Suzanne Fortier

Suzanne Fortier, OC FRSC (born November 11, 1949)[1] is the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University.

Fortier was born in St-Timothée, Quebec, a town on an island in the St. Lawrence River. Her mother and father ran a small local hotel; she grew up speaking only French. As an elementary school student, she attended a small local convent school that held a single bookcase.[2] A nun who taught chemistry and was enthusiastic about the subject inspired her to pursue science.

She was among the first group of girls admitted to the local CEGEP, where she and a friend decided to enter the 1968 Quebec provincial science fair. Their project on the diffraction of sound waves interested a crystallographer from McGill University who was attending the science fair, and who invited Fortier and her friend to visit his lab. Her visit to the lab further confirmed her interest in science generally and crystallography in particular, a field of study that she has said "present[s] you with beautiful puzzles to solve. There are incredible pictures that you get of the structure of matter,"

Fortier entered McGill University and continued to study crystallography, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1972. She won an NRC Canada Post Graduate Scholarship and entered directly into a PhD program. Her supervisor was Gabrielle Donnay.

During her PhD work, she attended a talk by U.S. mathematician Herbert Hauptman, who would later win the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and who studied directed methods for determining crystal structures. After being awarded her PhD, Fortier worked on biophysics for six years at the Medical Foundation of Buffalo, Inc., a private institute where Hauptman was research director (now the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute).

In 1982, she joined the Chemistry Department of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, as an Assistant Professor, the first woman to be hired by the department She was interested in using artificial intelligence and other mathematical and machine learning techniques to determine the structure of proteins, and in 1993 she was cross-appointed to the computing department. She served as Queen's Vice-Principal (Research) from 1995 to 2000 and then Vice-Principal (Academic) from 2000 to 2005.

She took a leave from Queen's to become the President of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), a Canadian government division that provides grants for research in the natural sciences and in engineering. She served as head of NSERC from January 16, 2006[3] until March 4, 2013.[4]

In September 2013, Fortier was appointed the principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University.

Fortier's current salary at McGill is $390,000 with a discretionary bonus of up to twenty percent. Her contract was made public in 2013 by the university.

References

  1. ↑ "McGill principal and vice-chancellor completes full circle". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved September 30, 2014.
  2. ↑ "Ardent administrator: how Suzanne Fortier's unmistakable enthusiasm for Canadian science began with a passion for solving the "beautiful puzzles" of the structure of matter. - Free Online Library". www.thefreelibrary.com. Retrieved 2017-10-26.
  3. ↑ "Biography: Dr. Suzanne Fortier (Wayback machine cache)". Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. 2009-06-10. Archived from the original on January 7, 2013. Retrieved 21 August 2010.
  4. ↑ Suzanne, Fortier (2013-03-05). "Statement from Dr. Suzanne Fortier". Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Retrieved 3 September 2013.


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