Category:Famous McGill Alumni
This is a small category with an unusual density of laboratory work: Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine, plus the Turing Award, all held by people who took their first degrees in Montreal. The category collects biographical entries on people who studied at McGill University, and what the roster skews toward is science first and then a second, much more recent group of Canadian and Canadian-trained business founders. Canadian public life enters it through one entry, and that entry is a prime minister.
Background
McGill was founded in Montreal in 1821 under the will of the merchant James McGill and is the oldest university in the province of Quebec. It is an English-language institution in a French-speaking city, which is part of why its graduates in this category are so internationally scattered: Lebanon, China, France, England and the United States all appear as birthplaces among people whose undergraduate degrees are Montreal degrees. Its engineering, physics and biology faculties account for almost every senior entry here, and several members took two or three McGill degrees rather than one.
The research careers
Willard Boyle took a bachelor's, a master's and a doctorate in physics at McGill, joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, and in 1969 co-invented the charge-coupled device with George E. Smith, the sensor that made digital imaging possible in cameras, medical instruments and telescopes. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009. Rudolph Marcus was born and raised in Montreal, took his doctorate at McGill, and received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems.
The biological sciences supply two more. Jack Szostak entered McGill young, completed a bachelor's degree in cell biology, and shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on telomeres; his laboratory later turned to the chemical origins of life. Ralph Steinman studied biology and chemistry at McGill before Harvard Medical School, spent his entire scientific career at Rockefeller University, and discovered dendritic cells and their role in adaptive immunity, work recognized with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Yoshua Bengio completed a bachelor of engineering, a master's and a doctorate at McGill and shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for the work that produced modern deep learning. He remains based in Montreal, which is the reason the city carries an artificial intelligence research cluster at all.
Public life and business
Justin Trudeau earned a bachelor's degree in English literature at McGill, later began a master's in environmental geography there without completing it, and served as Prime Minister of Canada from November 2015 to March 2025.
The business entries are recent and international. Noubar Afeyan took a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at McGill, then a doctorate at MIT, founded Flagship Pioneering and co-founded Moderna. Wael Sawan was born in Beirut, holds a McGill master's degree in engineering, and has served as chief executive of Shell since January 2023. Changpeng Zhao studied computer science at McGill after his family emigrated from China, built order-matching systems for the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Bloomberg, and founded Binance in 2017.
The newest members of the category are software founders a few years out of the same faculties. Eden Ovadia is from Montreal, took a McGill degree in software engineering with a machine learning specialization, worked in cybersecurity advisory during her studies, and now runs a financial technology company in New York. Baptiste Cumin studied at McGill after the American School of Paris, led artificial intelligence work on a large retail product catalog, and co-founded a retail data company. Both routes, engineering degree to venture-backed company, are the pattern the roster is adding fastest.
See also
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