John Hepburn, FRSC

John Hepburn was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and did his undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo, graduating in 1976 with his B.Sc. He continued his education at the University of Toronto and obtained his PhD in 1980.

Following two years as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he began his academic career back at the University of Waterloo, where he was appointed an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Physics in 1982, and ultimately Chair of Chemistry in 1998.

In 2001, he moved to the University of British Columbia as a Professor of Chemistry and Physics and Astronomy, and Head of Chemistry. He became Dean of Science in 2003, and Vice President, Research in 2005. The international portfolio was added to his list of responsibilities in August 2009. In June 2016, he took a leave of absence from UBC to take up his current position at CIFAR.

He has been a Fellow of the A.P. Sloan Foundation, a Foreign Research Fellow of the CNRS (France), and a Canada Council Killam Fellow. He has been awarded the Rutherford Medal and the Noranda Prize and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Physical Society, and the Canadian Institute for Chemistry.

John was a member of the CCA’s Scientific Advisory Committee from 2006 to 2018.

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