Continuing McGill’s long history of research excellence, seven of the University’s researchers were recently feted by the Royal Society of Canada.
On November 17, 2007, the RSC presented two McGill faculty members with some of the most prestigious honours in their fields. In recognition of her cutting-edge work on neutron stars, pulsars and supernova remnants, Victoria Kaspi received the Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics, which is awarded for outstanding research in any branch of physics. Kaspi is McGill’s Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology and Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics. She and her team discovered more than 20 pulsars in a single Milky Way cluster, as well as the fastest-rotating pulsar known to science. Roderick Macdonald, the F.R. Scott Professor of Constitutional and Public Law at McGill, has been awarded the RSC’s Sir John William Dawson Medal for his contribution to interdisciplinary research. Macdonald is generally regarded as one of Canada’s most influential public intellectuals, and was among the first to explore law through disciplines as varied as philosophy, anthropology, literary theory, semiotics and history.
As well, five McGill researchers have been invited to join the RSC’s ranks. The new fellows are:
- Hong Guo, professor in the physics department who achieved renown for his contributions in the theoretical and computational modeling of quantum transport in nanoelectronic systems;
- Michael J. Meaney, associate director of research at the Douglas Hospital Research Centre and one of the first researchers to identify the importance of maternal care in modifying the expression of the genes that regulate behavioural and neuroendocrine responses to stress;
- Morag Park, the James McGill Professor of Oncology and an international leader in understanding the mechanisms underlying the activation of human cancer;
- A. Patrick S. Selvadurai, William Scott Professor and James McGill Professor, who has profoundly influenced engineering modeling activities in nuclear waste management, soil-structure interaction and northern and environmental geomechanics; and
- Isztar I. Zawadzki, director of the radar observatory in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and a major contributor to radar meteorology.