Kudos

Friend of education

Warren Chippindale, MNI campaign leader
Courtesy of MNI

Warren Chippindale was recently awarded the Distinguished Friend of Education Award by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education for his extraordinary leadership. For over four decades, Dr. Chippindale has occupied volunteer leadership positions at McGill that have significantly advanced higher education and the field of university advancement nationally. He has served as a McGill governor for 18 years and has chaired all three of the Montreal Neurological Institute's major campaigns, securing over $56 million in addition to continue to play a key role on the Institute advisory board.

Hooray for jolly good fellows!

McGill has just received a rash of good fellowship news. First, we heard that mathematics professor Niky Kamran is one of ten researchers to be named a new Killam Research Fellow. Kamran will study wave equations in curved space-time. Of eleven other fellowships renewed for a second year, three were awarded to McGill professors: Kenneth Dean, Department of East Asian Studies, for research on "Irrigation and Individuation: Regional Ritual Networks in Southeast China"; Brian Young, Department of History, for the study "Patrician Families in Lower Canada/Quebec, 1760-1840"; and Hong Guo, Department of Physics, for "Multi-Scale Modeling for Nanoelectronic Devices".

Administered by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Killam Research Fellowships enable Canada's best scientists and scholars to devote two years to full-time research and writing.

Hot on the heels of the Killam news, we heard that three McGill professors have received prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships: Andrew Cumming, Department of Physics; Christopher C. Pack, Department of Neuroscience; and Ehab Abouheif, Department of Molecular Biology.

The Sloan Foundation established the fellowships in 1955 "to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise."

The Foundation gives 116 awards each year, and recipients are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of the most compelling interest to them. Thirty-two Sloan Fellows have won Nobel Prizes later in their careers, and hundreds have gone on to receive other honours.