Fast Facts

Award-Winning Professors

McMaster's current faculty renewal rivals the pace of expansion of the campus during the 1960s and early 1970s. The newest faculty maintain and strengthen the University's reputation as a research-intensive university that fosters interdisciplinary links and encourages creative teaching and learning approaches.

Good teachers inspire students to reach higher and go further in their learning and thinking than they ever dreamed possible. We are fortunate at McMaster to have many teachers who loudly or quietly instill a love of learning that carries well beyond the walls of the classroom – well beyond the university campus. Some of these excellent teachers have been singled out by their students or their colleagues to receive special honours for their teaching.

Most of the nearly 1,224 academic and clinical members of the University faculty hold doctoral degrees in their areas of specialization. Academic faculty members are expected to teach both graduate and undergraduate courses and may be involved in the academic counseling of students.

Nobel Prize
Bertram Brockhouse, co-winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Physics

Teaching Awards
McMaster is proud to have many excellent educators. Since 1986, 8 professors have been recipients of the prestigious 3M Teaching Fellowships. The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) has presented 16 McMaster professors with teaching awards since 1974.

Royal Society of Canada
McMaster University is honoured to have had a total of 70 Fellows elected to the Royal Society of Canada. University faculty are selected by their peers for outstanding contributions to the arts and sciences. Election to Fellowship in the Society is the highest academic accolade available to scientists and scholars in Canada.

Learning Innovation Grants
The departments of biochemistry, physics & astronomy, and the undergraduate MD program each received three-year, $100,000 grants from the Centre for Leadership in Learning. These grants help departments or schools make large and substantial changes throughout the undergraduate curriculum. The program is funded by a $1-million grant from the Imperial Oil Charitable Foundation.

Petro-Canada 2003 Young Innovator Award
Imre Szeman, professor of English, was named the inaugural winner of the 2003 Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award, which provides $25,000 to a new McMaster professor (less than eight years from a PhD) to encourage creative thinking about how undergraduate students can participate in University research. Szeman will use the award for a project called The World of News: Global Coverage of International Events — A Comparative Analysis.

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