Pat McGeer

Pat McGeer had already been a standout basketball player in high school when he joined the University of British Columbia team in 1944. With them, he won the Pacific Northwest championship in 1946 and was selected to represent Canada at the 1948 London Olympics, where his country placed ninth overall. He ended his basketball career after graduating with a degree in chemistry that year, and went on to earn his PhD from Princeton in 1951.

After a brief career at DuPont, McGeer returned to UBC to pursue medicine in 1954 and embarked upon a lengthy career in Alzheimer’s research there. The nephew of former Vancouver mayor Gerry McGeer, he entered politics as a member of the Liberal Party in 1962 and became a member of the British Columbia Legislative Assembly until his 1986 retirement. During that time, he was leader of the Liberal Party from 1968 through 1972, but then switched to the more right-wing Social Credit Party and served in the British Columbia cabinet. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1995, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2002, a member of the UBC Hall of Fame in 2004, and a member of the Order of British Columba in 2005.