McGill University

James McGill was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on October 6, 1744, and studied at the University of GlasgowUniversity of GlasgowThe University of Glasgow is a research university in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1451, it describes itself as the fourth oldest university in the UK, and it is a member of the Russell Group.Open the full entry. He moved to North America before 1766 and traded in the Upper Great Lakes region, known in French as the “pays d’en haut”; by 1775 he was based in Montreal, dealing in furs and ammunition, and the goods he traded and imported included products of West Indies plantations that relied on enslaved labour. In 1776 he married Marie-Charlotte Trottier Desrivières (née Guillimin), a French-speaking widow, and became stepfather to her sons.⁠[1][2]

He was a volunteer colonel in the Montreal militia and for many years a city magistrate, sitting on a council that acted as Montreal’s de facto government; he served on a committee that drew up a report on the need for a Legislative Assembly in Lower Canada and was elected to that assembly three times.⁠[2]

McGill University’s page on its founder states that the McGill household at various times owned at least five enslaved people: Jack or Jacques, a Black man (c. 1760–1838); Sarah, a Black woman (c. 1763–1809); Marie-Louise, a Black woman who joined the household as a girl (c. 1765–1789); an Indigenous boy whose name is unknown (c. 1768–1778); and Marie Potamiane, an Indigenous girl (c. 1773–1783). On that page the university acknowledges that its founding wealth came partly from James McGill’s role in the colonial economy and the transatlantic slave trade, and recognizes the lasting harm these practices caused to Black and Indigenous communities.⁠[2]

In 1801 Lower Canada established the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning to promote elementary and secondary school education in the colony; The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that it was set up to meet demand for public education.⁠[3][4]

James McGill’s will, dated January 8, 1811, left a tract of land near Montreal with the dwelling house and other buildings on it, together with £10,000, in trust for the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, on condition that a university or college be established on the land within ten years of his death, one college of which was to be called McGill College; the £10,000, with interest, became payable three years after his death. McGill died in 1813. The university’s bicentennial page describes the bequest as £10,000 and his 46-acre Burnside Place estate, left in trust to the Royal Institution, and states that the estate became the heart of today’s downtown campus.⁠[5][6]

The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that McGill’s heirs contested his will; the university’s bicentennial page states that although McGill College was officially founded in 1821, the first classes were not given until 1829, in part because of legal disputes over McGill’s estate.⁠[4][7]

On March 31, 1821, in the second year of his reign, King George IV issued Letters Patent at Westminster incorporating “The Governors, Principal, and Fellows of McGill College, at Montreal, in the said Province of Lower Canada.” The charter was granted at the request of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning; it provided that the college would be treated as a university with the power to confer degrees and made the members of the Royal Institution its Visitors. McGill University gives 1821 as the year of its founding.⁠[5][3][1]

The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article gives the name in the 1821 charter as “the University of McGill College.”⁠[4]

George Jehoshaphat Mountain, an Anglican priest and the son of Bishop Mountain, the president of the Royal Institution, was the first Principal of McGill College; the university lists his term as 1824 to 1835. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography states that when the honorary teaching staff was appointed in 1824 he was named principal of the college and professor of divinity, and that he held the post until July 1835; the university’s bicentennial page likewise dates the appointment of a first Principal to 1824, when no faculties had yet been established, while the past-principal article on the President’s website says he was named the first Principal of McGill College in 1829. That article quotes him as saying that the college’s rules “imposed no test upon Professors or Students.” The Dictionary of Canadian Biography also states that his father, Jacob, was the first bishop of the diocese of Quebec, and that George Mountain was consecrated at Lambeth Palace, London, on February 14, 1836, as suffragan bishop in the diocese of Quebec with the title of bishop of Montreal; he formally succeeded as bishop of Quebec in 1837 but kept the Montreal title until 1850.⁠[8][9][10][7]

On June 24, 1829, Burnside Place was formally opened as McGill College. The university’s bicentennial page states that the Montreal Medical Institution, which without a royal charter could not grant degrees, merged with McGill College in 1829 and became Canada’s first Faculty of Medicine, and that the Montreal General Hospital, from which the institution had sprung, became the Faculty’s teaching hospital; The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that the trustees, after gaining the estate, adopted the Montreal Medical Institution as the Faculty of Medicine in 1829. McGill’s Quick facts page also describes it as Canada’s first faculty of medicine.⁠[7][4][11]

The Faculty of Medicine’s history page states that the Montreal Medical Institution became McGill College’s first academic unit; four years after classes began McGill awarded its first degree, which was also Canada’s first medical degree, to William Leslie Logie, the only graduate that year.⁠[12]

John Bethune (in office 1835–1846) was a clergyman, aged 44 when appointed; Edmund Allen Meredith (1846–1853), a lawyer and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, was 29 when he was appointed the third Principal in 1846; Charles Dewey Day (1853–1855) was named the fourth Principal by the Board of Governors in 1853 and accepted the post on a temporary basis.⁠[8]

The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that the litigation was settled in the trustees’ favour and the nondenominational McGill College was built on the founder’s farm; the Faculty of Arts was established in 1843, and the Arts Building, designed by John Ostell and completed that year, is the oldest building still standing on the campus. The university’s bicentennial page states that the central pavilion (the original Arts Building) and the east pavilion (Dawson Hall) were completed in 1843, making the building the University’s oldest structure.⁠[4][13]

On July 6, 1852, in the sixteenth year of her reign, Queen Victoria issued an amended charter at Westminster that revised the provisions of 1821 and used the corporate name “The Governors, Principal and Fellows of McGill College”; the Visitor became the Governor General of the Province of Canada or, in his absence, the Administrator of the Government, and the members of the Royal Institution ceased to be Visitors. In the same year the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning and the Governors of McGill were joined in a single Board of Governors, and the members of the Royal Institution became governors of McGill College.⁠[5][3]

The geologist and educator John William Dawson was born at Pictou, Nova Scotia, on October 13, 1820, was Superintendent of Education for Nova Scotia from 1850 to 1853, Principal of McGill from 1855 to 1893 and Principal of the McGill Normal School from 1857 to 1870. The university’s page on its past principals credits his administration with putting McGill on a stable financial footing, expanding instruction in pure and applied science, maintaining a strong Faculty of Medicine, establishing the Normal School and building the Redpath Museum and the Redpath Library; controversies of his tenure concerned the Jesuit estates and the admission of women and co-education; he went on writing about geology and evolution while in office. He died in Montreal on November 19, 1899.⁠[14]

The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article describes Dawson on his arrival as a young geologist from Nova Scotia; he proposed affiliated schools and colleges across Canada teaching the McGill curriculum and built a tradition of seeking support from wealthy benefactors, among them the Molson family, Lord Strathcona (Donald Alexander Smith) and Sir William Macdonald; McGill received minimal public funding until the early 1960s.⁠[4]

On May 14 and 15, 1874, a McGill side played a HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry squad in Cambridge, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry, in what McGill’s bicentennial website calls the first modern football games; Harvard’s student newspaper, the Magenta, then wrote of the sport as “foot-ball.” The website gives the result of the 1874 game as a 3–0 win for Harvard and states that Harvard so liked McGill’s additions of carrying the ball, downs and tackling that it used them against YaleYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry the following year, and that college football thus took root in America. The two universities now meet each year in rugby for the Peter Covo Memorial Cup, founded in 1974 and named for a McGill rugby coach and professor; the website gives McGill 24 wins in the 38 games played.⁠[15]

On March 3, 1875, the first organized indoor hockey game was played at the Victoria Skating Rink in downtown Montreal; it was organized by the civil engineer James Creighton (BCL 1880), and many of the players were McGill students. Two years later the McGill Hockey Club made its debut, described by McGill’s bicentennial website as the world’s first official hockey team; Richard F. Smith (BSc 1883), W. F. Robertson (BSc 1880) and W. L. Murray refined the rules and introduced a rubber puck carved from a lacrosse ball. The website calls McGill arguably the “birthplace of hockey” while noting that Kingston, Halifax, Dartmouth and Windsor make the same claim, depending on how hockey is defined.⁠[16]

In 1911 Frank Patrick (BA 1908) and his brother Lester, who left McGill to play professional hockey, created the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, which competed with the National Hockey Association, soon to become the NHLNHLThe National Hockey League (NHL) is a men’s professional ice hockey league with clubs in the United States and Canada. Founded in Montreal in 1917, it comprises 32 teams and awards the Stanley Cup to its playoff champion.Open the full entry. The brothers’ innovations included Canada’s first artificial ice rinks, penalty shots, numbered jerseys, on-the-fly line changes, assists and the blue line; in 1926 they sold their league and its rules to the NHL, and both were later inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.⁠[16]

Picture captions in The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article state that the game of hockey as it is known today was developed at McGill in 1875, and that an 1884 photograph of a McGill hockey game is believed to be the earliest known action photograph of the sport.⁠[4]

In the fall of 1884 four recent graduates of the Montreal High School for Girls, Rosalie McLea, Octavia Ritchie, Alice Murray and Helen Reid, became the first women admitted to McGill, which made McGill the first university in Quebec to accept women.⁠[17]

McGill’s bicentennial website states that the admission of women was a growing topic of debate at the time: in 1872 Mount Allison University in New Brunswick became the first Canadian university to admit women, followed by Queen’s, Acadia and Dalhousie. At McGill the process began in 1857 with the establishment of the McGill Normal School, which offered Montreal’s first English-language professional training program for women but could not grant university degrees; in the early 1870s McGill professors gave university-level lectures to members of the Montreal Ladies’ Educational Association, one of whose co-founders was Margaret Mercer Dawson, the wife of Principal William Dawson. In 1882 a committee led by Principal Dawson met to discuss establishing a system of co-education and reached a favourable decision two years later.⁠[17]

Sir Donald Smith (later Lord Strathcona), a Scottish-Canadian banker and railway magnate, made donations over several years on condition that women be educated separately from men; in his honour the students called themselves “Donaldas,” their numbers surged, and by 1889 women made up a third of McGill’s student body.⁠[17]

In 1885 the governors formally adopted the name “McGill University.”⁠[4]

William Peterson, a classical scholar and a graduate of Edinburgh and Oxford, accepted the principalship in May 1895 after much negotiation and held it until 1919. The university’s page on its past principals states that his tenure saw the creation of Macdonald College and the Conservatorium of Music and expansion in the sciences and the arts; the campus was transformed, primarily through the benefactions of Sir William Macdonald and Sir Donald A. Smith, by the construction of the Macdonald Engineering, Physics and Chemistry Buildings, the Strathcona Medical Building, the Students’ Union Building (now the McCord Museum) and Royal Victoria College. He died on January 4, 1921.⁠[18]

Royal Victoria College opened in 1899 as a college for women and was later gradually merged into McGill, which Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry’s article describes as now fully coeducational. McGill’s bicentennial website states that the lion’s share of Sir Donald Smith’s donation went into the construction and upkeep of the college, which opened as a dormitory and educational facility for women; today it is a mixed-gender residence, and much of the original building is occupied by the Schulich School of Music.⁠[19][17]

The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that Peterson encouraged Henry Marshall Tory to found McGill College in Vancouver, which is now the University of British Columbia.⁠[4]

In 1898 Ernest Rutherford (born in Nelson, New Zealand, on August 30, 1871; died in Cambridge, England, on October 19, 1937) left Cambridge for Canada to take the Macdonald Chair of Physics at McGill, which had become vacant; The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that he was hired as a full professor of physics while Peterson was principal. At McGill he worked with R. B. Owens on the “emanation” of thorium and discovered a new noble gas, an isotope of radon later called thoron, and he continued at the Macdonald Laboratory his work on radioactive bodies, especially the emission of alpha rays. Frederick Soddy arrived from Oxford in 1900, and together they created the “disintegration theory” of radioactivity, which treats radioactive phenomena as atomic rather than molecular processes; they also discovered a number of new radioactive substances and fixed their places in the series of transformations. Otto Hahn, who later discovered atomic fission, worked under Rutherford at the Montreal laboratory in 1905–1906. In 1907 Rutherford returned to England as Langworthy Professor of Physics at the University of ManchesterUniversity of ManchesterThe University of Manchester is a research university in Manchester, England, formed in 2004 by combining the Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). It traces its origins to 1824 and is a member of the Russell Group.Open the full entry; he received the Nobel PrizeNobel PrizeThe Nobel Prize is an international award established under the will of Alfred Nobel, comprising five prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, awarded since 1901; its funds are managed by the Nobel Foundation, whose Board is based in Stockholm. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, established in 1968, is not a Nobel Prize.Open the full entry in Chemistry 1908 “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances,” and his affiliation at the time of the award was Victoria University, Manchester.⁠[20][4][21]

Macdonald College was founded in 1907 at Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, specializing in agricultural sciences, as part of McGill University. McGill’s bicentennial website states that in the early 1900s Sir William Macdonald, an industrialist who avoided public attention, bought hundreds of acres of farmland in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, near the western tip of the Island of Montreal, and donated the land as the basis of the college, which the website calls one of the most important gifts in McGill’s history; James W. Robertson, the federal government’s commissioner of agriculture and dairying in the 1890s, was principal of the college for its first three years and assembled its professors. The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that it was Peterson who persuaded Macdonald to establish the college as a constituent of McGill, focused on agriculture, food science and teacher training. The college is now known as McGill’s Macdonald Campus.⁠[19][22][4]

Sir Auckland Campbell Geddes (in office 1919–1920) was born on June 27, 1879, was Professor of Anatomy at McGill from 1913 to 1914 and was British Minister of National Service from 1917 to 1919. He was appointed Principal in 1919 but never undertook his official duties, and he resigned in 1920 on being appointed British Ambassador to the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry; Frank Dawson Adams served as Acting Principal for most of his tenure.⁠[8][23]

Sir Arthur Currie (in office 1920–1933) was born in Adelaide, Ontario, in 1875, was educated locally and trained as a schoolteacher, and at 19 moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where he worked as a teacher, an insurance agent, a manager and a real estate developer while serving in the militia, in which he was a lieutenant colonel by 1912. After war broke out in 1914 he rose quickly, led the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge and by 1917 commanded the Canadian Corps in France. The university’s page on its past principals states that he was a strong public speaker and helped McGill’s capital campaign of 1920. In 1927 an Ontario newspaper accused him of needlessly sacrificing Canadian troops during the war; he sued the newspaper and won, but the trial took an emotional toll and he was granted a leave of absence. He died in office in 1933.⁠[24]

The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that under Currie McGill’s graduate school began to share with Toronto the development of postgraduate studies in Canada.⁠[4]

In 1930 Leonard Marsh began the McGill Social Science Project, which The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article judges to have strongly influenced the development of the welfare state in Canada. Among McGill’s scholars between the two world wars the article names James Bertram Collip and Wilder Penfield in medicine, Otto Maass in chemistry and John Stuart Foster in physics.⁠[4]

In 1934 Wilder Penfield founded The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital). The Neuro’s website describes Penfield as “a trailblazer in epilepsy surgery” and The Neuro as a bilingual academic healthcare institution and a McGill research and teaching institute that forms part of the Neuroscience Mission of the McGill University Health Centre and is a Killam Institution, supported by the Killam Trusts.⁠[25]

Arthur Eustace Morgan (in office 1935–1937) was born in Bristol, England, on July 26, 1886, and was the first Principal of University College, Hull, from 1926 to 1935 before being appointed to McGill. Lewis Williams Douglas (in office 1938–1939) was an American whose grandfather, James Douglas, was a McGill governor from 1911 to 1919 and a major benefactor.⁠[26]

Frank Cyril James was born in London, England, in 1903, studied at the London School of EconomicsLondon School of Economics and Political ScienceThe London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is a specialist social science university in central London, founded in 1895 by members of the Fabian Society. It is known for research in economics, politics and social policy, and its alumni and staff include many Nobel laureates and national leaders.Open the full entry and at the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry, where he took his PhD in 1926, and became an economist, professor of finance and author. He was brought to McGill in 1939 to reorganize the School of Commerce and, shortly after war was declared, became Principal and Vice-Chancellor when Lewis Williams Douglas returned to the United States. He chaired the Canadian Advisory Committee on Reconstruction from 1941 to 1943, was a member of the American Committee on Financial Research of the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1935 to 1945, sat on the executive of the National Conference of Canadian Universities from 1940 to 1952 (vice-president 1946–1948, president 1948–1950) and of the Association of Universities of the British Commonwealth in 1948–1951 and 1960–1962, was chairman of the Canadian Universities Foundation in 1949 and its vice-chairman from 1959 to 1962, and was president of the International Association of Universities from 1960 to 1965. He resigned as Principal in 1962 and died in England in 1973.⁠[27]

The university’s page on its past principals states that James’s term coincided with Sir Edward Beatty’s retirement as Chancellor and that the Principal’s office gained greater control over the university’s administration; the Faculty of Divinity was created in 1948, and the departments of Geography and Chemical Engineering, the Foster Radiation Laboratory, the Institute of Islamic Studies and the Bellairs Research Institute were also established in this period.⁠[27]

The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article gives James’s term as principal as 1940 to 1962 and states that he led the fight for federal funding of universities; with the return of veterans, enrolment at McGill rose from about 3,400 in 1939 to more than 8,000 in 1948. The article also names Stephen Leacock, Hugh MacLennan and Frank Scott for their contributions to the humanities and law.⁠[4]

The Allan Memorial Institute is a psychiatric teaching hospital in Montreal affiliated with McGill University. The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that from 1957 to 1964, and possibly from as early as 1948, the Scottish-American psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron ran a series of experiments there; Cameron, already a well-known psychiatrist by 1943, was invited by Wilder Penfield to lead the new institute and became its first director and the first chairman of McGill’s psychiatry department. The stated purpose was to find a cure for schizophrenia; the article states that the real aim was to study whether drugs and psychological techniques could be used for mind control. The Central Intelligence AgencyCentral Intelligence AgencyThe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an independent U.S. intelligence agency established under the National Security Act of 1947 to provide national security intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers. It is headquartered in Langley, Virginia.Open the full entry funded the work from 1957 to 1964 through a front organization, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and Cameron is believed to have received half a million dollars from the Canadian government from 1950 to around 1965.⁠[28]

The methods listed in the article were “depatterning,” intended to erase memories and return patients to a childlike state; “psychic driving,” in which patients were made to listen to looped taped messages for up to 16 hours a day, negative messages for 10 days followed by positive ones for 10 days; drug-induced comas, one of them said to have lasted up to 86 days; LSD and large doses of sedatives; electroshock at up to 75 times the normal intensity; and sensory deprivation. Patients did not consent and families were not informed that the treatments were experimental; many patients suffered retrograde amnesia and had to relearn skills. The article estimates that hundreds of patients were probably treated under the program.⁠[28]

The article states that MKULTRA became public in 1975, when the Church Committee of the United States Senate investigated abuses by the CIA; that Canadians learned of the Allan Memorial Institute experiments in 1980 from the CBC program The Fifth Estate; and that the institute’s directors defended Cameron’s actions in the mid-1980s. More than 300 people sought compensation from the Canadian government; in 1988 nine survivors received compensation from the United States government, and in 1992 seventy-seven survivors were awarded compensation by the Canadian government, while more than 250 claimants were denied. The article states that in 1984 it was revealed that the United States had sent a formal apology to the Canadian government while asking it not to share any details about the MKULTRA program with former patients seeking an apology and financial compensation; it also states that neither the CIA nor the Canadian government has apologized for the human experimentation at the Allan Memorial Institute that they funded.⁠[28]

Harold Rocke Robertson was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1912, received a BSc (1932) and an MD,CM (1936) from McGill, and had been Professor of Surgery at the University of British Columbia, Surgeon-in-chief of the Montreal General Hospital and chairman of the Department of Surgery in McGill’s Faculty of Medicine. He became Principal in December 1962, the first McGill graduate to hold the post. Under him several buildings were planned or constructed, among them the McIntyre Medical Building, the Faculty of Law Building and the Stewart Biology Building, which formed a new upper campus; the number of students and staff doubled; and he decentralized the administration by creating additional Vice-Principals and other administrative officers.⁠[29]

In 1969, during Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, a large street march called “Opération McGill Français” drew 15,000 people, mainly trade unionists and Quebec nationalists, who demanded that McGill become a French-language university; the student newspaper The McGill Daily and other student groups supported it. McGill’s bicentennial website states that English remains McGill’s primary language of instruction, that one student in five gives French as a first language and that students may submit examinations and papers in either French or English. The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that in the 1960s and 1970s McGill went through a “student revolt” and adjusted to the revival of francophone nationalism.⁠[30][4]

Robert Edward Bell (in office 1970–1979) worked in research and teaching in nuclear physics, had been Rutherford Professor of Physics and Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies, and was appointed Principal in 1970. David Lloyd Johnston (in office 1979–1994) was born in Sudbury, Ontario, took a BA at Harvard University in 1963, holds law degrees from Cambridge and Queen’s University, taught in the law faculties of Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, became Dean of Law at the University of Western Ontario in 1974, specialized in securities regulation, corporation law and labour law, and took up the principalship of McGill in September 1979. Bernard J. Shapiro (in office 1994–2002) was born and raised in Montreal and took his undergraduate degree at McGill, where he received the Alan Oliver Gold Medal.⁠[26][31]

Heather Munroe-Blum was McGill’s 16th Principal and Vice-Chancellor from 2003 to 2013. A scholar of psychiatric epidemiology and public policy, she holds a BA and a BSW from McMaster University, an MSW from Wilfrid Laurier University and a PhD in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel HillUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) is a public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Established by an act written in 1789, it admitted its first students in 1795, describes itself as the first public university in the United States, and is part of the UNC System.Open the full entry; before McGill she was Vice-President (Research and International Relations) and Dean of the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto, after earlier academic appointments at York University and McMaster University. The university’s page on its past principals states that she strengthened McGill’s international leadership in research and graduate education and oversaw a significant renewal of the professoriate and of the university’s infrastructure. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the National Order of Quebec and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.⁠[32]

Suzanne Fortier was McGill’s 17th Principal and Vice-Chancellor from 2013 to 2022. A native of St-Timothée, Quebec, she took her BSc and her PhD in crystallography at McGill, spent more than two decades at Queen’s University as a professor of chemistry and computing and as Vice-Principal (Research) and Vice-Principal (Academic), and was President of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada from 2006 to 2013; her research developed mathematical and artificial-intelligence methods for protein structure determination and the analysis of crystallographic data. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of France’s National Order of Merit and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Royal Society of Canada.⁠[33]

On February 13, 2019, John and Marcy McCall MacBain announced a gift of C$200 million to create the McCall MacBain Scholarships at McGill, which McGill’s news release called the single largest gift in Canadian history. The scholarships are for master’s and professional-degree students and cover full tuition and fees and a living stipend, with mentorship and activities such as retreats, workshops and internships; the program was to grow within five years to support up to 75 scholars on campus at a time, with applications opening to Canadian students in fall 2020, a first cohort starting in fall 2021 and international students joining in the third year. The release states that the gift honours McGill’s bicentennial. John McCall MacBain took an Honours BA in Economics at McGill in 1980 as a scholarship student, was president of the Students’ Society and valedictorian, later obtained a law degree from the University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry as a Rhodes Scholar, and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Marcy McCall MacBain, originally from Huron County, Ontario, obtained an Honours Bachelor of Kinesiology from McMaster University in 2000 and holds a Master of Science in International Health Policy from the London School of Economics and a DPhil in Evidence-Based Health Care from the University of Oxford.⁠[34]

In 2020 McGill appointed two Provostial Postdoctoral Research Scholars on Slavery and Colonialism to investigate the university’s historic ties to colonialism and slavery, and committed itself to publishing more about its early history as that research emerges. In September of the same year McGill launched its Action Plan to Address Anti-Black Racism. McGill’s bicentennial website states that the plan’s commitments are meant to increase the representation and success of Black students, faculty and staff at McGill, that at least C$15 million was being allocated to these priorities over a five-year period and that by winter 2021 important headway had been made on a range of commitments; Suzanne Fortier, then Principal, said the plan “is just the beginning.”⁠[2][35]

On November 14, 2022, McGill announced that its Board of Governors, on the recommendation of an advisory committee that had led an international search, had unanimously approved H. Deep Saini as the 18th Principal and Vice-Chancellor for a five-year, renewable term beginning April 1, 2023; until then the Provost, Christopher Manfredi, served as Interim Principal. Saini grew up in India, completed a Master of Science (Honours) in Botany at Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana and a PhD in Plant Physiology at the University of Adelaide in Australia; when appointed he was President and Vice-Chancellor of Dalhousie University, had earlier been President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra in Australia, and had lived in Montreal for nearly two decades. Maryse Bertrand, chair of the Board of Governors, spoke of his “exceptional breadth and depth of leadership experience.”⁠[36]

H. Deep Saini’s term began on April 1, 2023. He was installed on May 29, 2023, in the same tent that was to host 13 Convocation ceremonies over six days; John McCall MacBain, the Chancellor, was emcee and formally invested him with the office and title, Principal Emerita Suzanne Fortier assisted with the removal of his PhD robes and the donning of the Principal’s regalia, and Daniel Jutras, Rector of the Université de Montréal, and Anja Geitmann, Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, offered greetings; during the ceremony Saini took part in conferring honorary degrees on Drew Feustel, Alexina Louie and Drew Hayden Taylor. In his address he said, “The relentless pursuit of excellence is embedded in our DNA,” and named climate change, public health, energy, food security, environmental sustainability and global order and security as challenges that call for collaboration.⁠[37][38]

On April 27, 2024, amid a wave of similar demonstrations on American campuses over the conflict between Israel and Hamas, protesters set up an encampment on the lower field of McGill’s downtown campus, where dozens of tents were eventually pitched; they demanded that McGill divest from funds connected with Israel. The encampment was dismantled on July 10: the university said security staff entered shortly before 5 a.m. and demanded that the protesters leave the grounds; it had hired a private security firm, dozens of Montreal police officers were present and Quebec provincial police assisted. The university said that almost all of the approximately 35 people at the site left and that the clearing was “proceeding peacefully”; heavy machinery removed parts of the camp, Sherbrooke Street was closed for a time and splinter demonstrations began in the street. Police said a 21-year-old man was arrested for assaulting a security agent. Classes were moved online for the day, and libraries and campus daycares were closed.⁠[39]

President Deep Saini said the university had acted in “close collaboration” with the city and the police and through the engagement of a qualified security firm; he said, “This camp was not a peaceful protest,” and called it “a heavily fortified focal point for intimidation and violence.” The safety concerns the university cited were human waste, a rat infestation, discarded syringes, rotting food and garbage. A Concordia University student watching from the street said, “The students are steadfast in their struggle.” Quebec’s higher education minister, Pascale Déry, said the province had been asking for weeks for the encampment to be dismantled and called the development “good news”; the office of Montreal’s mayor, Valérie Plante, said police were on site to ensure safety.⁠[39]

On February 7, 2025, McGill set out its finances at a town hall: it expected a deficit of C$15 million in the current fiscal year and of C$45 million in the next (2025–26), and the Provost, Christopher Manfredi, said that without changes the accumulated deficit could reach C$194 million by 2028. The university planned to eliminate projected deficits of C$45 million, C$16 million and C$14 million over the following three fiscal years. Staffing makes up 80 percent of its operating expenses, and most of the savings were to come from reducing administrative and academic head count, together with attrition, the elimination of overtime, voluntary reduced hours and unfilled vacancies; Manfredi said some positions would be abolished, causing job losses, which he called “unsettling news.” Each faculty was given a budget target for 2025–26, and the university began a multi-year initiative, Horizon McGill, to review administrative efficiency and the delivery of programs.⁠[40][41]

McGill attributed the deficits to several policies: Quebec’s decision in 2023 to raise tuition for out-of-province students by C$3,000 a year, which the government said was needed to protect French; the province’s clawing back of a large part of international students’ fees for redistribution to French-language universities; federal limits on international students first announced in January 2024; a Quebec law passed in December 2024 that lets the province limit international students by region, institution and program; and a requirement that, from fall 2025, Quebec’s three English-language universities ensure that 80 percent of their out-of-province undergraduates reach an intermediate level of French by graduation. President Deep Saini said at the town hall that these pressures have significant implications for the delivery of McGill’s mission and its identity as a world-class university.⁠[40]

On March 19, 2025, the Provost, Christopher Manfredi, and the Vice-President (Administration and Finance), Fabrice Labeau, wrote to the university community that, after the February 7 town hall had set out a need to reduce McGill’s workforce by 350 to 500 people, faculties and units had worked to find savings and an estimated 99 layoffs were expected across the university, a figure communicated to Quebec’s Minister of Employment and Social Solidarity; affected employees were to be notified by the end of April 2025.⁠[41]

McGill and Concordia University began a legal challenge to Quebec’s tuition and French-language measures in 2024. On April 24, 2025, Justice Eric Dufour of the Quebec Superior Court invalidated the tuition increase for out-of-province students, finding the government’s 2023 decision, an increase of 33 percent, unreasonable and based on limited data; the ruling let the higher fee stay in place for up to nine months while the government revised its tuition plan. It also overturned the requirement that 80 percent of out-of-province undergraduates at English-language universities reach an intermediate level of French by graduation, which the judge found unreasonable because of the “almost certain impossibility” that the universities could meet the target.⁠[42]

McGill’s Quick facts page gives a total of 40,531 students in fall 2025: 28,167 undergraduates, 10,196 graduate students, 649 postdoctoral scholars and 1,519 residents and fellows; 49 percent had English as their mother tongue, 21 percent French and 29 percent another language; 50 percent came from Quebec, 23 percent from the rest of Canada and 27 percent from other countries. The letter of the President and the chair of the Board of Governors on the Board’s meeting of October 2, 2025, gives total enrolment in the third week of classes as 40,421, up 1.5 percent from the previous fall; 10,835 undergraduates came from CEGEP, up 4.2 percent; the number of Quebec residents rose 5 percent and that of students from the rest of Canada 2 percent, while international enrolment fell 5 percent; the five leading countries of origin of international students were the United States (21.5 percent), China (20.6 percent), France (18.3 percent), India (4.0 percent) and Iran (2.9 percent); and 73 students joined the first cohort of the Bachelor of Global Engineering after two years at CentraleSupélec in France.⁠[11][43]

Enrolment by faculty in fall 2025 was Arts 9,630; Science 6,769; Medicine and Health Sciences 6,089; Engineering 5,169; Desautels Faculty of Management 3,521; Education 2,566; Agricultural and Environmental Sciences 1,638; Continuing Studies 1,553; Law 909; Schulich School of Music 870; and Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences 297, with a further 864 students under Interfaculty Studies and 656 under Interfaculty BA & SC. In U15 Data Exchange figures for degree-seeking students in 2023–24, international students made up 29.5 percent at McGill (20.9 percent at other Canadian research universities) and doctoral students 12.1 percent (6.7 percent at the others).⁠[11]

The Quick facts page lists 1,677 tenured and tenure-stream faculty, 148 endowed teaching and research chairs, 166 Canada Research Chairs allotted to McGill and 216 active Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada. In fiscal year 2024 the university, including its affiliated hospitals, received C$749.2 million in research funding (source: CAUBO): C$375.3 million from the federal government (50 percent), C$115.3 million from the Quebec government (15.4 percent), C$129.9 million from not-for-profit organizations and individuals (17.3 percent), C$55.8 million from industry (7.4 percent) and C$73 million from other sources (9.7 percent).⁠[11]

In fiscal year 2024–25 McGill’s combined sources of revenue came to C$1.9 billion: C$669 million from the Government of Quebec, C$430.3 million in tuition and fees, C$315.7 million in Government of Canada research and infrastructure grants, C$171.5 million from sales of goods and services, C$125.9 million in investment and interest income, C$94.3 million in gifts and bequests and C$44.1 million in other grants and contracts. In fiscal year 2025 it had 23,000 donors and received C$289.2 million in gifts and pledges, including C$6.6 million in bequests from 87 donors. On October 2, 2025, the Board of Governors approved the 2024–2025 Financial Report, covering the year ended April 30, 2025. At the same meeting the Board granted full approval for the creation of the McGill Antimicrobial Resistance Centre, approved proceeding with Phase 2 of a construction project at the Montreal Neurological Institute and an increase in funding for the structural rehabilitation of the Strathcona Music Building, and appointed DeloitteDeloitteDeloitte is a global professional services network made up of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and its member firms, providing audit and assurance, consulting, tax and legal services. It reported aggregate revenue of $74.5 billion for fiscal 2026 and has nearly 500,000 people.Open the full entry as external auditor for the fiscal year ending April 30, 2026.⁠[11][43]

The rankings quoted on the Quick facts page are first in Canada among medical-doctoral universities for more than 20 consecutive years in the Maclean’s University Rankings 2027, 30th in the QS World University Rankings 2027, 43rd in the Times Higher EducationTimes Higher EducationTimes Higher Education (THE) is a London-based higher education news and data company. It grew out of the Times Higher Education Supplement, launched in 1971, and is best known for its World University Rankings, founded in 2004; it has been owned by the private equity firm Inflexion since 2019.Open the full entry World University Rankings 2027 and 73rd in the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities 2026. The October 2025 letter of the President and the Board chair states that McGill placed 27th worldwide in both the 2026 QS World University Rankings and the 2025 Center for World University Rankings and holds a Platinum rating from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.⁠[11][43]

In January 2026 the Quebec government published a revised framework that formally entrenched the 33 percent tuition increase for out-of-province students, saying it wanted to ensure that Quebec taxpayers were not subsidizing the education of out-of-province students. In February 2026 McGill and Concordia University said they were abandoning their legal challenge to that decision: McGill said that, while it did not believe the government’s response respected the 2025 court ruling, further litigation would undermine the university’s objectives, and a Concordia University spokesperson said that university did not have the financial means to continue the challenge and hoped to work productively with the government. Premier François Legault has said the tuition increase is in part meant to reduce the number of English-speaking people in Montreal and to protect the French language.⁠[44]

As of November 2026, under the Royal Charter of 1852, the Board of Governors is the university’s highest governing body, with final authority over its affairs; the Senate oversees academic affairs, subject to the Board, and each body is represented on the other. The Chancellor is Pierre Boivin; the office is the titular headship of the university, and its holder presides over Convocation and represents McGill at official functions. The President and Vice-Chancellor is Deep Saini, and the Provost and Executive Vice-President (Academic), the chief academic officer after the President, is Angela Campbell. Saini has been reappointed for a second five-year term commencing July 1, 2028; he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Royal Society of New South Wales, chaired the Board of Directors of Universities Canada from 2023 to 2025 and remains a member of that board, and sits on the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal. Before McGill he had also been vice-president of the University of Toronto and principal of its Mississauga campus, dean of the Faculty of Environment at the University of WaterlooUniversity of WaterlooThe University of Waterloo is a university in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, that opened in 1957 with engineering as its first faculty. Co-operative education, alternating academic and work terms, has been a guiding value since its founding; in October 1957 its first engineering students began what the university describes as Canada’s first educational work term.Open the full entry and director general of the Plant Biology Research Institute at the Université de Montréal; he is fluent in English, French, Hindi and Punjabi and has received honours from the Canadian Society of Plant Physiologists, Nanjing University and the Sikh Foundation of Canada as well as the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum and Diamond Jubilee Medals.⁠[45][37]

Other senior officers listed on the university’s administration and governance page are Véronique Bélanger, Chief of Staff; Anthony Mittermaier, Associate Provost (Student Life and Learning); Fabrice Labeau, Vice-President (Administration and Finance); Marc Weinstein, Vice-President (University Advancement); Philippe Gervais, Vice-President (Communications & Institutional Relations); Lesley Fellows, Vice-President (Health Affairs) and Dean of Medicine and Health Sciences; Dominique Bérubé, Vice-President (Research and Innovation); Anja Geitmann, Vice-President (Global Engagement); Edyta Rogowska, Secretary-General; Jean-François Legault, General Counsel and Director of Legal Services; and Diana Dutton, Associate Vice-President (Human Resources).⁠[45]

The page of the university’s Secretariat describes it as the “corporate head office” for McGill University and the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning. The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that McGill is a constituent of the provincial university network and has considerable freedom in maintaining its tradition of excellence in education and research.⁠[46][4]

McGill’s history page states that the university has 11 faculties and 13 schools across three campuses; its Quick facts page lists 11 faculties and 15 “schools and other academic units.” The 11 faculties are Agricultural and Environmental Sciences; Arts; Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences; Education; Engineering; Law; the Desautels Faculty of Management; Medicine and Health Sciences; the School of Continuing Studies; the Schulich School of Music; and Science. The university’s administration is housed in the James Administration Building at 845 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal.⁠[1][11]

The 15 schools and other academic units listed on the Quick facts page are the Bensadoun School of Retail Management; Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies; the Ingram School of Nursing; the Max Bell School of Public Policy; the Bieler School of Environment; the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture; the School of Biomedical Sciences; the School of Communication Sciences & Disorders; the School of Computer Science; the School of Human Nutrition; the School of Information Studies; the School of Religious Studies; the School of Physical & Occupational Therapy; the School of Social Work; and the School of Urban Planning.⁠[11]

The Macdonald Campus is in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, on the western tip of the Island of Montreal, about 35 kilometres from downtown; it covers 650 hectares and is home to the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the School of Human Nutrition and the Institute of Parasitology, with the Macdonald Campus Farm. The campus page states that classes there are much smaller than comparable courses downtown.⁠[47]

The Quick facts page states that the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) has Canada’s second-largest hospital-based research facility, with 550 researchers and clinicians, 1,200 graduate and postdoctoral students and close to C$170 million in research funding; the MUHC’s teaching hospitals are the Glen site, the Montreal General Hospital, Lachine Hospital and Camille Lefebvre Pavilion and The Neuro, and the other affiliated hospitals are the Jewish General Hospital, the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and St. Mary’s Hospital Center.⁠[11]

Encyclopaedia Britannica’s article states that McGill is internationally known for its work in chemistry, medicine and biology and that three theological colleges are affiliated with it. The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article, last edited in October 2016, states that McGill has 10 faculties offering nearly 300 programs of study, partners with four teaching hospitals and had approximately 40,000 full- and part-time students in the 2016–17 academic year; a picture caption in the article shows the McGill Arctic Research Station on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut. The history page states that Archie, described as the world’s first internet search engine, was created at McGill and that Canada’s first female professor taught there.⁠[19][4][1]

McGill’s logo consists of a shield and a wordmark. The shield bears three red martlets on a white (silver) ground, taken from the arms of the family of the founder, James McGill; an open book at the top, the heraldic symbol of learning, carries the words “In Domino Confido” (“I trust in the Lord”); the crowns with fleurs-de-lys on either side refer to Montreal’s royal name and French origins, and the three peaks above the martlets stand for Montreal’s three hills. The wordmark “McGill” is custom-designed, based on Garamond. The official colour, McGill Red, is hex #ed1b2f (RGB 237, 27, 47), with Pantone 185 for print.⁠[48]

The university’s coat of arms consists of the shield and a scroll and derives from an armorial device assumed by James McGill: the patent of arms was granted by England’s Garter King of Arms in 1922, registered with the Lord Lyon King of Arms in Edinburgh in 1956 and entered in the Public Register of Arms, Flags and Badges of Canada in 1992. The motto on the arms is “Grandescunt Aucta Labore,” which the university’s visual identity guide renders as “By work all things increase and grow.” The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article gives the official colour as red.⁠[48][4]

McGill’s page of notable alumni lists eight alumni who received the Nobel Prize: Rudolph Marcus (BSc 1943, PhD 1946; Chemistry, 1992), Willard Boyle (BSc 1947, MSc 1948, PhD 1950; Physics, 2009), David Hubel (BSc 1947, MDCM 1951; Physiology or Medicine, 1981), Val Fitch (BEng 1948; Physics, 1980), Andrew Victor Schally (BSc 1955, PhD 1959; Physiology or Medicine, 1977), Ralph Steinman (BSc 1963; Physiology or Medicine, 2011), John O’Keefe (PhD 1967; Physiology or Medicine, 2014) and Jack W. Szostak (BSc 1972; Physiology or Medicine, 2009).⁠[49]

The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article states that in 2016 McGill celebrated its 140th Rhodes Scholar and counted 12 Nobel Prize winners among its faculty and alumni.⁠[4]

The Quick facts page states that McGill has more than 325,000 alumni living in more than 185 countries: 50 percent in Quebec, 28 percent in the rest of Canada, 12 percent in the United States and 10 percent elsewhere.⁠[11]

Changpeng ZhaoChangpeng ZhaoChangpeng Zhao (commonly abbreviated CZ) is a Canadian entrepreneur and the founder and former chief executive officer of Binance. He entered the Bitcoin industry with a background in trading-systems engineering and founded Binance in 2017; in 2023 he pleaded guilty in the United States to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program and resigned, personally bearing a $50 million criminal fine and a $150 million CFTC civil penalty, while Binance as a company separately bore billions of dollars in criminal and regulatory settlements; he served four months in prison in 2024 and received a U.S. presidential pardon in 2025. Since then he has mainly been involved in education, investment, and advisory work on digital asset policy.Open the full entry went from Vancouver to Montreal to attend McGill University after finishing high school in 1995, switched his major from biology to computer science and in 1999 co-wrote a scholarly paper on artificial intelligence with his professor, Jeremy Cooperstock; in 2000 he turned a summer internship with the Tokyo stock exchange into a full-time job and decided not to return to McGill, leaving without a degree. Fortune’s profile of April 10, 2023, points out that the many press accounts describing him as a McGill graduate are inaccurate. He later founded BinanceBinanceBinance is a global digital asset trading and multi-asset financial platform launched in 2017 and co-founded by Changpeng Zhao and Yi He. Its business has expanded from spot trading to derivatives, wallets, payments, a public blockchain ecosystem, market data, traditional securities, and artificial intelligence interfaces; its history also includes security incidents, regulatory enforcement across multiple jurisdictions, a 2023 U.S. criminal settlement, and subsequent compliance restructuring.Open the full entry.⁠[50]

Yoshua BengioYoshua BengioYoshua Bengio is a professor of computer science at Université de Montréal, founder of Mila and a deep learning pioneer who shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun; since 2023 he has turned to AI safety research, chairing the International AI Safety Report and founding the non-profit LawZero in 2025. He appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2018.Open the full entry took his BEng (1986), MSc (1988) and PhD (1991) at McGill and was a co-recipient of the 2018 Turing Award. Steven PinkerSteven PinkerSteven Pinker is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist and popular-science author who studies language, cognition and social relations; after more than two decades at MIT he has been a professor of psychology at Harvard University since 2003, and his books include The Language Instinct, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now.Open the full entry was born in Montreal on September 18, 1954, took a bachelor’s degree in psychology at McGill in 1976 and a doctorate in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979. William ShatnerWilliam ShatnerWilliam Shatner is a Canadian actor, author, director and television host best known for playing Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek. His performance as Denny Crane earned two Emmys and a Golden Globe. He also writes fiction and essays, records music and performs on stage. He founded the Hollywood Charity Horse Show in 1990 and flew on Blue Origin’s NS-18 mission at age 90 in 2021. In 2026, he launched the podcast No Time But Now with his daughter and released Love & Other Mysteries.Open the full entry received a BCom from McGill in 1952, and the alumni page also lists a DLitt (2011); he is best known for his starring role as Captain James T. Kirk in the television show Star TrekStar TrekStar Trek is a science-fiction franchise originating in the work of Gene Roddenberry. Its central subjects include exploration aboard starships, encounters across cultures and humanity’s future. It spans television, film, animation and other media, with a long-established fan community.Open the full entry and won back-to-back Emmy Awards as Denny Crane in The Practice and Boston Legal. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s article on Zbigniew BrzezinskiZbigniew BrzezinskiZbigniew Brzezinski (1928–2017) was a Polish-born American political scientist and foreign-policy expert who taught at Harvard University, Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University and served as President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser from 1977 to 1981.Open the full entry states that he studied economics and political science at McGill (B.A., 1948) and political science at McGill (M.A., 1950) and at Harvard University (Ph.D., 1953), and that he was national security adviser in the administration of Jimmy CarterJimmy CarterJimmy Carter (1924–2024) was an American politician and Democrat who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. His administration brokered the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, signed the Panama Canal treaties and established relations with the People’s Republic of China, but he lost his reelection bid amid the energy crisis, inflation and the Iran hostage crisis; after leaving office he founded The Carter Center to work on mediation, election observation and disease control, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.Open the full entry from 1977 to 1981. Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and President of Cloudflare, holds a B.Sc. in Chemistry and Business from McGill and an MBA from Harvard Business School.⁠[49][51][52][53]

In politics and public life the alumni page lists three prime ministers of Canada: Sir John Abbott (BCL 1854), the third; Sir Wilfrid Laurier (BCL 1864), the seventh; and Justin Trudeau (BA 1994), the 23rd; three justices of the Supreme Court of Canada, Sheilah Martin (BCL and LLB 1981; appointed 2017), Nicholas Kasirer (BCL and LLB 1985; appointed 2019) and Mahmud Jamal (BCL and LLB 1993; on the court since 2021); Kirsten Hillman (BCL and LLB 1993), Canada’s ambassador to the United States; John Humphrey (BCom 1925, BA 1927, BCL 1929, PhD 1945), who drafted the first text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948; Joanne Liu (MDCM 1991), international president of Médecins Sans Frontières from 2013 to 2019; and Charles Krauthammer (BA 1970), winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.⁠[49]

Alumni in science and medicine on that page include the physician Sir William Osler (MDCM 1872), an advocate of bedside teaching; the blood-transfusion researcher Charles R. Drew (MDCM 1933); Colin MacLeod (MDCM 1932), who helped identify DNA as the hereditary material; Thomas Chang (BSc 1957, MDCM 1961, PhD 1965), who made the first artificial cell in 1957; Phil Gold, co-discoverer of the cancer marker CEA; the neuroscientist and memory researcher Brenda Milner (PhD 1952); Tim Bliss (BSc 1962, PhD 1967), co-recipient of the 2016 Brain Prize; Bernard Belleau (PhD 1950), a contributor to the drug lamivudine; the astrophysicist Hubert Reeves (MSc 1955); and Alan Emtage (BSc 1987, MSc 1991), creator of the internet search engine Archie. Astronauts among the alumni are Julie Payette (BEng 1986), chief astronaut for the Canadian Space Agency from 2000 to 2007; Robert Thirsk (MDCM 1982), who holds the Canadian record for the longest spaceflight; Dave Williams (BSc 1976, MSc 1983, MDCM 1983), the seventh Canadian in space; David Saint-Jacques (MedResident 2007), who began a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station in November 2018; and Jennifer Sidey-Gibbons (BEng 2011), named an astronaut in 2020.⁠[49]

In business the page lists Noubar Afeyan (BEng 1983), co-founder and chair of Moderna; Les Vadasz (BEng 1961), a founding member of Intel; Wael Sawan (MEng 1997), chief executive of Shell since January 2023; Darren Entwistle (MBA 1988), president and chief executive of Telus; Mirko Bibic (BCom 1989), chief executive of BCE and Bell Canada; Aldo Bensadoun (BCom 1964), executive chairman of The Aldo Group; Lawrence Rossy (BA 1965), founder of Dollarama; Robert Deluce (BSc 1971), founder of Porter Airlines; Lorne Trottier (BEng 1970, MEng 1973), co-founder of Matrox; the philanthropist Seymour Schulich (BSc 1961, MBA 1965); and the management thinker Henry Mintzberg (BEng 1961).⁠[49]

In culture and sport the page lists the poet, novelist and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (BA 1955); the composer Burt Bacharach (Dip AMus 1948); the architect Moshe Safdie (BArch 1961), designer of Habitat 67 and the National Gallery of Canada; the architects Arthur Erickson (BArch 1950) and Raymond Moriyama (MArch 1957); Adam Gopnik (BA 1980), a writer for The New Yorker since 1986; Edward Saxon (BA 1982), the Oscar-winning producer of The Silence of the Lambs; Deborah Chow (BA 1996), director of The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi; James Naismith (BA 1888), the inventor of basketball; Ken Dryden (LLB 1973), six times a Stanley Cup winner with the Montreal CanadiensMontréal CanadiensThe Montreal Canadiens, known in French as the Canadiens de Montréal, are a professional ice hockey team based in Montreal, Quebec. They compete in the National Hockey League (NHL) and play at the Bell Centre.Open the full entry; Laurent Duvernay-Tardif (MDCM 2018), a Super Bowl winner and medical graduate; and Dick Pound (BCom 1962, BCL 1967), a former vice-president of the International Olympic Committee and McGill’s Chancellor emeritus. Prominent alumni named in The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article also include Irving Layton, Hume Cronyn, John Ralston Saul, Charles Taylor, Maureen Forrester, Madeleine Parent, Maude Abbott and Carrie Derick.⁠[49][4]

McGill University: Official website: https://www.mcgill.ca/ (opens in a new window).⁠[54]

Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (Macdonald Campus): Official website: https://www.mcgill.ca/macdonald/ (opens in a new window).⁠[55][47]

The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital): Official website: https://www.mcgill.ca/neuro/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

X: Public account: https://x.com/mcgillu (opens in a new window).⁠[11][54]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/school/mcgill-university/ (opens in a new window).⁠[54][11]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/mcgilluniversity (opens in a new window).⁠[54][11]

Instagram: Public account: https://www.instagram.com/mcgillu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[54][11]

Facebook: Public account: https://www.facebook.com/McGillUniversity (opens in a new window).⁠[54][11]