University to honour six for contributions to academy, industry and community

The University of Windsor will confer honorary degrees during its 99th Convocation ceremonies on six individuals who have made outstanding contributions to science, media, the performing arts, labour relations, transportation and hospice care.

Receiving honorary doctor of law degrees are:

  • Mary Louise Fallis, opera singer, actor, broadcaster and university teacher;
  • Douglas M. Stocco, internationally recognized biologist and UWindsor alumnus;
  • John Stackhouse, editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail newspaper;
  • Carol Derbyshire, executive director of the Hospice of Windsor and Essex County;
  • Claude Mongeau, president of transportation company CN; and
  • Ken Lewenza, national president of the Canadian Auto Workers Union.

Mary Louise FallisMary Louise Fallis will be honoured during the 10 a.m. Wednesday, June 12, session of Convocation. She is a soprano who is well-known for making classical music accessible to all Canadians and is beloved for her comedic character Primadonna.

Fallis has had an international career in opera, and has performed in a variety of roles around the world. She hosted CBC Radio’s This is My Music and Diva Diaries and was host of CBC-TV’s Showcase, a nationally broadcast Sunday arts journal. Among her many awards and honours, she is a member of the Order of Canada; received a Gemini Award as producer for Bathroom Divas for BRAVO! TV; and received an ACTRA award for best musical performance in radio for her performance as the Primadonna character with the Toronto Symphony.

Douglas StoccoDouglas M. Stocco (BSc 1967, MSc 1969) will be honoured during the 3 p.m. Wednesday, June 12, session of Convocation. Dr. Stocco is a faculty member at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Centre, where he is a professor and interim chair of the Department of Cell Biology and Biochemistry. His research career has focused on the mechanisms involved in the regulation of steroid hormone biosynthesis. During the course of this research, his laboratory identified and characterized the novel protein, Steroidogenic Acute Regulatory, its discovery solving a five-decade long mystery as to the nature of the factor regulating the production of steroid hormones.

Among other awards, Stocco has received the National Institutes of Health Research Career Development Award and its MERIT Award, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

John StackhouseJohn Stackhouse will be honoured during the 10 a.m. Thursday, June 13, session of Convocation. Stackhouse is editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail. He was previously editor of Report on Business and has also served as the newspaper’s national editor, foreign editor, correspondent at large, and from 1992 to 1999 was the development issues correspondent based in New Delhi. He has worked for Report on Business Magazine, the Financial Times, London Free Press, and the Toronto Star.

Stackhouse has won five national newspaper awards, a national magazine award and an Amnesty International award for human rights reporting. He is the author of two books, “Out of Poverty” and “Timbit Nation: A Hitchhikers Guide to Canada,” and was a contributing author to “The Bre-X Fraud,” “Travels with My Laptop,” and “Foreign Correspondent: Fifty Years of Reporting South Asia.”

Carol DerbyshireCarol Derbyshire will be honoured during the 3 p.m. Thursday, June 13, session of Convocation. Executive director of the Hospice of Windsor and Essex County since 1985, she has been involved with Windsor’s Hospice movement since 1979.

Under her direction, Windsor’s Hospice program has grown to include more than 47 wellness programs which provide services ranging from lifestyle support to social work, community nursing and spiritual care to the community, with no cost to users from the time of diagnosis. In 2007, Hospice opened an eight-bed palliative home for patients and their families, following an extensive capital campaign and assistance from the Ministry of Health & Long-Term Care.

Derbyshire is past chair of the University of Windsor’s Board of Governors and has served on boards and committees for a number of community agencies.

Claude MongeauClaude Mongeau will be honoured during the 10 a.m. Friday, June 14, session of Convocation. He has served as president of the transportation company CN since 2010.

He began his career in Paris with American consulting firm Bain & Company and later served in the business development unit of Imasco. Prior to joining CN in 1994, he was a partner with Groupe Secor, a Montreal-based management consulting firm providing strategic advice to such Canadian corporations as Bombardier and Bell Canada. He has served directorships with the Canadian National Railway Company, SNC-Lavalin, the Railway Association of Canada, and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. In 1997 he was named one of Canada’s top 40 executives under 40 years of age by the Financial Post, and was selected in 2005 as Canada’s CFO of the Year by an independent committee of Canadian business leaders.

Ken LewenzaKen Lewenza will be honoured during the 3 p.m. Friday, June 14, session of Convocation. He is national president of the Canadian Auto Workers Union and has been a member of CAW Local 444 since he started work at Chrysler Canada in 1972.

He has been lauded for his efforts to lead the union at a time of global economic crisis and a fundamental shift in the Canadian economy. Since taking on his current role in 2008, he is noted as a rank-and-file leader who believes the union’s success is based on an engaged and active membership, and one who champions outreach into workplaces with a predominance of people of colour, first-generation immigrants, youth and others who have not traditionally had a voice in their places of work.