Graduate student and postdoctoral opportunities
We are always happy to hear from interested prospective graduate students and postdocs. Please reach out to Asher by email if you’re interested (see details at the bottom of this page).
Timelines:
For all positions, it’s a good idea to reach out sooner rather than later. We typically recommend reaching out to us a minimum of 12 months in advance of when you would like to start, to allow us time to coordinate the appropriate funding mechanisms. We prefer to accept graduate students to start in September each year.
Financial details:
MSc and PhD positions in the Leeks lab are fully funded. The salary in 2025 is $35,000 CAD annually for first-year students, with subsequent annual increases in line with inflation. Tuition is covered and we typically ask you to TA one course a year.
Postdocs typically start at $65,000 CAD/year as a minimum, but this may be higher depending on the source of funding.
There are many opportunities to apply for both graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, some of which provide additional salary.
Degree details:
For graduate students, we accept both MSc and PhD students. If you already have a Master’s degree, we will enter you on the UBC Zoology PhD programme. If you do not have a Master’s degree, we will enter you on the UBC Zoology MSc programme, with the opportunity to transfer to the PhD programme after one year. Both programmes come with some course requirements in the first year, and we will help to guide you in selecting the most useful courses for your project. In both cases, the salary is the same, and your primary objective during your degree will be research. There is no set length for a PhD degree at UBC Zoology, but in our lab we aim to graduate PhD students within 4-5 years of their start date. We can take both domestic and international students.
What we’re looking for:
(1) We are looking for genuine enthusiasm for the academic research directions in our lab. It is critical that you find social evolution in viruses genuinely exciting, and that the ideas themselves interest you.
(2) It is important that you are intellectually collaborative, generous with your time and ideas, and that you enjoy regular academic conversations with peers. We expect new lab members to engage with the academic community within our lab and broader environment, which includes ongoing collaborations with other labs in our building, regular academic visitors, and multiple weekly discussion groups and journal clubs.
(3) It is a bonus if you can demonstrate evidence of your resilience, or the ability to see projects through to completion, even if your past experiences are in a non-academic context. Academia is a marathon rather than a sprint, and everybody faces challenges that they must overcome as they progress through graduate school and beyond.
Location:
Our lab sits in the Biodiversity Research Centre within the Department of Zoology, on the Vancouver campus of the University of British Columbia. The campus is a short distance from downtown Vancouver, located within a temperate rainforest and surrounded by the beautiful beaches and scenery of the Point Grey peninsula. Vancouver is a vibrant international city with world-class cuisine and breathtaking natural beauty.
To Apply
To apply to join the lab as a graduate student or postdoc, please email asher.leeks@ubc.ca with the following:
- Your CV
- One paragraph describing an open research direction or question within sociovirology. Please give details on why you are interested in the specific open question you’ve chosen. Feel free to draw from one or more of our recent review papers for this (e.g. our cheating review, our open questions review, or our clinical opportunities perspective).
- One paragraph describing how some of your past experiences or interests relate to our lab’s academic directions.
Please do not use generative AI in your email.
Asher Leeks 