A Century of Circuits: UNB's Electrical Engineering Program Turns 100

The University of New Brunswick is marking a century of electrical and computer engineering — a milestone that doubles as a history of how this province ended up with a technology industry at all.

The through-line

Follow almost any thread in New Brunswick tech far enough back and you arrive at the same building. The engineers who built NBTel into a national byword for network experimentation trained here. The talent that let Q1 Labs build a global security platform from Fredericton, the industrial-vision work that became Eigen Innovations, the mechatronics behind the province's sensor makers, the students who founded Potential Motors and the rest of the TME pipeline — the common denominator is a hundred years of ECE graduates who mostly didn't have to leave to do interesting work.

That last clause is the achievement. Engineering schools everywhere produce good graduates; the rarer trick is an economy that can absorb them. UNB's department and the province's industry have spent decades in a slow, mutually constructive loop — companies forming around available talent, talent staying because companies formed.

The next hundred

The department enters its second century with the loop intact but the curriculum transformed: the century-old program now feeds cybersecurity institutes, AI-driven vehicle software, and smart-grid research as naturally as it once fed the phone company. The Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity and the TME centre — both younger than most readers — are its current force multipliers.

Institutions this durable are easy to take for granted; ecosystems are mostly built by things that keep working for decades. Happy hundredth to the department that keeps the lights on — and monitored, and networked, and occasionally holographic.