ICORD Director Dr. John Steeves with former Research Associate Dr. Gordon Hiebert in the late 1990s.

History - ICORD (Collaboration On Repair Discoveries) was founded in 1995 by Dr. John Steeves with the support of Rick Hansen and then-UBC President Dr. David Strangway. That year, the Rick Hansen Man-in-Motion Chair in Spinal Cord Research was created, and a search was initiated for the first chair holder. Dr. Wolfram Tetzlaff was the successful candidate, and he joined Dr. Steeves and a small group of UBC / VCH researchers with an interest in spinal cord injury (SCI) known as CORD. Membership in CORD grew steadily, with 15 members in 2000.

In 2002, Dr. Steeves and his CORD colleagues were awarded a Canada Foundation for Innovation infrastructure award of $12.8 million. The CFI award was matched by the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and additional funding was pledged by UBC, Vancouver Coastal Health and the Rick Hansen Foundation to provide for the construction of a dedicated SCI research centre.

CORD’s vision and mandate became much broader than a regional research centre, and the research group was renamed ICORD–with the “I” standing for “international”.

ICORD’s administrative office and some basic science research labs were located in the Biosciences Building at the UBC Point Grey Campus. Other ICORD researchers were based at more than twenty different locations in Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island (in other buildings at the UBC campus, at the VGH campus, at BCIT, SFU, UVIC).