Probably the first Canadian-born scientist to have animportant influence on the development of crystallography inCanada was William H. Barnes. Born in Montreal in 1903, theson of a physicist, he was educated at McGill University, receivingB.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees there, his Ph.D. in 1927. He sub-sequently spent three years on Fellowships at the Royal Institutionin London under the supervision of Sir William H. Bragg. Whilethere he developed his interest in the analysis of crystal structuresby X-rays, and carried out pioneer work on the structure of ice.He returned to Canada in 1930 to join the faculty at McGill Uni-versity. Legend has it that he carried on low-temperature crystal-lography at McGill by positioning a camera outside his laboratorywindow in winter. In 1946 he obtained a Guggenheim Fellowshipand went off to MIT to spend a year working with Martin Buerger.He came back to Canada in 1947 in order to establish an X-rayDiffraction Section in the Division of Pure Physics at the NationalResearch Council of Canada, and he remained Head of this sec-tion until his retirement in 1968. A few years after his arrival, theNRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship program was established, enablingmany young crystallographers from abroad to spend a year or twoworking in his laboratory. Some of them returned subsequentlyto their own countries to carry on crystallography there, most no-tably David Phillips [later Lord Phillips of Ellesmere], who wentback to Britain and later became Prof. of Molecular Biophysics atOxford. Several people from Barnes' lab later set up new crystal-lographic research or teaching centres in Canada, and so his influ-ence spread across the country.
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