Two McGill students among Maclean's university stars

Félix-Antoine Boudreault and Alexandra Conliffe cited as leaders of tomorrow

Two McGill students have been named leaders of tomorrow in a special report in Maclean's magazine that's just hit newsstands. A third Maclean's achiever is joining McGill as a research fellow next fall. These remarkable scholars under 30 were chosen from 400 nominations submitted by universities across the country.

The McGill students are Félix-Antoine Boudreault, 26, a master's student in Civil Engineering, and Alexandra Conliffe, 24, who will soon graduate with her bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering and head to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Conliffe and Boudreault have both taken their academic interests beyond the classroom to make a difference. Boudreault has worked on development projects in Ghana, Togo and Central Africa. "For me this is a way to humanize a profession [engineering] with a bad reputation," says Boudreault, whose efforts have already garnered him several awards in Quebec.

Conliffe is a founder of the McGill chapter of Engineers Without Borders. Her own development work has included a water resources project in Uzbekistan and English-language teaching in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

A third person selected by Maclean's as a future leader is Pascale Fournier, 29, a women's rights advocate who has a Université Laval law degree and two Master's degrees to her credit and is completing her doctorate at Harvard University. As a Boulton Fellow in McGill's Law Faculty in 2004-05, she will be conducting research on the role and legal status of women in modern Islamic states and teaching a course on Muslim women's rights.

Earlier this year, Maclean's magazine asked Canadian universities to nominate current students or recent graduates for possible inclusion in the report.