“I was amazed and delighted to hear the news,” Professor Emeritus Donald Mackay said upon learning he is to receive an honorary degree from the University of Toronto at a spring convocation ceremony on June 16.

Prof. Mackay, who worked at U of T for nearly 30 years before coming to Trent University in 1995, is a chemical engineer renowned for developing a series of software models that allow chemicals to be tracked from their source through air, water and soil to the point where they are absorbed by humans and wildlife.

The honorary degree is in recognition of Prof. Mackay’s lifetime work in trying to understand and model the behavior, properties, fate and effects of toxic substances in the environment and for establishing the Canadian Environmental Modelling Centre at Trent University.

Prof. Mackay originally hails from Glasgow, Scotland. He completed his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the Royal College of Science and Technology at the University of Glasgow in 1961. He came to Canada shortly after as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow within the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto. After three years as a Research Chemical Engineer with the Heavy Organic Chemicals Division of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd., Billingham, Co. in Durham, England, Prof. Mackay returned to U of T as a professor in 1967. In 1995, he came to Trent as an NSERC-Chemistry Industry Research Chair to establish the Canadian Environmental Modelling Centre within the Environmental and Resource Studies program at the University. In 2002 he retired from Trent and now holds the position of Director Emeritus of the Canadian Environmental Modelling Centre. 

This honorary degree marks the most recent distinction awarded to Prof. Mackay throughout his impressive career. Other awards include: the Award for Outstanding Contributions to Great Lakes Research, International Association for Great Lakes Research, 1990; the Professional Engineers of Ontario (PEO), Engineering Medal for Research and Development, 2001; and the NSERC Award of Excellence, 2001. In 2003, Prof. Mackay was appointed to the Order of Ontario and in 2004 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.