University of British Columbia

The institution was established in 1908, but it took a student march in 1922, the “Great Trek”, to convince the government to begin construction of the university’s 402-hectare Vancouver campus. Today, campuses in Vancouver and Kelowna accommodate more than 56,000 students and 20,000 academics and staff. The late Michael Smith, scientist and doyen of British Columbia, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1993, and alumni Robert Mundell and Bertram Brockhouse have won the accolade in economics and physics.