Past Recipients

Clarence Chant, known as the father of Canadian astronomy, studied mathematics and physics at UC, earning a doctorate in physics at Harvard University. His interest in astronomy began in 1892 when hired by the U of T Department of Physics. Instrumental in the development of the astronomy curriculum, he ultimately became the Department of Astronomy's inaugural chairman in 1918. He was the sole Canadian to train astronomers until 1926, and many of his students later became directors of astronomical observatories. 

Committed to popularizing astronomy to all, he published Our Wonderful Universe in 1928, gave public lectures, wrote for newspapers and delivered radio talks. He would gladly help any sincere correspondent, from naive beginner to accomplished professional. He served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and founded its namesake journal, which he edited from 1904 until his death in 1956. He also led an expedition to Australia in 1922 to observe a total solar eclipse, thus helping to verify Einstein's prediction concerning the deflection of light by massive bodies.

With Jessie Donalda Dunlap, the widow of mining entrepreneur David Dunlap, Chant established the Dunlap Observatory at the University of Toronto. It was inaugurated on May 31, 1935, the day Chant turned 70, received an honorary doctorate, from U of T, and retired.

Norman Doidge, MD, is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, author and poet. He studied classics and philosophy at UC and graduated with high distinction. After winning the E.J. Pratt Prize for Poetry at age 19, he won early recognition from the literary critic Northrop Frye, who wrote that his work was “really remarkable… haunting and memorable.”  He earned his medical degree at U of T, followed by psychiatric and psychoanalytic training at Columbia University and a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellowship.

An expert in neuroplasticity, psychiatry, psychotherapy and neuroscience, he is on faculty at the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry and Columbia University’s Centre for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.  He is author of two New York Times bestsellers, The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain’s Way of Healing. His writing has appeared in medical journals and the Wall Street Journal, Time, the Daily Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. His work has been recognized by Brain Injury Canada, the Sigourney Award for psychoanalytic achievement worldwide, the CBC Literary Award, and four National Magazine Gold Awards.

Justice Kathryn Feldman of the Ontario Court of Appeal has distinguished herself as a jurist of the highest quality. A former partner with Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP, she was appointed to the Superior Court of Justice in December 1990, where she presided over criminal and civil matters, before being elevated to the Court of Appeal in June 1998.

As a lecturer, she has made tremendous contributions to continuing legal education for students, lawyer and judges. She served as chair of the insurance committee of the Canadian Superior Court Judges’ Association and, in 2001, became the first recipient of the Canadian Superior Court Judges Association President’s Award. She is currently a director of the Canadian chapter of the International Association of Women Judges.

As an alumna, she sat on the Moss Scholarship selection committee for six years, three as chair; on the President’s International Alumnae Council; and is a recipient of the University of Toronto Arbor Award.

Graham Fraser was appointed Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages in 2006. He has been a champion of bilingualism and diversity throughout his distinguished career. As a journalist, he wrote in both official languages on cultural and foreign policy, constitutional debates and provincial, national and international politics for the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Gazette, Le Devoir and Maclean’s. The author of five books, including the influential Sorry, I Don’t Speak French, he has played a key role in explaining Quebec politics and the importance of bilingualism to Canadians.  

Fraser is the recipient of the Public Policy Forum’s Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism; the Baldwin-LaFontaine Award from the Canadian Club of Vancouver, which honours efforts in bilingualism and co-operation; and the Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Pléiade from the Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Ottawa, Université Sainte-Anne, Université Laval, Concordia University and York University.

A pioneer in medical psychiatry, Dr. Geist has established new care models that help patients with unexplained medical symptoms and co-occurring mental and physical symptoms. She is currently the Program Chief and Medical Director of Mental Health at Trillium Health Partners. A proponent of collaborative care, she is also director of the newly formed Medical Psychiatry Alliance, a partnership between Trillium Health Partners, the University of Toronto, the Hospital for Sick Children and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health with the mandate of changing the way mental health care is taught to residents and delivered to patients in Ontario.

Geist is a frequent speaker on mental health issues for both professional and lay audiences, promoting access to care, including through telepsychiatry, and removal of the stigma associated with mental illness. In the community, she has served the Governing Council of U of T and the Capacity to Consent to Treatment in Youth. She earned a master’s in conducting from the University’s Faculty of Music in 2011.

Arts journalist, dramaturg and theatre director Urjo Kareda was a key figure in Canadian film and theatre. Born in Estonia, at age five he moved with his parents to Toronto. He studied at UC, then Cambridge University in London, writing for the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. Returning to Toronto, he became the Star’s theatre critic before being hired by the Stratford Festival and, later, the Tarragon Theatre as artistic director.

Over the next 20 years, Kareda turned the Tarragon into the new play centre, earning it the unofficial title of the Playwright's Theatre. In the process, he became one of the most respected voices in English-Canadian theatre. For his tremendous contributions to the nation’s developing arts scene, he was recognized with the Order of Canada, the City of Toronto Award for the Performing Arts, the Chalmers National Award for Artistic Direction, and an honorary Dora Mavor Moore Award for theatre, among other honours.

Human rights lawyer Ilana Landsberg-Lewis is the executive director and co-founder of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, an organization working to turn the tide of HIV/AIDS in Africa. She has travelled extensively in developing countries, working directly with more than 300 grassroots organizations on 1,400 initiatives. She spent eight years at the United Nations Development Fund for Women, working to strengthen the United Nations’ implementation of the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Also at the United Nations, she cofounded UN PRIDE to fight for the rights of gay and lesbian employees, many of whom faced extreme discrimination by their home country employers.

She was named a YWCA Woman of Distinction in 2009, and in 2012 she was named one of the Top 25 Women of Influence in Canada. She is the daughter of inaugural UC Alumni of Influence award recipients, humanitarian Stephen Lewis (1959 UC) and journalist Michele Landsberg-Lewis (BA 1962 UC), and the sister of documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis (BA 1988 UC), a fellow honouree this year.

Beloved Canadian author Stephen Leacock was the best-known humorist in the English-speaking world from 1915 to 1925. He wrote more than 60 books, including Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich.

Leacock studied languages at UC, then taught at Upper Canada College before earning a PhD in political economy at the University of Chicago. Returning to Canada, he joined the faculty at McGill University, where he remained until retirement. He was a prolific writer of humorous fiction, literary essays, and articles on social issues, politics, economics, science and history and claimed in his later years, “I can write up anything now at a hundred yards."

The leading award for humour in Canada is named after him, and his summer home in Orillia is now a museum which attracts thousands of visitors each year.

Documentary filmmaker and broadcaster Avi Lewis has made a career of advocating for social justice and environmentalism through the media. In the early 1990s, he hosted City TV’s landmark music journalism show, The New Music, and later hosted CBC’s live, nightly political debate show, Counterspin. When he moved to Al Jazeera USA, he hosted a biweekly show on U.S .politics and a weekly series examining the issues behind the U.S. presidential election. His first independent feature documentary, The Take, tells the story of Argentinian workers who struggle to take over an abandoned factory and save their livelihoods. It premiered at the Venice Biennale and won the International Jury Prize at the American Film Institute Festival.

He is co-founder of The Working World, a capital fund that makes microloans to worker co-operatives, and a board member of the Jackman Humanities Institute at the U of T and the Council of Patrons of the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture. His parents, Stephen Lewis (1959 UC) and Michele Landsberg-Lewis (BA 1962 UC), and his sister Ilana Landsberg-Lewis (BA 1988 UC), have all been honoured as UC Alumni of Influence.

Tashi Rabgey was the first Tibetan Rhodes Scholar. A former UC Literary and Athletic Society president, she completed law degrees at Oxford and Cambridge universities and earned a PhD at Harvard University. A research professor of International Affairs and director of the Tibet Governance Project at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, she was named a Public Intellectual Program fellow by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and is currently writing a book about the need to reframe the Sino-Tibetan dispute.  

Rabgey has spent much of the past 15 years working inside the region and has led the development of the TGAP Forum, a seven-year academic dialogue process on governance in Tibet with policy researchers of the Chinese State Council in Beijing, as well as Harvard, UQÀM and other global academic partners. With her sister, Losang Rabgey (BA 1993 UC), she is the co-founder of Machik, an organization that has supported the education and capacity building of thousands of young Tibetan women and men across Tibet. 

Robert Schwartz has made outstanding contributions to public health in Canada and beyond through his research and policy work on tobacco control. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in Canada, and his studies evaluating a range of interventions to reduce smoking, combined with his teaching and scholarship on effective public health policy, have led directly to a decline in tobacco use. He is currently the executive director of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit; a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health; and a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation.

Schwartz led the evaluation of the Smoke-Free Ontario strategy and established a smokers’ panel to facilitate long-term study of more than 4,000 smokers, as well as the effects of Ontario’s smoking cessation system. He is the recipient of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health’s 2012 John Hastings Award for Excellence in Service to the University and the Community and the 2010 J.E. Hodgetts Award for the best article published in Canadian public administration, among other honours.

Mary Lynn Young is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Journalism and associate dean, communications and strategy, in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. She is an authority on gender and the media, newsroom sociology, media credibility and representations of crime. She is a consultant, public speaker and frequent commentator on current media and policy issues. In 2007, she co-founded FeministMediaProject.com, which provides a feminist perspective on media depictions of missing and murdered women. 

Prior to completing her PhD in criminology at U of T in 2005, she worked as an editor, national business columnist and senior crime reporter at major daily newspapers in Canada and the U..S, including the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun and the Houston Post. She is a former board member of the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre in Vancouver and was named one of British Columbia’s 100 Women of Influence in 2010. As a journalism educator, she has received a number of awards for her writing and teaching.