Alumni of Influence

Originally from Italy, Giuseppe Mazzotta came to Canada as a child. While he spoke no English at first, through perseverance, hard work and encouragement by his father, he graduated from U of T and went on to complete his PhD at Cornell University. A specialist in medieval literature, he is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Dante. Since 1983, Mazzotta has been teaching at Yale University, where he is Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian, the highest academic rank at Yale, and also serves as chair of the department. 

Mazzotta's extensive writings address all periods of Italian literature and culture and includes Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment, which consists of a number of public lectures he delivered in 1999 as the Emilio Goggio Visiting Professor in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto.

Physician, army officer and poet John McCrae is the author of the celebrated First World War poem, In Flanders Fields. He wrote the poem during the Second Battle of Ypres in the spring of 1915, the day after the death of his good friend, Alexis Helmer, who was killed in action. It is said that McCrae wrote the poem on the step of an ambulance wagon overlooking the wild poppies that bloomed among the makeshift graves on the battlefield. The poem was subsequently published in the London magazine, Punch, to international acclaim.

McCrae became a famous poet but continued to work as a surgeon in an artillery brigade during the war. His poem is recited annually at Remembrance Day ceremonies around the world. He is also credited with the idea of adopting the poppy as the official flower of remembrance, a practice which has been embraced in Canada, the United States, France, Britain and Australia.

Distinguished scholar Annabel Patterson is the Sterling Professor Emerita of English at Yale University. An expert in early modern literature, her work also encompasses history, law and politics. She has written16 books and more than 70 articles on topics as varied as Holinshed’s Chronicles, 18th-century libel law, the reception of Virgil’s eclogues in Europe, editions of Aesop’s fables, censorship, liberalism and parliamentary history. Her writings also discuss Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, John Locke and Andrew Marvell.

Patterson has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; a senior fellowship at the Society of Humanities, Cornell University; the Andrew Mellon Chair of the Humanities at Duke; a Mellon Fellowship, National Humanities Center; and a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship at Yale. She won the Harry Levin Comparative Literature Prize for Pastoral and Ideology, and the John Ben Snow Award for Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles. She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto.

Pioneering lawyer the late Roman Pitt was a judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Upon being called to the bar, he left a prestigious Bay Street law firm to form, with Eric Lindsay, the first partnership of Black lawyers in Canada. In 1994, he was appointed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, becoming the first Black lawyer in Canada to be named to a Superior Court from private practice.

In the community, Pitt mentored high school students interested in pursuing careers in law and served on the boards of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice and the Toronto Hospital. He was a founding director of Caribana, the annual celebration of Caribbean culture held in Toronto, and North America’s largest street festival. He played a leading role in the creation of the Black Business Professional Association and the Sickle Cell Association of Canada. For his contributions to law and the community, he was awarded the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal, among other honours.

Cardiologist Vivian Rambihar is a pioneer in diversity and health, studying immigrant health, particularly for South Asians. An immigrant himself, he arrived in Canada from Guyana in 1970 to study math and physics at UC, then medicine at McMaster University. He was among the first in Canada to identify ethnic and gender differences in health and to use chaos and complexity science as a model for this and for health promotion. He is a pioneer in chaos and complexity science, and one of the first to apply it to medicine, health and society, and has written many books and given many lectures on the topic.

Rambihar is the recipient of the Canadian Cardiovascular Society Segall Award for Health Promotion in Canada, the IndoCanadian Chamber of Commerce Humanitarian Award. and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal;  in 2011 he was named one of the Top 25 Immigrants in Canada. An adjunct professor of Medicine at U of T, he is also the health co-chair for the Global Organization for People of Indian Origin, with the goal of reducing the epidemic of premature heart disease and diabetes across the Indian diaspora. 

James Spence is a recently retired judge of the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario and a former president of the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice.  He has served as co-chair and member of the Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics and as co-chair and member of the Education Committee of the Superior Court of Justice.

Before his appointment to the court in 1993, he served as head of the Law Society of Upper Canada and a director of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. He is a life bencher of the Law Society and an honorary member of the Advocates Society of Ontario. As a judge, Spence dealt with a wide variety of Commercial List cases and other commercial and civil disputes, as well as divisional court review of administrative decisions.

During his 24 years of law practice prior to appointment, he specialized in commercial and corporate matters and government relations as a member and partner in the firm which is now Torys LLP in Toronto. He has lectured and written on legal matters including professional and judicial practice and responsibility and has served as a director on a number of private and public company boards.

Gemini- and Emmy-award winning children’s television producer Cheryl Wagner has entertained generations of children around the world. She is best known as the creator of The Big Comfy Couch, which airs in Canada, the United States, Mexico, South America, Australia, Britain, Turkey, South Africa, Singapore, the Middle East, Israel, Africa and Indonesia. Earlier in her career, Wagner contributed as a performer and puppeteer on the much-loved series Fraggle Rock, alongside Jim Henson; Mr. Dressup alongside Ernie Coombs; Today’s Special; and Sesame Street Presents Follow That Bird. She is the President of Periscope Pictures, Inc., a Charlottetown-based production company that creates original, screen-based entertainment, including the web series Bunny Bop! A member of the Writers’ Guild of Canada, she sits on the board of the Women in Film and Television (WIFT) -- Atlantic, and is a recipient of the WIFT Wave Award for her contributions to Canadian film and television.

Distinguished scientist Zena Werb is professor and vice-chair of the Department of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. Born in a concentration camp in Germany, she eventually immigrated to Canada with her family, studying biochemistry at UC and cell biology at the Rockfeller University. She is internationally recognized for her discoveries about the molecular and cellular bases of extracellular matrix proteolysis and their roles in the normal functioning of tissues. Her studies have led to new paradigms about the role of the cellular microenvironment and intercellular communication in breast development and cancer.

The author of more than 450 articles, Werb is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For her outstanding contributions, she has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Excellence in Science Award and an honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen, among other honours.

Justice Marvin Zuker is a 30-year veteran of the Family Court of the Ontario Court of Justice, and an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. He has made prolific contributions to scholarship at the intersection of educational, criminal and family law, including youth criminal justice, the impact of legislative changes and the rights and responsibilities of parents, school councils and private schools. Zuker's work has helped educators to understand the legal context in which they operate. A notable advocate for the rights of women and children, he is the co-author of Canadian Women and the Law, Children’s Law Handbook, Education Law, and Inspiring the Future: A New Teacher’s Guide to the Law, among other titles.  He is also a frequent presenter to educators and legal professionals.

Higher education leader and physicist Robin Armstrong, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto, has had a long and distinguished academic career. He has co-authored almost 200 publications and conference proceedings in condensed matter physics, in most cases with his many PhD graduate students.

He served as chair of the Physics Department and dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T before becoming president of the University of New Brunswick, where he initiated its most ambitious fundraising campaign to date and attracted a state-of-the-art MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) centre on the strength of his scholarly reputation.

Armstrong has served on numerous federal and provincial research committees, including as vice-chair of the National Science and Engineering Research Council. He was a founding director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is currently chair of the Canadian Arthritis Network.

His achievements have been recognized by the Royal Society of Canada, of which he is a fellow; by the Canadian Association of Physicists with its Herzberg Medal and Medal of Achievement; by the University of Cordoba with its Vistante Distinguido award; and by the University of New Brunswick with an honorary doctorate.

Lawrence Cherney started his career under the baton of Igor Stravinsky. Ever since, for more than 40 years, he has been at the forefront of Canadian music. He is the founding artistic director of Soundstreams, a charter member of the National Arts Centre Orchestra and founding artistic director of the summer festival, Music at Sharon.

Under his leadership, Soundstreams has become one of the largest and most dynamic organizations of its kind in the world and a leading producer of concerts, contemporary oper, and international festivals. Known for the high quality of its innovative national and international collaborations that cross genres, cultural traditions and disciplines, Soundstreams hosts an annual concert series in Toronto, produces new Canadian opera and tours Canadian music and opera in Canada and internationally. It co-produces an outreach series, Salon 21, with the Gardiner Museum and has developed a state-of-the-art web platform that includes a digital concert hall and archive.

Cherney has performed as an oboe soloist and recitalist in North America, Europe and Israel. He was named to the Order of Canada in 2003, awarded the Toronto Arts’ Foundation’s Award for Outstanding International Achievement in 2007, and in 2012, the Friends of Canadian Music Award, awarded jointly by the Canadian Music Centre and the Canadian League of Composers.

William J. Deadman was one of Canada’s first forensic pathologists. After completing his medical training, he served in the First World War and, thereafter, became city pathologist in Hamilton, a position he held from 1919 to 1956. He was an in-demand expert witness and became known across Canada during the Evelyn Dick trial in 1946, one of the most sensationalized trials in Canadian criminal history.

He established one of the largest forensic medicine laboratories in Canada and set up a formal training program for laboratory staff, which led to the creation of the Canadian Society for Laboratory Science.

He published extensively and frequently presented at scientific meetings as well as to pathologists, coroners and police officers. He also lectured on forensic pathology and medical jurisprudence at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) and the University of Toronto. At the end of his distinguished career, he was the consultant in pathology to the Attorney General’s Centre for Forensic Science in Toronto.

He had a keen interest in public affairs and community, and was named Citizen of the Year by the City of Hamilton in 1950. The Hamilton General Hospital's William J. Deadman Prize in Forensic Medicine was established in his honour. He also served on the University of Toronto Senate (now Governing Council) and as president of the Medical Alumni Association and UC Alumni Association.