McGill law student and alumnus each awarded an Action Canada Fellowship

The Faculty offers its warmest congratulations to doctoral candidate Mélanie Bourassa Forcier and alumnus Benjamin Perrin (LLM'07), who were among the 17 exceptional Canadians chosen this year for Action Canada Fellowships. In total, four students and alums from McGill University were selected for this honour.

A lawyer specializing in biotechnology law, Mélanie Bourassa Forcier is currently completing doctoral studies in intellectual property law at the CIPP, where she also holds a research position. She has a strong interest in developing public policy that will support innovation and access to new medical technologies. In May 2007 Mélanie Bourassa Forcier was invited to South Africa to help develop a government strategy for encouraging pharmaceutical innovation.

Benjamin Perrin will be starting as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia, in August 2007. His teaching and research interests include domestic and international criminal law, international humanitarian law, comparative constitutional law and human trafficking. While at McGill, Benjamin Perrin was the assistant director of the Special Court for Sierra Leone legal clinic and completed an internship at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Selected for outstanding leadership initiative and commitment to Canada, each Action Canada Fellow receives $20,000 and participates in a 10-month program focused on leadership development and Canadian public policy issues. Fellows will concentrate on ways to enhance Canada's international leadership profile and its impact in world affairs.

These awards demonstrate the success of McGill University and its Faculty of Law in training extraordinary scholars who are active not only in an academic sense, but as citizens of our increasingly globalized world.