You’ll never hear senior administrators at Simon Fraser University and UBC admit they’re in competition.

However, the province’s two largest universities occasionally poach staff from one another.

One of the more recent examples was SFU’s hiring of UBC nursing professor Joy Johnson as its new vice president of research.

Johnson, also former scientific director of the Institute of Gender and Health at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, assumes her new position on September 1. She will replace Mario Pinto, who will have served two five-year terms.

Meanwhile, UBC’s incoming president, Arvind Gupta, was a mathematician at SFU for 18 years before being lured to the Point Grey campus in 2009.

In a phone interview with the Georgia Straight last month, Johnson said that as SFU’s newest vice president, she’ll be responsible to create conditions within the university to foster research.

That includes ensuring that laboratories and other infrastructure are up to snuff.

In addition, SFU’s library system falls under her portfolio.

“I just saw the Simon Fraser position as an incredible opportunity,” she said. “I’ve worked primarily in the health field and obviously when you’re a vice president of research, you get to expand your horizon and work across all areas of research.”

Johnson will also deal with the three major national funding organizations: the Social Sciences and Research Humanities Council, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

CIHR has 13 institutes, including gender and health, where she worked for the past six years.

“That institute has been responsible for creating funding opportunities related to men’s and women’s health and also helping us think about how sex-based factors, genders, and social factors influence health outcomes for Canadians,” Johnson said.

She’s particularly proud of the role of the institute in changing how research is conducted in Canada.

Applicants for CIHR funding must address key questions regarding the integration of sex and gender in their work. That’s because medications sometimes have different effects on men and women.

“One of the things we’ve been very concerned about is, for example, that researchers in the past would study a drug, but only in male animals,” Johnson said. “This has been a big problem. We also have a problem that researchers, for example, might have included women in men in their clinical trial, but not asked the question: are their outcomes different for men and women.”

She acknowledged that sometimes it’s more challenging for researchers to include women in clinical trials, particularly if they’re of child-bearing age.

“There’s also some evidence that women, because of other responsibilities in their lives—child caring, parents, caregiving, et cetera—have less time to be involved in some trials  and may be more reluctant to engage in the process. So we need to knock down those barriers as well.”

SFU has launched a $250-million fundraising campaign to coincide with its upcoming 50^th anniversary in 2015. Johnson said that she anticipates that part of her job involves supporting this initiative.

Meanwhile, UBC is trying to raise $1.5 billion by 2015.

Johnson offered a diplomatic response if the two universities are competing with one another.

“We need a variety of different universities to serve different purposes,” she said.

The Straight also recently asked Gupta about any competition between UBC and SFU.

“I actually believe that universities should work very closely together,” he said. “If there are opportunities for us to boost SFU, we should be doing it, and vice versa.”

SFU was quicker than UBC to establish a presence in Surrey and in downtown Vancouver, notably with Harbour Centre, the Segal Graduate School of Business, the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, and SFU Woodward’s, which is an important cultural venue.

UBC’s major downtown presence is at Robson Square, which is used by the Sauder School of Business. Its primary cultural venue, the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, is on the Point Grey campus.

Meanwhile, UBC has absorbed the former Okanagan University College, giving it a massive presence in Kelowna, and has opened a learning annex in Vancouver's Chinatown.

“Different universities will position themselves differently,” Gupta said. “That’s a healthy thing. We want universities to try to figure out where they want to build their strengths. I think we should be proud of all the things at SFU, and we should be proud of how UBC has gone out and engaged the world in teaching, research, and really positioning [itself] as the premier institution in Canada. I don’t think it would be fair to say UBC hasn’t been nimble. They’ve just focused on different things.”