The Honourable David C. Onley, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario has announced that Queen’s University physics professor Arthur McDonald, the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics, has been named to the Order of Ontario, Ontario’s highest honour.

"It is an honour to receive the Order of Ontario for our work at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory,” says Dr. McDonald. “I have been privileged to work with the very talented international team of scientists in the SNO Collaboration to answer fundamental scientific questions and provide an excellent educational experience for our students."

A internationally-known expert in nuclear and particle physics, Dr. McDonald’s scientific achievements span more than four decades. In 1989 he became Director of the Queen’s Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), located in VALE’s Creighton mine near Sudbury. Working in the world’s deepest underground laboratory, the SNO team discovered that neutrinos (sub-atomic particles considered the basic building blocks of the universe) change from one type to another on their journey to Earth from the sun. This confirmed that these fundamental particles have a finite mass and that the current models for energy generation in the sun are very accurate.

Dr. McDonald has received the Killam Prize in the natural sciences, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in physics, the Henry Marshall Tory Medal from the Royal Society of Canada and the Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal from NSERC.

Dr. McDonald and the SNO team from Carleton, Laurentian, UBC, Alberta, Guelph, Queen’s and institutions in the US, UK, Portugal and Germany have received numerous honours and awards for their contributions to the scientific community. In 2006, the SNO team received the inaugural NSERC John C. Polanyi Award for scientific achievement.