Motto | Prove All Things |
---|---|
Established | 1931 [1] |
Dean | Viviane Yargeau |
Academic staff | 154 (professors) [2] |
Students | 4,612 [2] |
Undergraduates | 3,403 [2] |
Postgraduates | 1,209 [2] |
Location | , , |
Campus | Urban |
Alumni | Over 24,000 [2] |
Affiliations | McGill University |
Website | Official Website |
The Faculty of Engineering is one of the constituent faculties of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in bio-engineering, bioresource, chemical, civil, computer, electrical, mechanical, materials, mining, and software engineering. The faculty also comprises the School of Architecture and the School of Urban Planning, and teaches courses in bio-resource engineering (Faculty of Agriculture) and biomedical engineering (Faculty of Medicine) at the master's level.
Dawson Lectures (1855)
Thirty years before the construction of Engineering's two original edifices; McGill had been offering lectures in Applied Sciences. This series of lectures was started in 1855 by William Dawson, a renowned geologist and McGill's fifth principal which was offered within the Faculty of Arts until the formation of the Department of Applied Sciences in 1871. Dawson accepted the offer, but he traveled to Britain first and while there delivered several papers at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Eventually, the lectures formed the core of a two-year curriculum leading to a Diploma in Civil Engineering. [3]
First Engineering Buildings (1893)
For the first time in the history of McGill, buildings are constructed specifically to house engineers. The imposing Macdonald Engineering Building and the more modest Workman Technical Shops were both designed by architect Sir Andrew Taylor and his partner, William Gordon. Featuring a symmetrical Italian Renaissance facade and a Montreal limestone exterior, the five-storey Macdonald building is equipped to meet every conceivable need. Among the facilities housed on its five floors are an apparatus museum, a library, a forge, a foundry, and a dynamo and engine room. [4]
Fire of the Macdonald Building and Rebuilding (1907–1909)
On April 5, 1907, the Macdonald Engineering Building burns. Everything in it, except the contents of the ground floor laboratories, is destroyed. Fortunately, the fire doors that were built in the adjoining Workman Technical Shops (commonly referred to as the Workman Wing) do their job, keeping the building intact and sparing it from significant damage. Less than a week earlier the old Medical Building had burned down. Some of the stone salvaged from this fire was used to add a fourth floor to the Workman shops. The Faculty's sponsor, Sir William Macdonald, again stepped forward, this time volunteering to contribute to build a new structure on the foundation of its predecessor. Percy Nobbs, Director of McGill's School of Architecture is asked to design and build the new structure. The University and Macdonald both stress to him the importance of function and fire resistance. The carved phoenix rising from the flames is one of the few ornaments on a building constructed specifically for fire-proof functionality. Although the phoenix is easy to overlook, the Macdonald Engineering Building is a mainstay on the east side of McGill's downtown campus. [5]
Faculty of Engineering Launched (1931)
The Faculty of Applied Science becomes the Faculty of Engineering in 1931. It offers two degrees – Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) and Master of Engineering (MEng). McGill also introduces a completely revised curriculum in Chemical Engineering, to be administered by the Department of Chemistry. [6]
Dawson College (1945)
Dawson College was opened in 1945 to accommodate the greatly increased enrollment due to the return of students from the armed services and was housed at the R.C.A.F base at St-Jean, Quebec. All first year science and engineering students were transferred there. The number of students enrolled, mainly veterans, reached a peak of 1687 in January 1947. The College was closed in 1950. Dawson College was administered by a Vice-Principal, Dawson College and by various other McGill staff members who undertook duties such as that of Assistant Bursar and Secretary. [7]
First Woman to Graduate From Engineering (1946)
Mary Blair Jackson (later Mary Fowler) graduates from Mechanical Engineering, McGill's first woman engineering (non-Architecture) graduate. She would go on to become a pilot officer at RCAF training command headquarters in Trenton, Ontario, where she conducted statistical work connected with the training of ground crews. [8]
The J.W. McConnell Building Is Completed (1958)
Named in honour of J.W. McConnell, a Governor of the University from 1927 to 1958, the new four-storey McConnell Engineering Building is officially dedicated by Chancellor Ray Edwin Powell on October 6, 1958. The new building doubles the Faculty's space and provides much needed facilities for graduate programs. [9]
Center for Intelligent Machines (1985)
With a grant from the Québec Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Science, four researchers – Martin Levin, Steve Zucker, Pierre Bélanger, and George Zames (BEng Engineering Physics 1954)– form McRCIM (the McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines), now known as the Centre for Intelligent Machines, to study intelligent systems. CIM seeks to advance the state of knowledge in such domains as robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, computer vision, systems and control theory, and speech recognition. [10]
The M.H. Wong Building Reaches Completion (1997)
The new M.H. Wong Building – the first new major academic construction on McGill's downtown campus in almost 20 years – is erected around the Foster Radiation Laboratory (built in 1948). The building, which became the new home of the Departments of Chemical and Mining, Metals, and Materials Engineering cost close to $34 million, $12 million of which came from private donations. The largest of these was a gift of $8 million from the family and friends of the late Man Hung (Jimmy) Wong (BArch 1981). Another anonymous donor from Hong Kong contributed $1.9 million in honour of the late Chemical Engineering professor J.B. Philips. [11]
Philanthropist Lorne Trottier Makes Transformative Gift (2000)
Quebec entrepreneur Lorne Trottier announced a gift of $5 million to help build a new Information Technology undergraduate teaching facility at McGill, estimated at a cost of $17 million. The government of Quebec announced that it will provide $7 million to complete the Lorne M. Trottier Building, prompting Trottier to double his gift to $10 million. In 2003, the Lorne M. Trottier Building opened in September. The building houses six floors of advanced teaching laboratories, interactive learning rooms and meeting spaces and is equipped with all of the latest high-tech equipment. [12]
School of Architecture Receives Landmark Gift (2017)
Through a gift from McGill alumnus Peter Guo-hua Fu, the School of Architecture is renamed the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. His gift will support the full range of architecture education at McGill, creating new learning and research opportunities that will position the school and its students for a vibrant future. One portion of the gift will be used to create the Peter Guo-hua Fu Fellowships. These will be awarded, on the basis of academic merit, to graduate students entering or enrolled in the School. Preference will be given to citizens of China. [13]
The Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics (est. 1871) offers programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Department currently has twenty-two full-time faculty members. In addition, the department enjoyed great relations with corporate partners and has many Faculty Lecturers, Associate Professors, and researchers working with students in the department. The Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics has consistently ranked in the top hundred Civil Engineering schools worldwide and top 3 in Canada. [14]
There are approximately four hundred undergraduate and eighty graduate students in the department, of whom over half are women and over one-third are from outside Canada as of 2018. Broad programs of study are available that offer specialized courses in all areas of civil engineering. Facilities include state-of-the-art teaching, research, and computing laboratories.
Established in 1871, the mining engineering program is the oldest in Canada, [15] and oldest of its kind in North America. In the mid 1960s mining engineering at universities in Canada was suffering. Toronto closed its school; McGill had only one undergraduate student and its Professor of Mining was due to retire. [16] In 1964 John Ross Bradfield, Chairman of Noranda Inc., was asked to form a committee to study and resolve the problem. [17] The result was the raising of funds to help finance a Chair of Mining at McGill and to persuade Professor Frank T. M. White to come from the University of Queensland in Australia to take the position of Chairman of the Department of Mining Engineering and Applied Geophysics. Professor White initiated a program that graduated a large cohort of postgraduate engineers, many of whom served to rebuild the educational capacity of mining throughout Canada. [18] This, together with the contribution that he made in promoting mining education, resolved the crisis. Professor White died in 1971; McGill University and the Canadian Mineral Industry Education Foundation set up an award, the F.T.M.White Scholarship, to honour him for his outstanding contribution to mining education in Canada. [19]
Over one hundred years of chemical engineering at McGill has evolved through several distinct stages. The chemical engineering curriculum, established at McGill in 1908, produced its first bachelor's degree graduate in 1911. Today, collectively, 17 members of the academic staff conduct research programs in almost all areas of modern chemical engineering, drawing upon theoretical, computational and experimental methodologies. [20]
The department of Electrical & Computer Engineering is located in McGill's downtown Montreal campus with a student body of 900 undergraduate students, 350 graduate students, 20 staff members and 40 faculty members. [21] ECE offers three undergraduate degrees in the areas of Electrical (including Honours), Computer and Software Engineering, all accredited by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB).
Established in 2012, the Department of Bioengineering is the newest department to join McGill University's Faculty of Engineering. McGill researchers from nearly all Faculty units, including seven Canada Research Chairs and many colleagues in the Faculties of Medicine, Science, and Agriculture and Environmental Sciences are actively involved in various areas of Bioengineering. Within the Department, the faculty are focusing on three major directions: biological materials and mechanics; bio molecular and cellular engineering; and biomedical, diagnostics and high throughput screening. [22]
The department of Mechanical is located in McGill's main downtown Montreal campus and is one of the primary engineering departments.[ citation needed ]
McGill was the first university in Canada to offer a full-time program in urban planning. An interdisciplinary program through which students combined a master's degree in their original field was combined with urban planning was established in 1947. An autonomous program was established in 1972. In 1976, the School of Urban Planning was established as a unit within the Faculty of Engineering.
The School offers three Master of Urban Planning programs (a Core Program, with a concentration in Transportation Planning, and with a Concentration in Urban Design) and a Ph.D. in Urban Planning, Policy, and Design program. Major research areas include the Community-University Research Alliance (CURA), Transportation Research at McGill (TRAM), and Whole-corridor Urban Design Strategies (WCUDS).
Founded in 1896, McGill's School of Architecture is among the oldest architecture schools in North America, offering professional and post-professional programs from undergraduate through to PhD levels. The School has established an international reputation and a record of producing leading professionals and researchers, with McGill alumni practicing and teaching in firms and institutions across the nation and the globe. It is housed in the Macdonald-Harrington Building, designed by Montreal architect Andrew Taylor. The School of Architecture has produced renowned architects, including Arthur Erickson, Moshe Safdie, Melvin Charney, Raymond Affleck, Catherine Wisnicki, Blanche van Ginkel, Witold Rybczynski, and Raymond Moriyama; leading Montreal-based architects such as Howard Davies and Anne Cormier of Atelier Big City and Annie Lebel of In Situ; Julia Gerzovitz and Alain Founier of EVOQ, Danny Pearl and Mark Poddubuik of L’OEUF as well as contemporary international architects such as Adam Caruso (London), Amale Andraos (Work Architecture, New York), Eric Bunge (nArchitects, New York), and Todd Saunders (Bergen, Norway).
On 26 September 2017, the School was renamed the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture following a $12 million gift from Chinese architect and McGill graduate Peter Fu.
IPLAI (Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas) is a collaboration among six faculties across McGill, two schools and the McGill Libraries. [23]
MIAE is an initiative of the Lorne Trottier Chair in Aerospace Engineering to foster interest in Aerospace Engineering among undergraduate and graduate students and awareness of the multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural environment in which they may work as future engineers working in the Aerospace Industry. Students accepted into the Institute will be given the opportunity to participate in a number of 500 to 1000 hours Research Projects proposed by the Aerospace Companies. [24]
McGill Institute for Advance Materials was established by the Faculties of Science and Engineering for research into all forms of advanced materials. [25]
When the Arts Building was becoming overcrowded in the 1890s as enrollment climbed; new faculties were added to the University Campus. The Applied Science Faculty, (which was the term used for Engineering at that time), relocated in 1893 to two new buildings. One was donated by Thomas Workman and the other by Sir William Macdonald, one of McGill's most generous benefactors.
The Macdonald Chemistry Building, recently renamed the Macdonald-Harrington Building after its first Chemistry professor, Bernard Harrington, was built between 1896 and 1897 and was one of the many donations made to the University by Sir William Macdonald. Located in the Macdonald-Harrington Building are: Engineering Micro-computing Facilities; School of Architecture; School of Urban Planning.
This edifice, donated by Mr. Wong, an alumnus of McGill's School of Architecture, preserves the atmosphere of the campus both in its size and in its materials. It is composed of two sections, the older Foster section which consists of four storeys, and a new wing north of Foster which adds another six storeys to the whole. The Foster Wing, which will be used as offices, has had classrooms and labs added to both its west side and the top of the building, designated for Metallurgical Engineering labs. The new wing is used for Chemical Engineering labs.
The McConnell Engineering Building was donated to McGill in 1959 by John W. McConnell, a major benefactor of the University since 1911 and one of its Governors from 1928 until 1958. In the period after World War II when all of the Engineering Faculties were greatly expanding, this nine-storey structure doubled the number of classrooms, lecture rooms, and offices available for use by the above faculties.
The Physical Sciences Centre was renamed the "Frank Dawson Adams Building" after a professor of Geology who was the first chairman of Graduate Studies, and also served as Vice Principal from 1920 to 1924. The building was completed in October 1951.
The Lorne M. Trottier Building was inaugurated on March 26, 2004. This building is part of the TechSquare and will allow the University to expand its popular electrical engineering, computer science and telecommunications programs.
The Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) is the representative body of the undergraduate students of engineering at McGill University. The EUS is a full-fledged not-for-profit organization that is financially independent from McGill.
Architecture Students Association (ASA) is a non-profit student-run society within the School of Architecture. The society serves as an organizational body for student activities and affairs, a voice for students in academic and university issues at McGill, and a link between other schools of architecture across the country.
Carleton University is an English-language public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Founded in 1942 as Carleton College, the institution originally operated as a private, non-denominational evening college to serve returning World War II veterans. Carleton was chartered as a university by the provincial government in 1952 through The Carleton University Act, which was then amended in 1957, giving the institution its current name. The university is named after the now-dissolved Carleton County, which included the city of Ottawa at the time the university was founded.
The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is an academic division at the University of Toronto which focuses on architecture, urban design and art. The Faculty was the first school in Canada to offer an architecture program, and it was one of the first in Canada to offer a landscape architecture program. As of July 2021, its dean is Juan Du.
The Macdonald Campus of McGill University houses McGill's Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (FAES), which includes the Institute of Parasitology, the School of Human Nutrition and the McGill School of Environment. It is located in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, in the West Island region of the Island of Montreal. The property is also the home of John Abbott College.
McGill University is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter, the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant, whose bequest in 1813 established the University of McGill College. In 1885, the name was officially changed to McGill University.
The School of Computer Science is an academic department in the Faculty of Science at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The School is the second most funded computer science department in Canada. As of 2024, it has 46 faculty members, 60 Ph.D. students and 100 Master's students.
The University of Oregon College of Design is a public college of architecture and visual arts in the U.S. state of Oregon. Founded in 1914 by Ellis F. Lawrence, the college is located on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene, off the corner of 13th and University streets, and also has programs at the historic White Stag Block in Portland, Oregon.
The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, also known as The University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, formerly the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, is a constituent body of the University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The school was established in 1920.
Arcop was an architectural firm based in Montreal, renowned for designing many major projects in Canada including Place Bonaventure, Place Ville-Marie and Maison Alcan. The firm was originally formed as a partnership under the name Affleck, Desbarats, Lebensold, Michaud & Sise between Ray Affleck, Guy Desbarats, Jean Michaud, Fred Lebensold and Hazen Sise, all graduates and/or professors at the McGill School of Architecture. In 1959, after the departure of Michaud and the addition of Dimitri Dimakopoulos, another McGill Architecture graduate, the firm was renamed Affleck, Desbarats, Dimakopoulos, Lebensold, Sise which it maintained for a decade afterward. The company did not adopt the name Arcop, which stands for "Architects in Co-Partnership", until 1970.
The McCall MacBain Arts Building is a landmark building located at 853 Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal, Quebec, in the centre of McGill University's downtown campus. The Arts Building is the oldest existing building on campus, and it was designed in the Classical Revival style by John Ostell. Construction began in 1839, and the building's central block and east wing were completed in 1843. The west and north wings were finished in 1861 and 1925, respectively, after involving multiple architects, including Alexander Francis Dunlop and Harold Lea Fetherstonhaugh. Today, the Arts Building is made up of a central block and three distinct wings – Dawson Hall (east), Molson Hall (west) and Moyse Hall (north). The building currently houses the Department of French Language and Literature, the Department of English, and the Department of Art History and Communication Studies. It also hosts lectures for several other departments from the Faculty of Arts.
Janet Leys Shaw Mactavish was a Canadian architect notable for her innovative design of schools and university buildings. Among her noteworthy works are two circular university buildings: Stirling Hall, the physics building at Queen's University in Ontario (1962); and the McIntyre Medical Sciences Building at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec (1965). She was a graduate of McGill University's School of Architecture.
The Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, formerly the McGill School of Architecture, is one of eight academic units constituting the Faculty of Engineering at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1896 by Sir William Macdonald, it offers accredited professional and post-professional programs ranging from undergraduate to PhD levels.
Harold John Author Spence-Sales, was a British-born Canadian architect and urban planner. He is best known for creating the first university planning program in Canada at McGill University, and for playing an important role in shaping the urban landscape of the country. Spence-Sales left an impression on every province in the country and his mark on planning legislation.
The Macdonald-Harrington Building is a building located at 815 Sherbrooke Street West, on McGill University's downtown campus in Montreal, Quebec. Designed and built in Renaissance Revival style by Sir Andrew Taylor between 1896 and 1897, Macdonald-Harrington was one of the many donations made to the university by Sir William Macdonald. Today it houses the McGill School of Architecture and the School of Urban Planning, and prior to 1987, contained the Department of Metallurgy and Mining laboratories and the Department of Chemistry.
Saucier + Perrotte Architectes is an architectural firm based in Montreal, Quebec. The firm was founded in 1988 by architects Gilles Saucier and André Perrotte, and is known for designing institutional, cultural and residential projects.
John Bland was a Canadian architect and educator. He played a fundamental role in transforming architectural education in Canada, spending more than five decades teaching at the McGill School of Architecture including a 31-year tenure as director, under which Bland transformed the School from a Beaux-Arts institution into one based on contemporary design principles. He also introduced the first Canadian graduate programs in Architecture. Many important individuals in architecture learned under Bland, including Arthur Erickson and Moshe Safdie, as well as the heads of architecture schools in at least six countries. In addition to his teaching career, Bland was a practicing architect, working alongside Harold Spence-Sales prior to joining McGill and collaborating with many Montreal architects on other projects throughout his tenure. He was the president of the Province of Quebec Association of Architects in 1953, and served on the council from 1942 to 1954. He was also a member of the Council of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) from 1950 to 1954, and was elected to the RAIC College of Fellows in 1954 and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in 1967.
Philip John Turner was an architect and educator from Stowmarket, Suffolk. After emigrating to Canada in 1906, he began a private architectural practice in Montreal, and in 1910 became a lecturer at the McGill School of Architecture, where he would teach for more than three decades. He became the director of the School in 1939 and opened the door to co-ed education while also fighting the threat of the School's closing due to low enrollment after the Great Depression and amidst World War II.
Vivian Manasc is a Canadian architect.
Andrew King is a Canadian architect and cross-disciplinary artist currently serving as Chief Design Officer at Montreal-based architecture firm Lemay. He is a Professor in Practice at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University.