December 1, 1997 For Immediate Release

The Board of Governors for the University of Northern British Columbia held a regular meeting in Fort St John over the weekend where two new graduate degree programs were approved. Both will be offered with existing resources and accentuate UNBC's development as an institution with a solid grounding in the sciences.

• The Board approved a new PhD in Psychology. The objective of the program is to educate psychologists in skills that can be applied to the pressing social problems of the North and elsewhere, including the relative poor health status of the population and high levels of risk behaviour. The resources to offer the program are already in place with nine full-time Psychology faculty, and ten other faculty with background in Psychology and related fields.In addition, the Psychology program already has state-of-the-art research facilities.The doctoral program will be UNBC's second when it begins accepting students (usually 2-4 per year): the other UNBC PhD program is in Natural Resources & Environmental Studies.
• A new Masters of Science (MSc) degree was also approved. This program, unique in British Columbia, will encompass the expertise and resources available in eight UNBC science programs: Biology, Forestry, Resource Recreation and Tourism, Environmental Studies, Geography, Mathematics & Computer Science, Chemistry, and Physics. The new MSc represents a new style of graduate program that can be offered at a small university with limited resources, in large part due to the economies of scale inherent in a combined approach. The new MSc includes two streams: in Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, and in Mathematical Computing and the Physical Sciences. This new program will begin accepting students in 1998.