Maxwell John Dunbar

Dunbar, Maxwell John

Maxwell John Dunbar, oceanographer (b at Edinburgh, Scot 19 Sept 1914; d at Westmount, Qué 14 Feb 1995). Dunbar received his BA and MA from Oxford and his PhD from McGill. He was acting Canadian consul to Greenland between 1941 and 1946 and joined the McGill faculty in 1946. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Arctic Institute of North America, the Royal Geographical Society and the Linnean Society of London. Active in research in ARCTIC OCEANOGRAPHY all his professional life, he published numerous works on marine biology in Canadian arctic waters. During the 1930s and 1940s he participated in numerous expeditions to Greenland and the Canadian Arctic.

In 1947 he was appointed Director of the Eastern Arctic Investigations of the Fisheries Research Board, for which he played a decisive part in the design of the Arctic Research Vessel Calanus. Emeritus professor in the Institute of Oceanography at McGill in 1982, Dunbar was professor of zoology and director of the Marine Sciences Centre. He was responsible for the training of a large group of oceanographers at work in the Canadian North.

Dunbar was awarded the Bruce Medal for Polar Research by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Fry Medal of the Canadian Society of Zoologists (1979), the J.P. Tully Medal in Oceanography (1987), the North Slope Borough (Alaska) Arctic Sciences Prize and the Northern Science Award (both in 1986). Dunbar was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1990.