(BlockBar) The University of British Columbia, is launching a blockchain tech training path for graduate students. To be noted, the University of British Columbia is one of Canada’s leading research universities. The program is a first of its kind in Canada, according to the UBC. The program will focus on four areas: clean energy, health and wellness, regulatory technology and issues for Indigenous residents. The program will officially launch in January, 2020.

Victoria Lemieux, UBC iSchool associate professor and founder of Blockchain@UBC said in a statement, “The initiative will allow students to develop the skills around emerging technologies that are in high demand as well as drive economic growth as graduates fill the void in the industry.” UBC aims to build out services for existing master’s and PhD students in educationally adjacent areas and train around 139 students over six years. Interestingly, the aspiring students do not need to come to the program with blockchain experience.

Related articles No Content Available

To be noted, this initiative is supported by 15 industry partners. These industry partners belong to a wide range of sectors. Mitacs, a not-for-profit that works with federal and municipal governments to support industrial innovation, will provide $1.324 million over six years. Boehringer Ingelheim which is a pharmaceutical company with net sales of around 17.5 billion euros in 2018 is also one of the industry partners. Other than this, Mitacs will also fund 18 master’s and eight PhD internships in the field. The courses represent a potential value of over $2.44 million for 156 internships and post-doctoral training projects over the course of the partnership.

It is worth noting that Blockchain@UBC is supported by UBC’s Grants for Catalyzing Research Clusters program. To explore issues in emerging blockchain technologies, its research papers and projects bring academics and industry partners together and its past educational initiatives have spanned undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels.

UBC faculty from diverse disciplines, including FinTech, engineering and computer science, natural science, and information governance, along with the non-STEM fields will be teaching the UBC’s most recent initiative. According to Victoria Lemieux, “Complex, wicked problems require a collision of perspectives.”