University of Northern British Columbia

Overview

University of Northern British Columbia

University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) is a public university located in British Columbia, Canada. It was established in 1990 when the UNBC Act was passed by the British Columbia legislative assembly, three years after local residents Steadman, McCaffrey, and Stone proposed the establishment of a northern university. Today, it is one of the top-ranking institutions in the country and has also earned the title of “Canada’s Green University” in 2007 for its sustainability practices. UNBC is acknowledged as one of the best universities in the country with contributions to the fields of biology, medicine, and ecology.

University of Northern British Columbia Key Statistics

UNBC is composed of the Division of Medical Sciences and five faculties, including the Faculty of Human and Health Sciences, Faculty of Indigenous Studies, Social Sciences and Humanities, and Faculty of Science and Engineering. The university offers 122 undergraduate and postgraduate academic courses.

University of Northern British Columbia has 3,524 undergraduate students, 736 graduate students, 167 professors, and 476 non-academic staff. The university has a main campus in Prince George as well as regional campuses in the cities of Terrace, Prince Rupert, Quesnel, and Fort St. John. These campuses offer facilities, such as cafeterias and dining halls, student centers, gymnasiums, and sports centers.

Other University of Northern British Columbia key statistics include the Geoffrey R. Weller Library, which holds 581,000 titles.

University of Northern British Columbia Research

UNBC conducts research through its various research clusters and receives support from sources, such as the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and the Government of Canada Research Fund. For 2019-2020, the university’s research funding amounted to more than $9 million.

The top fields of University of Northern British Columbia research are ecology, biology, and medicine. Its researchers have attended and presented at conferences, such as the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in 2011, Systems, Man, and Cybernetics conference also in 2011, and the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces in 2007.

The most cited article from the university is Reich et al.’s (1997) “From tropics to tundra: Global convergence in plant functioning,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, with more than 2,410 citations to date. The second most cited publication is Raffa et al.’s (2008) “Cross-scale drivers of natural disturbances prone to anthropogenic amplification: The dynamics of bark beetle eruptions” featured in BioScience and has over 1,630 citations.

In addition, the third most cited work is Botvinick et al.’s (2005) “Viewing facial expressions of pain engages cortical areas involved in the direct experience of pain,” which appeared in NeuroImage and has more than 800 citations so far.

UNBC is home to several research centers and institutes such as the Health Research Institute, Institute for Social Research, National Resources and Environmental Studies Institute, Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, and the Urban Aboriginal Knowledge Network Western Research Center.

Its other research facilities include the I.K. Barber Enhanced Forestry Lab, Northern Analytical Laboratory Services, GIS and Remote Sensing Lab, and the Genetics Lab. The university also has the Aleza Lake Research Forest, the Dr. Max Blouw Quesnel River Research Center, and the John Prince Research Forest.