Wellness in the making

Advancing Health

For generations, McGill has pioneered discoveries that have revolutionized health care while educating professionals responsible for the well-being of patients around the world. Today, it is laying the groundwork for a new era in health care, one in which the blunt instruments of 20th-century medicine give way to custom-designed interventions that more effectively treat or even prevent disease. Over the next decade, health care has the potential to enter a new “golden age” — one as significant as that which followed the development of public health and sanitation in the Victorian era and the introduction of antibiotics during World War II.

McGill is an international leader in many areas of medicine, including genomics and proteomics, neurosciences and pain research. The University gained standing as one of the world’s foremost centres for neurological research in the 1950s, with pioneering neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. Today, its researchers are exploring how neurons drive cognition and consciousness, movement and memory, pain and perception, in order to develop interventions for diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s to autism. McGill’s interdisciplinary Centre for Research on Pain is studying how to treat chronic pain, building on a storied track record that includes emeritus professor Ronald Melzack’s revolutionary insights into how we experience pain, and psychology professor Jeffrey Mogil’s recent discovery of gender differences in pain perception.

More than 2,000 researchers, technical personnel, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows work in health research at McGill and its affiliated teaching hospitals. But this is just the beginning. We are marshalling our resources, recruiting new faculty and graduate students, and equipping new laboratories to consolidate McGill’s standing as one of the world’s foremost centres for health research.

The people and programs supported through Campaign McGill will allow us to tackle such broad issues as: the education of health care professionals in overburdened systems, the transfer of knowledge from bench to bedside, the biological basis of disease, childhood health and development, and public health. This new investment will permit McGill to move our historic strengths into the 21st century.