Royal Society of Canada honours 5 'dynamic academics'

RSC College Member Steven High – Professor and Canada Research Chair in Public History (Tier 2), Department of History

Steven High established the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia in 2006. It facilitated the major collaborative research project, Montreal Life Stories, investigating the life stories of survivors of mass violence.

“But it isn’t enough to just collect people’s stories,” insists High, who has authored numerous award-winning publications exploring economic, social and cultural displacement in 20th century North American and the Caribbean. “You have to bring those stories into the public realm and connect people. Our project did that. We built it into the process, through partnerships with the National Film Board and theatre companies and animators.”

High is honoured to become a RSC College member, representing Concordia with his colleagues. “I’m extremely proud to be at Concordia, because of its long history of engagement with the wider community,” he says. “The appointment is wonderful validation in terms of the wider work we’re doing with our Centre. Our Centre is unique because most of our 150 affiliates work on community-based projects and we have an ethic of ‘learning with’ and sharing authority. Oral history brings things down to the individual and humanizes. It’s easy to hate people you don’t know. Oral history is a process of re-humanization.”

The College is particularly interesting to High as a rejuvenating force for the RSC. “It’s pivoting toward mid-stream scholars at the peak of their careers,” notes High. “That will have a transformative effect, bringing new energy to the academy.”

RSC College Member Vince Martin – Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Microbial Genomics and Engineering, Department of Biology

Vince Martin, a classically trained microbiologist, is a Canadian leader and innovator in microbial genomics and synthetic biology. He co-directs Canada’s only Centre for Applied Synthetic Biology, which focuses on the potential of biological sciences to develop sustainable processes for producing value-added products from Canada’s renewable resources.

“If you look at research in biology for hundreds of years, we’ve been focused on what biology does and how it works,” notes Martin. “We’re now at the stage where we understand biology and can start making things. We’re flipping the process. This is significant to Canadians because we can develop processes for replacing things like petro-chemicals and non-renewable fuels.”

He also works on developing more affordable medication — drugs for malaria, for example, and painkillers. They’re often difficult to obtain, hard to mass produce and prohibitively expensive.

“Now we can engineer microorganisms that make the molecules needed to create some pharmaceuticals,” said Martin. “We can actually develop, engineer and modify microorganisms to make something that’s difficult to get from plants and make it on a scale and cost that serves people everywhere.”

While clearly proud of the work accomplished at the Centre, Martin looks forward to making any contribution he can as a member of the College. “It’s a huge honour, of course, and I’m in excellent company.”

Last week, the RSC also honoured two Concordia professors, appointing them as fellows.

RSC Fellow Michel Magnan – Professor and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in Corporate Governance at the John Molson School of Business.

“My work crosses borders,” notes Michel Magnan, who became a Fellow Chartered Professional Accountant (FCPA) in 1998 and is the only professor on Canada’s Accounting Standards Board. “It’s accounting based, but it reaches audiences beyond academic researchers. Sometimes there’s this notion of professors being in the Ivory Tower, but there’s more to me than academics.”

Twenty years ago, Magnan was among the first to do research on executive compensation in Canada, using domestic data on domestic companies.

“If you use Canadian data and analyze what’s going on in terms of governance and executive compensation, you gain a better understanding of the practices of Canadian companies,” he says. “This helps investors, analysts and regulators.” His current work also looks at environmental and social disclosure by corporations, while yet another aspect of his practice analyzes financial statements. 

“Becoming a fellow in the RSC is very satisfying because sometimes accounting is mistakenly thought of as too practical to be worthy of academic research,” says Magnan, who has well over one hundred articles published, written in both French and English. “This honour is recognition that accounting-related work within business school is of substance.”

Magnan strives to dispel the myth that only American executives are getting overpaid: “It’s important to continue to look at Canadian companies and not get too distracted by what’s happening with American C.E.O.s.”