Sir William Dawson, principal of McGill from 1855 to 1893, once wrote: "The business of a university [is] to train young men and women for noble lives, not so much to teach them to do something as to train them to be something." For nearly two centuries, McGill has trained men and women to be leaders in their fields, be it in the humanities, business, politics, arts, sciences or medicine. Among McGill's 174,000 alumni worldwide are three astronauts, four Nobel Prize recipients, seven Oscar winners and scores of leaders who help shape our world.

Quebec Superior Court Justice John Gomery, BA'53, BCL'56, became a household name as the head of an official inquiry into the controversial federal sponsorship program.
Reuters

Quick facts

• McGill students and graduates have collectively won three Olympic gold medals, five silver and ten bronze at various games.

• McGill has produced two prime ministers of Canada—Sir Wilfrid Laurier, BCL1864, and Sir John Abbott, BCL1854.

• Three alumni are currently Supreme Court of Canada justices: Ian Binnie, BA'60, Marie Deschamps, LLM'83, and Morris Fish, BA'59, BCL'62.

• William Chalmers, PhD'30, invented Plexiglas while a graduate student at McGill.

• McGill graduate James Naismith, BA1887, is credited with inventing basketball in 1891.

• Carrie Derick, BA1890, the first woman to become a professor in Canada, taught botany at McGill.

• The first woman elected to the Quebec National Assembly was alumna Marie-Claire Kirkland Strover, BA'47, BCL'50 (elected as Kirkland Casgrain).

• McGill has produced seven Academy Award winners including Burt Bacharach, Dip AMus'48, and National Film Board animator John Weldon, BSc'66.

• Ahmed Nazif, the former Prime Minister of Egypt, and Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the President of Latvia, both earned PhDs from McGill, in 1983 and 1965 respectively.

• Business leaders with McGill degrees include Larry Light, BSc'62, retired global chief marketing officer for McDonald's; Robert Ritchie, BSc'67, president and CEO of Canadian Pacific Railway; Aldo Bensadoun, BCom'64, president of Aldo Group; and Anne Martin, MBA'85, Vice-President Global Cosmetics and Marketing for Procter & Gamble.

• McGill alumni are prominent in the arts, including Jake Eberts, BEng'62, producer of such films as Chicken Run, Gandhi and Dances With Wolves; John F. Burns, BA'66, The New York Times bureau chief in Baghdad and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner; and Juno award-winning musician Sam Roberts, BA'98.

• Four grads have won the Nobel Prize: Andrew Victor Schally (Medicine, 1977), BSc'55, PhD'57; Val Fitch (Physics, 1980), BEng'48; David Hubel (Medicine, 1981), BSc'47, MDCM'51; Rudolph Marcus (Chemistry, 1992), BSc'43, PhD'46.

• Other McGill graduates of note include singer/poet Leonard Cohen, BA'55, and astronauts Julie Payette, BEng'86, Dafydd Williams, BSc'76, MSc'83, MDCM'83, and Robert Thirsk, MDCM'82.

Julie Payette, BEng'86, was the Voice of Houston for NASA's first shuttle mission after the Columbia disaster of 2003. Seated at a microphone at NASA's Johnson Space Center, it was she who welcomed her colleagues home when Discovery successfully landed on August 9, 2005.
NASA

Alumni news 2004-05

• Daniel Pearl, BSc(Arch)'84, BArch'85, Mark Poddubiuk, BSc(Arch)'84, BArch'85, and Bernard Olivier, BSc(Arch)'90, BArch'92, MArch'96, of design firm L'OEUF won the Holcim Foundation's North American Gold award for Sustainable Construction.

• Lolly Annahatak, BSW'97, a resident of Quebec's Kuujjuaq region, received a National Aboriginal Achievement Award in the social services category.

• Mesh Tandon, BCom'98, was named one of the best 30 financial traders under 30 by Trader Monthly Magazine.

• Sheila Fraser, BCom'72, Canada's first female Auditor General, continues to shed light on misspending of government funds.

• Win Butler, BA'04, is the co-founder and lead singer for Arcade Fire. The band's first album, Funeral, was named one of 2004's best releases by The Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and The Guardian.

• McGill-trained architects Moshe Safdie, BArch'61 and Raymond Moriyama, MArch'57, each received widespread acclaim for new museums they recently completed. Safdie designed the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel, and Moriyama was chief architect for the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

• Shaunna Burke, BA'01, became the second Canadian women to climb Mount Everest.

• William Shatner, BCom'52, earned an Emmy Award for his portrayal of eccentric attorney Denny Crain in the television series Boston Legal.

• Filmmaker Hubert Davis, BA'00, received an Academy Award nomination in the category of Best Documentary Short Subject for his film Hardwood, about his father, Mel, a one-time Harlem Globetrotter.

• Jill Beck, MA'76, the new president of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, is among at least 11 other McGill graduates who lead universities in Canada and the US.

• In 2004 MIT's Technology Review selected photonics scientist Maria Petrucci-Samija, PhD'99, and Colin Hill, MSc'98, cofounder and CEO of Gene Network, as scientists under 35 whose work could change the world.