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bCbUSiNeSS.Ca September 2014 BCBusiness 37 e's been put up to it by his mother, who had been a college-level math teacher before the family moved to North America from the Punjab three years earlier. Arvind Gupta is one of four siblings, a girl and three boys, and, he says, his mother "really loved to give us puzzles—different things than school—to get us thinking outside the box. She didn't really think about advanced math or easy math, it was all just math." And, usually, fun. On this occasion, she had challenged young Arvind to figure out how many straight sticks he could stack in such a way that each stick touched every other stick. "I got to six quite quickly, but I worked a long time on seven," he says. And then he began to consider that perhaps this particular math problem was, for his mother, actually a solution. "Maybe she just wanted us to go outside." If you're looking for the qualities of a president and vice-chancellor for UBC— the office that Gupta assumed on July 1st of this year—it's all there. Or almost all. You have to assume brilliance, because no one is going to get a shot at the top job at Western Canada's premier research university without being inordinately bright. Then you add early training by parents who have both raw intelligence (his father was a PhD chemist, working at the local mine) and (by his mother's example) an impressive amount of savvy. Throw in focus and discipline: the ability to work long hours at difficult problems, regardless of the distractions. And, perhaps best of all, add the ability to see patterns and make connections— and not just how the sticks fit together, but how they fit into the wider world. Gupta will need those skills and more. UBC is a $2-billion-a-year opera- tion with 58,000 students on two cam- puses (in Vancouver and Kelowna), a $500-million-plus research budget and an economic impact of close to $13 bil- lion a year. It also has more than 15,000 faculty and staff, an overwhelming majority of whom are looking at the new guy wondering how he's going to affect their lives and the institution they love. No pressure. s a young man, Arvind Gupta completely inter- nalized his mother's love of math. From Timmins, he went to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, to do a bachelor's degree in math and com- puter science. He followed with a com- puter science PhD from the University of Toronto and then did a Natural Sci- ences and Engineering Research Coun- cil ( NSERC) post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Waterloo. In 1991, by then married with two children, he came to the West Coast to check out a position at Simon Fraser University, "which has a really top- notch computer science department," he says. It was pouring. But the next day, just before his lunch at the SFU faculty club, the sun burst through, casting that perfect sparkle off the snow-covered North Shore mountains. "I thought: God has kissed this place." Gupta stayed at SFU for the next 18 years, during which time he cam- paigned tirelessly for the cause of math in education, research and industrial development. And nowhere was that campaign more obvious—or effective— than in his leadership of an agency now known as Mitacs Inc. Mitacs is an acronym for Mathemat- ics of Information Technology and Complex Systems, a mouthful that might serve as an object lesson on why mathematicians are sometimes poorly understood. The organization was born in 1999 out of a concern that Canadian industry was not making the best use of highly trained university graduates, and graduates often weren't getting the transformative work experience that they wanted and needed. The solution was to link graduate students and post-doctoral fellows from over 50 universities directly to businesses through specially designed internships—like a co-op program for the "highly qualified people" set. It's been an incredible success: more than 6,000 students have gone through the program and a huge number, having proved their worth, have stayed with their companies in jobs for which they are uniquely suited. Mitacs also started a higher-level program called Elevate, in which 250 post-doctoral fellows have designed and undertaken industrially relevant research projects, while being attached to their industrial partner for a two-year period. A third program, called Globalink, brings promising undergraduates to Canada from coun- tries all over the world to participate in summer research programs led by Canadian academics. More than 800 students came this summer alone. They are brilliant—creamed from the top one per cent in India, China, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and Vietnam—and the Canadian government hopes that many will also come back to do their graduate work here in Canada. So, what began in 1999 as a nationally distributed "Centre of Excellence" with a little over $3 million in federal funding is now a UBC-based, $70-million-a-year machine with 130 employees on more than 25 university campuses all over the country, with financial support coming one-third each from the federal govern- ment, provincial governments and the private sector. The nature of Mitacs' success also suggests what caused the UBC selection committee to cast so favourable a gaze on Gupta. At a time when universities across the country are under pressure to pro- duce more job-ready graduates, Gupta and the Mitacs programming seemed ahead of the curve, even if the man him- H A "He always surprised me.... arvind would come in with these initiatives and i would think, 'that is not achievable in this lifetime.' and then, in six months, he would do it" —Nassif Ghoussoub, UBC mathematics professor