchalter Cosmology Prize (First Prize) with Karsten Jedamzik. https://www.sfu.ca/physics/people/faculty/levon.html

Gopolang Mohlabeng is an Assistant Professor of Physics, specializing in theoretical particle and astroparticle physics. His research focuses on physics beyond the Standard Model, with particular emphasis on the particle nature of dark matter, neutrino–dark matter connections, particle cosmology, and terrestrial and astrophysical probes of new physics. Dr. Mohlabeng earned his PhD and MSc in Theoretical Particle Physics from the University of Kansas, and completed undergraduate studies in physics and astrophysics at the University of Pretoria and the University of Cape Town. Prior to joining SFU, he held research appointments as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen’s University, and a Chancellor’s Advanced Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. https://www.sfu.ca/physics/people/faculty/gmohlabe.html