UBC names new president

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – The University of British Columbia has named its new president, following a year that began with the abrupt resignation of former president Arvind Gupta last summer.

Santa Ono, who was born in Vancouver and has served as president of the University of Cincinnati since 2012, will take the reins at UBC at a difficult time for the institution.

UBC has been gripped by a governance crisis since Gupta’s departure, ultimately prompting the chairman of the board of governors to step down and the faculty association to declare it had lost confidence in the board.

The university has also faced accusations it is failing survivors of campus sexual violence, leading interim president Martha Piper to apologize and the school to begin drafting a sexual assault policy.

Fifty-three-year-old Ono holds a biology degree from the University of Chicago and an experimental medicine PhD from McGill University, and he is the son of a Japanese-born professor who taught math at UBC in the 1960s.

Board chairman Stuart Belkin praised Ono’s extraordinary life and accomplishments and says he was unanimously appointed to serve a five-year term at UBC.