Royal Society Fellows

Seven McGill professors have been named Fellows of the prestigious Royal Society of Canada, one of the highest honours in the country for academics, while an eighth professor earned one of the organization's top awards.

McGill's newest Fellows of the Royal Society are medicine professor Rhoda Blostein, management professor Reuven Brenner, law professor Patrick Glenn, Dean of Education Ratna Ghosh, neurology and neurosurgery professor George Karpati, physiology professor Michael Mackey and earth and planetary sciences emeritus professor Eric Mountjoy.

The Royal Society of Canada is the senior national body of distinguished Canadian scientists and scholars. Its primary objective is to promote learning and research in the natural and social sciences and in the humanities. The society consists of approximately 1,500 Fellows, men and women from across the country who are selected by their peers for outstanding contributions to the arts and sciences.

The Royal Society describes Blostein as "a pioneer in fundamental studies of the sodium/potassium exchange pump (Na/KATPase) that is crucial to cellular functions such as volume regulation, nutrient uptake and nerve impulse propagation."

Brenner is described as "an iconoclastic economist and a maverick because of his preference for topics far bigger than those with which most economists are comfortable."

Glenn is cited as "a world-renowned scholar whose innovative approaches to comparative law and legal theory have contributed to opening up the field of comparison of judicial institutions."

Ghosh is credited with "redefining the concept of multicultural education in terms of the theoretical as well as practical implications of the politics of difference in education."

According to the Royal Society, Karpati's "greatest achievements are in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a lethal genetic disorder due to a deficiency of the cytoskeletal muscle protein, dystrophin. He was the first to show the localization of dystrophin to the muscle fiber surface and to demonstrate a lack of dystrophin in the fibers of Duchenne patients."

Mackey is lauded for making "seminal contributions to biomathematics and biophysics, especially in the areas of membrane ion transport, dynamical diseases, cell replication, and the dynamics of neural systems."

Mountjoy "is acclaimed, nationally and internationally, for his research on the Devonian reef complexes of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, the sedimentology and diagenesis of carbonate rocks, and the structure and stratigraphy of the southern Rocky Mountains of Canada."

In addition to the seven new Fellows, architecture professor Annmarie Adams won the organization's Jason A. Hannah Medal. The prize is awarded for an important Canadian publication in the history of medicine.

Adams earned the award for her exploration of the relationship between domestic architecture, health reform, and feminism in late nineteenth-century England in her work Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900. In the book, Adams examines the changing perceptions about the English middle-class house from 1870 to 1900, highlighting how attitudes toward health, women, home life, and even politics were played out in architecture.