Each September as classes start up, the University of Alberta launches the academic year by honouring the achievements of our top faculty, students, and staff through Celebrate! Teaching.Learning.Research.
This special awards event celebrates the excellence of the people who make the U of A Alberta's flagship university as well as an outstanding post-secondary leader nationally and internationally. Please join us for this year's celebration, beginning at 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 19 in the Myer Horowitz Theatre on North Campus.
Celebrate! recognizes faculty whose cutting-edge research and love of teaching shine most brightly. Graduate and undergraduate students who have distinguished themselves for outstanding academic and extracurricular achievements are also honoured, along with dedicated staff who support research and learning through their day-to-day work.
Highlights each year include the University Cup, the highest honour a U of A academic can receive for top-notch research, teaching and service to the university and to the community. This year's recipient of the University Cup is Professor David Percy, Q.C., Borden Ladner Gervais Chair of Energy Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law. The University Cup was created in 1996 and Professor Percy is the first member of the Faculty of Law to receive the award. It is a wonderful recognition of Professor Percy's main contributions to the Law School's students, his colleagues, the University, and the legal community over the more than forty years he has served as a member of the Faculty of Law.
Professor David Percy became Dean of the Faculty of Law in 2002 and served in this role until 2009. His teaching and research interests are in contracts, construction law and natural resources law, including oil and gas law. Professor Percy is co-editor of Contracts: Cases and Commentaries, now in its seventh edition and used at law schools across Canada. He wrote The Framework of Water Rights Legislation in Canada, as well as books on Wetlands and Ground Water. Dean Percy is a former President of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers. In 1995, Professor Percy received the W.P.M. Kennedy Award for outstanding merit as a law teacher in Canada; in 1996, he won the Rutherford Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching at the University of Alberta. In 1999, Professor Percy received the Tevie H.Miller Teaching Excellence Award in the Faculty of Law. Since 2000, Dean Percy has worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization on water law and agriculture in six African countries.
Professor Gerald Robertson, Q.C., the Katz Group Chair in Health Law at the Faculty of Law, has been chosen by the University as one of its two recipients of this year's J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research. The Kaplan Award is the most prestigious University of Alberta award for research excellence, bestowed on its faculty whose achievements in research are deemed outstanding by experts in their respective fields. This is the second occasion on which a member of the Faculty of Law has received the Kaplan Award since the Award's inception in 1982, the other being Professor Lewis Klar, Q.C., in 2007.
Professor Robertson's area of research is health law, and he is recognized nationally and internationally as a leading scholar in that field. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh and McGill University, and was appointed to the Faculty of Law in 1983 as an associate professor, and as full professor in 1988. Since that time he has been actively involved in the development and activities of the
University's Health Law Institute. Professor Robertson is a past recipient of the Honourable Tevie H. Miller Teaching Excellence Award, the Law Society of Alberta/Canadian Bar Association Distinguished Service Award for Legal Scholarship, the McCalla Research Professorship, and the American Society of Law & Medicine Rattigan Award. He has been a member of the Alberta Bar (Law Society of Alberta) since 1989, and was appointed as Queen's Counsel in 2000. In 2011 Professor Robertson was appointed as the inaugural Katz Group Chair in Health Law in the Faculty of Law. Among his many health law publications, Professor Robertson is co-author (with Madam Justice Ellen Picard, of the Court of Appeal of Alberta)) of the textbook Legal Liability of Doctors and Hospitals in Canada, now in its 4th edition (soon to be its 5th). This book is widely regarded as the most authoritative and comprehensive treatment of medical malpractice law in Canada, and has been cited and relied upon on numerous occasions by courts in every province in Canada, as well as by the Supreme Court of Canada and courts in many other jurisdictions.
To attend Celebrate! please RSVP via e-mail to laura.connell@ualberta.ca or phone 780-492-2644. This event is free to the public. Seating begins at 3:15 p.m.
The University of Alberta, and the Faculty of Law, looks forward to seeing you there!