Ĭatherine Bell will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree June 18 at 10 a.m. Bell serves on the Board of the Indigenous Heritage Circle. Now she’s focusing on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, repatriation and reform of Canadian heritage law, policy and practice. Accolades celebrating Bell’s work include the Ramon John Hnatyshyn Governor General’s Gold Medal awarded by the Canadian Bar Association. She also supervised the Kawaskimhon National Moot. She co-developed the faculty’s Low Income Individuals and the Law clinical law course (with the Edmonton Community Legal Centre and Legal Aid Alberta ) and co-developed an experiential learning program on Gladue Sentencing Principles (with Alberta Justice). Bell has also been a visiting scholar at numerous academic institutions and has developed and taught courses to support Indigenous legal education across Canada. She has influenced Indigenous heritage law, policy and practice and Métis rights and collaborative research methods. She was the first full-time professor in the faculty to focus on how Canadian law affects Indigenous Peoples, and she continues to champion the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Lorne Tyrrell will receive an honorary doctor of science degree June 14 at 3 p.m.Ĭatherine Bell is a professor emerita with the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta, where she taught for more than three decades.

Tyrrell has received multiple awards for his work and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. His past roles include serving as the dean of the U of A’s Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and as a member of the federal government’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force. Tyrrell is the founding director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology and associate director of the Applied Virology Institute. This latter team established KMT Hepatech, which tested antivirals to treat the disease for more than a decade as part of an exclusive contract with the National Institutes of Health. He created the first oral antiviral therapy for chronic hepatitis B alongside Morris Robins in 1998 and established the first non-primate animal model for hepatitis C with Norman Kneteman and David Mercer in 1999.

Lorne Tyrrell, a University of Alberta Distinguished Professor, has accomplished several milestones in researching and treating hepatitis viruses over four decades. Ĭharles Lee will receive an honorary doctor of science degree June 13 at 10 a.m. From 2017 to 2023 Lee served as president of the Human Genome Organization, and his contributions to human genetics have been recognized by multiple organizations, including the American Association for Cancer Research and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He advised the State of Connecticut to help it navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, and he was inducted as a Fellow of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology in 2023. Lee became the inaugural scientific director of the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in 2013, which he still leads. He has contributed more than 190 publications to peer-reviewed journals and has been cited more than 81,000 times. Lee’s academic impact stretches well beyond this discovery. This finding uprooted the field of human genetics, leading to new genetic diagnostic tests and a better understanding of human disease and evolution. Ĭharles Lee made a revolutionary discovery in 2004 while serving as a member of Harvard Medical School’s faculty: Genes don’t always occur in two copies per cell. Richard Smith will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree June 2 at 2:30 p.m. Smith has been recognized with multiple awards, including the Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers. In 2017, Smith worked with Shell Canada to develop a permanent training facility. He also participated in more than 600 missions and in 1997-98 completed research and development with the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta in the field of lost person behaviour. He co-founded the Emergency Response Institute Canada, co-authored five text books about search and rescue, taught the field’s best practices nationally and internationally, and helped establish Search and Rescue Alberta. In response to that incident, Smith devoted himself to advancing search and rescue services. In 1986, Smith managed the search for two-year-old Jesse Rinker who, unfortunately, wasn’t found alive. He began his 21-year career with the RCMP in 1977. He has always supported the communities around him, participating in the Royal Canadian Army Cadets as a youth and serving in the Royal Canadian Army for more than five years. Richard Smith transformed the field of search and rescue in Alberta.

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