Dr. Rachel Scholes awarded $1M Wall Fellowship to advance protection of waterways
Dr. Rachel Scholes has been awarded one of two $1-million Wall Fellowships, the University of British Columbia's highest-value internal research award. The fellowship will support a deeper exploration of toxic pollutants in urban environments to the largely unexplored microbial networks that sustain our oceans.
The Wall Fellowships are one of the most significant internal research awards offered at a university in North America, and the flagship of UBC’s Peter Wall Legacy Awards.
Backed by five years of funding, Dr. Scholes will expand her work across BC to develop new ways to keep toxic tire chemicals out of salmon-bearing streams.
Understanding the hidden health costs of our roads
For Dr. Scholes, Assistant Professor of environmental systems engineering in the Department of Civil Engineering, the fellowship provides an opportunity to take a problem her team is already working to solve and tackle it at a much larger scale.
Every time a car travels down a road, it leaves behind particles from its tires. When it rains, chemicals from those particles can wash into nearby waterways, contributing to toxic pollution that has been linked to coho salmon deaths in BC. Tire wear also contributes to airborne particles people can breathe in urban environments.
One chemical in particular has drawn significant attention: 6PPD-quinone, a breakdown product of a tire additive that is highly toxic to coho salmon. And yet, many of the chemicals released from tires remain poorly understood, including how they move through the environment and their potential impacts. With the support of the Wall Fellowship, Dr. Scholes will broaden her team’s research on human and freshwater ecosystem exposures to tire-derived chemicals.
Her team will also develop and test ways to reduce contamination, building on earlier research showing that green infrastructure approaches such as rain gardens can help capture contaminants from stormwater before they reach streams. The goal is to identify solutions that can work in real-world urban settings.
Working with municipal and First Nations partners in BC, including ongoing work to mitigate toxic runoff entering important salmon-bearing streams on First Nations lands, Dr. Scholes hopes to turn emerging research into practical approaches for protecting waterways and communities.
The fellowship will also allow Dr. Scholes to build a broader network around the issue. She hopes to bring researchers, government, First Nations and other organizations together through a stormwater research hub at UBC that can continue to grow beyond the five-year fellowship.
“My hope is that the stormwater hub becomes something bigger than just me and my research group,” said Dr. Scholes.
Research-driven solutions to real-world challenges in B.C.
In addition to the two Wall Fellowships, this year’s Peter Wall Legacy Awards program includes eight additional faculty research awards—including a team project led by Dr. Bhushan Gopaluni in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering—and 19 graduate student awards. Five of these students come from Applied Science disciplines:
- Lauren Bogo, Mechanical Engineering
- Quinlan Bundschuh, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
- Julia Kidder, School of Community and Regional Planning
- Camille Leclerc, School of Engineering
- Qiangqiang Mao, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Collectively, these projects represent an exceptional breadth of research spanning climate resilience, wildfire preparedness in urban design, Indigenous governance, environmental pollutant detection, and artificial intelligence. Together, these researchers are united by a commitment to help communities and ecosystems adapt and thrive in a changing world.
