McDougall Centre

John R. McDougall; also John McDougall was appointed as the President of the National Research Council in April 2010. He was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Alberta Research Council for 12 years. He worked for ten years as a petroleum engineer. He was a member of the NRC-Industrial Research Assistance Program Advisory Board from 2002 to 2006 and also contributed to the AUTO21 Network of Centres of Excellence, the Edmonton Space & Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Advisory Committee. He contributed to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada , a Canadian government agency that funds, promotes and assists research in the natural sciences and in engineering. From 1991 to 1997, he served as the university's first Poole Chair in Management for Engineers, a leadership position within the Faculty of Engineering. Early in John McDougall's tenure at NRC, in June 2012, there was a controversy concerning Tim Hortons gift cards sent to employees who had just been laid off. On July 29, 2014, Canada's chief information officer announced that the NRC's computer system had been hacked by a Chinese state-sponsored actor earlier in the summer.As described in more detail in a subsequent section, John R. McDougall's tenure as a whole was characterized by a steep drop in publications and patents, by significant cuts in scientific staff and by a 23-month period during which NRC management was aware that NRC was contaminating the water table in a small Ontario community but did not inform that community's inhabitants. The water contamination episode caused owners of nearby homes to launch a multi-million dollar lawsuit against NRC.In March 2016, John R. McDougall sent a three-sentence email to NRC employees, announcing that he was going on personal leave. The reasons for John R. McDougall's retirement from the presidency of the NRC were never given.
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