About Us
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and Okanagan, in British Columbia, Canada. Established in 1908, it is the oldest university in British Columbia. With an annual research budget of $747.3 million, UBC funds 9,675 projects annually in various fields of study within the industrial sector, as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations.
The Vancouver campus is adjacent to the University Endowment Lands, an unincorporated area with multiple beaches and the Pacific Spirit Regional Park. The university is located 10 km (6 mi) west of downtown Vancouver.[8] UBC is also home to TRIUMF, Canada's national particle and nuclear physics laboratory, which boasts the world's largest cyclotron. In addition to the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and the Stuart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, UBC and the Max Planck Society collectively established the first Max Planck Institute in North America, specializing in quantum materials.[9] One of Canada's largest research libraries, the UBC Library system has over 8.3 million items (including print and electronic) among its 21 branches. It is visited annually by 3.1 million people or 9.7 million virtually.[ The Okanagan campus, acquired in 2005, is located in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Those affiliated with UBC include eight Nobel laureates, 75 Rhodes scholars, 231 Olympians with 65 medals won collectively, 306 fellows to the Royal Society of Canada, and 22 3M National Teaching Fellows. Among UBC's alums are Canadian Prime Ministers John Turner, Kim Campbell, Justin Trudeau, and the former Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Kiril Petkov.
In 1877, six years after British Columbia joined Canada, the Superintendent of Education, John Jessop, submitted a proposal to form a provincial university. The provincial legislature passed An Act Respecting the University of British Columbia in 1890, but disagreements arose over whether to build the university on Vancouver Island or the mainland.
The British Columbia University Act of 1908 formally called a provincial university into being, although its location was not specified. The governance was modelled on the Provincial University of Toronto Act of 1906, which created a bicameral system of university government consisting of a senate (faculty) responsible for academic policy and a board of governors (citizens) exercising exclusive control over financial policy and having formal authority in all other matters. The president, appointed by the board, was to provide a link between the two bodies and to perform institutional leadership.The Act constituted a 21-mmember senate with Francis Carter-Cotton of Vancouver as chancellor.
Before the University Act, there were several attempts at creating a degree-granting university with help from the universities of Toronto and McGill. Columbia College in New Westminster, through its affiliation with Victoria College of the University of Toronto, began to offer university-level credit at the turn of the century, but McGill came to dominate higher education in the early 1900s.
