Great Moment: Engineering faculty

Training tomorrow’s tech leaders

UVic’s youngest faculty was founded to respond to a provincial labour shortage, but ended up as a defining feature of the university’s acceleration into a globally recognized research institution. During the 1970s, more than half the engineers hired in BC came from outside the province. But starting in 1984, students were able to enrol in electrical engineering—and later, mechanical engineering and computer science—in Victoria. Historian Peter L. Smith pointed out that prior to the engineering program’s development, “UVic had already arrived on the national scene, ranking sixth in Canada in total [NSERC] awards per grantee and per applicant.” The founding and growth of a new faculty, with new instructors including engineering luminaries like Andreas Antoniou, Sadik Dost and David Scott, meant that the teaching and training of engineering grads happened side-by-side with a blossoming research culture of discovery and innovation. “Starting the Faculty was very exciting,” recalls Antoniou. “We worked with a number of engineers in Victoria, and in fact this program would never have started without their support. They helped change a lot of misconceptions about engineering. Soon people understood that engineering is an important part of environmental solutions, not about building more chimneys.” The growth and diversification of engineering at UVic continues today, with Western Canada’s first biomedical engineering degree students beginning this year, and civil engineering expected to begin in 2013-14.

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