Obituaries

Murphy graduated from Newfoundland's Memorial University before attending Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in 1986.

He got his start lending a hand at the private radio station VOCM in St. John's, backfilling a talk show while its host went on vacation.

Murphy would go on to spend many years working with CBC, including work on both radio and television. He was a National Post columnist at the time of his death and had previously written columns for The Globe and Mail.

Murphy hosted Cross Country Checkup on CBC Radio for more than two decades and was a familiar face to longtime viewers of CBC's The National. His appearances on CBC-TV date as far back as the 1970s.

Richard was the epitome of the scholar-athlete. At Highland High, he played football and captained the basketball team. He played basketball at Harvard and rugby and tennis at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Richard was a brilliant wordsmith in a variety of genres, writing for the Harvard Crimson, the Department of Agriculture, Lotus Software, Burson Marsteller, Apple, Citibank, and Morgan Stanley. He was a witty raconteur and a master of toasts, never sentimental and always capturing a friend, parent, child, sibling or relative with an affectionate phrase, humorous story or telling detail. He was happiest and most fully himself in lively conversation. A man of many (strongly held) opinions, he was a formidable and provocative disputant. One bantered with Richard at one's peril.

In addition to his career as a professional writer, Richard along the way took a number of side excursions: He was assistant dean of Harvard admissions, aide to Senator Frank Moss, manager of the Citgo service station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and director of the Utah Bicentennial Commission, where at the drop of a hat he would entertain the staff with an impromptu and badly danced Irish jig.

No matter how much time you spent with Richard, you came away with an indelible sense of his personality. A sampling of how people have described him: A vivid presence, one of a kind, in a league of his own, what a character, a true original. The most common tribute: "He was the funniest person I ever met."

Tom Sherman, a 1956 Oberlin graduate who returned to his alma mater to teach biology for 30 years, died April 9. He was 89.

A Rhodes Scholar, Sherman earned a DPhil from Oxford University in 1960 and began teaching at Oberlin six years later. He authored two books: A Place on the Glacial Till: Time, Land, and Nature Within an American Town, an affectionate chronicle of the natural history and life around his longtime home of Oberlin; and Energy, Entropy, and the Flow of Nature, an exploration of the principles of thermodynamics delivered in easy-to-follow language. Both books were published by Oxford University Press.

“Tom brought careful preparation and considerable thought to his lectures,” says Dennis Luck, an emeritus professor of biology and 24-year colleague of Sherman’s who bonded with the elder professor over their shared studies in Oxford’s doctoral program in biochemistry.

“He encouraged his students to forge cross-connections and to think independently. He stressed attention to accuracy and detail in written work. He will be remembered with affection by many Oberlin students and faculty as an accomplished, considerate, and gentle scholar.”

Ed excelled in academics and athletics at the Fessenden School, Phillips Academy Andover, Yale University, where he studied English literature, and Merton College Oxford, where he studied philosophy as a Rhodes Scholar. He later served those schools with great loyalty. He studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary and earned a law degree at Harvard Law School.

In Washington, D.C., Ed worked at Covington and Burling and then joined the U.S. Justice Department in the Office of Legal Counsel. He then moved back to the Boston area to help run the Council on Law Related Studies at Harvard Law School. That work led to his interest in the emerging field of environmental law, in which he became an early expert. In his practice, he focused on water and air pollution control. One of his proudest achievements was drafting the original Massachusetts Clean Water Act, which went further than federal laws of the time by defining “waters of the state” to include groundwater, thus requiring stricter regulation. Ed also taught environmental law courses at BU and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Ed served on a number of boards, including the Merton College Charitable Corporation and the All Newton Music School. On his retirement from law practice, he became a mediator, volunteered with the Executive Service Corps, and returned to English literature, his first love, leading classes on poetry, short stories, and philosophy for adult learners.

Ed pursued other passions after retirement as well. He took up piano lessons, learned to prepare gourmet meals, and participated in book clubs. Whatever he undertook, he set high standards for himself. Ed also reveled in becoming a grandfather.

Central to Ed’s life were his friendships, many dating to his youth. He and Renata, his beloved wife of nearly 64 years, maintained deep and lifelong connections with classmates and friends, traveling with them over many decades. They hosted numerous guests at their home with hospitality and warmth.

Ed loved poetry, from lyric odes to off-color limericks. He was especially moved by Shakespeare, Yeats, Thomas, Eliot, and Frost, with dozens of poems committed to memory. He was an elegant writer who took great delight in the English language, relishing puns, jokes, word play, and rules of grammar. With great wit, he crafted clever verses to celebrate friends and relatives. He loved classical music, especially works by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Bach, and Mozart. He cherished laughter and lively conversation over good food and fine wine.

We were deeply saddened to hear that Andrew Murray Watson died on April 4, 2024 at the age of 93. Born in 1930 to Amy (nee Reid) and Daniel Watson, Professor Watson was a graduate of Trinity College, University of Toronto. He completed his B. Comm in 1952 and his MA in 1953 before going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Later, he attended the University of Paris and studied Arabic at the University of Cairo. He received his appointment to the University of Toronto in 1957. A professor of Economic History, Watson was affiliated with the Department of Economics and Trinity College, where he was Emeritus Fellow, throughout his career with the University of Toronto.

Andrew has left a lasting legacy to the field of Economic History. In 1974, he published the paper, “The Arab Agricultural Revolution and Its Diffusion, 700-1100” in the Journal of Economic History. The paper became the basis of the 1983 book Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100. The volume and paper are still widely cited, and Watson is recognized as the first to make arguments about the role of the spread of Islam, coupled with agricultural innovations, in the economic transformation of the medieval world. 

While Watson retired in 1995, he taught until at least 2005 and completed his last academic assignment at the age of 80, following which he decided it was time to say good bye to academia and joyously devote himself solely to travel, adventure, and the enjoyment of the good company of his friends spread round the world. Amongst his many adventures in his 80's, he explored ancient grave sites in the Gobi Desert, and acted as guide for tours along the Silk Road. For over thirty years he spent the better part of his winters, at an old palace in Bali, where the staff treated him as an honoured Uncle.

Predeceased by his parents, his brother Hugh and sister Barbara, Professor Watson is survived by his nieces Janet Bell of Ottawa and Gail Lampinen of Sacramento, their families, and by countless friends.

Read full obituary here.

Professor William Bannister was first and foremost a most courteous and humble gentleman who provided the inspiration to a whole generation of doctors and academics to achieve the highest realms possible.

Known to all of who knew him as Willie, he had the time for all even though he was an intellectual giant that had a passion for getting to grips with the molecular mechanisms that provide for healthy cell function.

Willie, after completing his postgraduate studies in Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, in which he was offered further opportunities to stay, decided to return to Malta in the early 60s following which he took on the reigns of the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry and headed it till the turn of the century when he retired.

In 2000, the Council of the University of Malta honoured him with the appointment of professor emeritus and senior research fellow and thus he continued to be active in the field of computational biology and was sought after as ever for his expertise as a reviewer for a number of renowned international science journals.

Read the full obituary here.

We were saddened to hear of Gerald's demise in April 2024 following a short period of illness. He arrived at Oxford in 1964 to read for his DPhil in Mathematics. He joined the University of Cape Town as a Senior Lecturer of Physics in 1985.

James Ross Macdonald was awarded a four-year Tyng Scholarship during his freshman year at Williams College and won the freshman Pentathlon, which led to his immediate membership on the varsity swimming team. At the beginning of 1943, he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts where, in a special wartime program, he was awarded an SB in Electrical Engineering from MIT in February 1944 and a BA in Physics in June of that year from Williams.

He joined the U.S. Navy in 1944, trained as a radio-radar officer and was preparing to go with a night-fighter air squadron to the Pacific war theater when the war there ended in 1945. After marrying Margaret Milward Taylor in 1946, he returned to MIT, where he worked on Project Whirlwind, an early vacuum-tube, room-size computer. He received the SM degree in Electrical Engineering in 1947 from MIT.

That year, after starting a PhD program in physics at MIT, he applied for and won a Rhodes Scholarship from Massachusetts to attend New College, Oxford University. He and his wife were in Oxford from 1948-1950, and he received a D.Phil. degree from Oxford in condensed-matter physics in 1950.

After carrying out physics research at Armour Research Foundation and Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago from 1950 to 1953, he joined Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas, near the beginning of its very successful silicon transistor development program. He subsequently became the Director of the Physics Research Laboratory, the Central Research Laboratories, and finally Vice President for Research and Engineering in 1968.

In 1967 he was awarded a D.Sc. degree from Oxford for his published research done since graduation. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1970 and in 1973 to the National Academy of Sciences, one of only fifty members of both academies at that time. Upon taking early retirement from Texas Instruments in 1974, he joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics. He took emeritus status there in 1989.

Both as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of Engineering he served on many government advisory committees and university visiting committees and was a member of the NAS Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Resources. In 1986 he received the George E. Pake Prize of the American Physical Society, an award for combining original research accomplishments with leadership in the management of research in industry.

Dr. Macdonald was a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, served on many of its committees, and was the recipient of several awards from the IEEE and its predecessor, the Institute of Radio Engineers. He was awarded the 1988 IEEE Edison Gold Medal “for seminal contributions to solid state science and technology, and outstanding leadership as a research director.”

During his years at UNC, in addition to his productive teaching and research activities, he and his associates developed LEVM, an important computer-oriented immittance- spectroscopy data analysis program which he continued to improve and keep up to date after his retirement. It has been freely available since 1990, and its current version, LEVMW, involving the possibility of errors in both real and imaginary data, is used around the world by thousands of scientists, engineers, and students in many fields.

After retirement from UNC, he continued writing papers and reviewing many more for various journals and took the position of reviewer very seriously. His love of research, as well as a facility with words, led him to a prolific research career with 10 patents and over 255 papers published in refereed scientific journals. This work, as well as a pioneering 1987 book he edited and contributed to on Impedance Spectroscopy, and his continuing help to students and colleagues around the world in using LEVM/LEVMW for data analysis, resulted in international recognition for his experimental and theoretical contributions to condensed matter physics, electrochemistry, and to data analysis. He is also a published poet.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, the Electrochemical Society, and the Audio Engineering Society. He participated in many civic organizations, particularly in Dallas, TX, and was a Wilson Fellow of the University of North Carolina Library.

Bill Neville grew up in Winnipeg, studied at the University of Manitoba, and went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He became a university professor and went on to head U of M’s department of political studies, retiring in 2005. Before he chose that academic path, Neville entered the political sphere.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was an adviser to Sidney Spivak, then-provincial minister of industry and commerce in Duff Roblin’s Conservative government. While they were both working for Spivak, Neville met Lee Southern in 1969.

Southern described Neville as a true “public intellectual.” He became a prolific columnist for the Free Press in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. He continued to write and serve as a political contributor to local news outlets into the early 2000s, becoming a thought leader and influencer of public opinion through his well-researched prose.

He served as a Winnipeg city councillor for the Tuxedo ward through the late 1970s and ’80s.

Read the full obituary here.