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Brian E. McCarry1946 - 2013 |
It is with a profound sense of loss and sadness that we announce the sudden passing of our friend and colleague, Brian McCarry, on July 7, 2013 at the age of 67.
Dr. Brian E. McCarry, FCIC was born and raised in Vancouver, and received a B.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of British Columbia in 1968. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1972, working under the supervision of William S. Johnson. After postdoctoral work as a NRC-NATO Fellow at Cambridge University with Alan R. Battersby and as a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow back at UBC with Prof. Donald G. Clark, he joined the Department of Chemistry at McMaster as an Assistant Professor in 1976. Brian was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1985 and to Professor in 1994, and served as Chair of the Department from 1990-96 and again for a second time from 2004-12. He also served as Acting Chair of the Department of Biology from 2011-13, stepping down from the position only just over a week ago to embark on a 2-year admin/research leave the first leave he’d had since his first term as Chair of the Department of Chemistry ended in 1996, and only the third in his career. He began his sabbatical with a talk at the International Metabolomics Conference in Glasgow, Scotland and had then travelled to Iceland for a short vacation with his partner, Twyla Hendry, when tragedy struck. He had not been feeling well after leaving Scotland, and collapsed in their hotel room in Reykjavik, Iceland in the early morning of July 7. He passed away a short time later. The details are not yet fully known, but it is believed that he suffered a heart attack.
Brian has had an inestimable impact on our department, the broader McMaster and Hamilton communities, and indeed the entire Canadian Chemistry community over the course of his 37-year career. He has held the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in Environment and Health at McMaster since 1999, and was Director of the McMaster Occupational and Environmental Health Laboratory from 2006-13. He served on McMaster’s Board of Governors as elected Faculty representative from 1998-2002 and again from 2009-12, and was also an elected Faculty representative on the University Planning Committee over two successive terms spanning 1998-2009. He chaired the University Budget Committee from 2000-09. Brian’s considerable international reputation in environmental chemistry and toxicology was mirrored by his reputation in the Hamilton area for his tireless efforts on behalf of the local community and its environment. Over the past twenty years he has served on a wide range of Hamilton air and water quality committees, including the Bay Area Restoration Council, a multi-stakeholder group responsible for overseeing the restoration of Hamilton Harbour, the Hamilton Air Monitoring Network, and Clean Air Hamilton, another multistakeholder group that is dedicated to improving air quality in the Hamilton community, and which he has led as Chair since 2000. The list of environmental advisory and industry-community liaison groups in the Hamilton area that he was involved in (often as Chair) goes on and on. As a result of these efforts, in 2005 he received the Canadian Environment Award, an award bestowed on Canada’s environmental leaders by the Government of Canada and Canadian Geographic magazine. In the same year he was also named the 26th recipient of the Dr. Victor Cecilioni Hamilton Environmentalist of the Year Award by the City of Hamilton.
Brian’s service to the Canadian scientific community was no less extensive. He served on the Management Board of the Environmental Science and Technology Alliance of Canada from 1994-2001 and on the Canadian Section Executive Committee of the Society for Chemical Industry from 1994-2000, including a term as Chair in 1998-99. He was a member of the Canadian Council of University Chemistry Chairs (CCUCC) and the Council of Chairs of Departments of Chemistry of Ontario Universities (CCDCOU), serving the latter as Chair (Chair-of-Chairs?) in 1994-96 and 2008-10. He served as Vice-President of the International Society for Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds (ISPAC) in 2000-01 and as President throughout 2003-05. He co-Chaired the DIOXIN 2005/ISPAC 20 Conference in Toronto in 2005, and was Conference Chair of the 92nd Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition in Hamilton in 2009.
Brian McCarry had a truly transformative impact on our Department over his 37-year career at McMaster. In 2000 he led one of the first major research infrastructure grants to be awarded to McMaster by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and its provincial counterpart, the Ontario Innovation Trust. The grant entitled the “Biomolecular Interactions Initiative” brought more than $13M in funding to the department, which bought a desperately needed expansion of the department’s research space and an impressive suite of new research instrumentation. He was a co-investigator on several other major funding initiatives since that time, including the Ontario-wide Protein Identification Facility sponsored by the Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund (2001-06) and McMaster’s Centre for Microbial Chemical Biology, which was funded in 2006 by the CFI and the Ontario Research Fund; these efforts also brought significant new research infrastructure into our and other departments at McMaster.
Above all else, Brian was a dedicated and inspiring teacher. He taught Freshman chemistry for almost half of his 37-year career at McMaster, and was one of the first in our department to embrace the Inquiry style of teaching roughly 15 years ago. Twenty-five M.Sc. students and thirteen Ph.D. students have graduated from his research group over the past 30 years, and he has had a direct impact on dozens more through service on M.Sc. and Ph.D. supervisory committees. His current group consists of seven M.Sc. and Ph.D. students.
Brian shared with Twyla, his partner of close to 35 years, an immense pride in their daughter Aislinn and sons Adrian and Tom, to whom our hearts reach out.
The family asks that condolences be sent to the department for forwarding. In lieu of flowers please donate to the Education Fund of the Bay Area Restoration Council at Canada Helps.
Willie Leigh
Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology
B.E. McCarry
Department of Chemistry
09jul2013