Innovation Timeline

Financed by the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec and the citizens of Hamilton, McMaster University holds its first academic session in Hamilton on lands transferred to the university by the Royal Botanical Gardens.

Post-war demands for education in the sciences leads to a reorganization of the university, creating two federated colleges: the denominational University College, which offered arts and divinity programs, and the non-denominational Hamilton College, which offered science programs and could receive public funding.

McMaster offers its first PhD program.

The university completes three new academic buildings for the sciences.

To secure further public funding for humanities and social sciences programs, the university reorganizes, dissolving the existing colleges and creating a non-denominational institution.

PhD programs are consolidated in a new Faculty of Graduate Studies.

The McMaster Nuclear Reactor, the only university-based research reactor in the Commonwealth at the time, begins operating.

McMaster establishes a medical school and teaching hospital.

McMaster University Medical School pioneers the McMaster Model or problem-based learning, a student-centred, problem-based interdisciplinary approach to learning.

The Faculties of Business, Engineering, Health Sciences, Humanities, Science and Social Sciences, each under the leadership of a dean, become the established divisional structure of the university.

McMaster’s medical school pioneers progress testing, developing a personal progress index based on innovations from the University of Missouri-Kansas and the Maastricht University. This model is now used across Canada, the US, Europe and Australia.

Professor Bertram Brockhouse, who worked at McMaster from 1962 until his retirement in 1984, is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with Clifford Shull of MIT.

Alumnus Myron Scholes is awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, which he shares with Robert C. Merton.

Two of the 10 annual 3M National Teaching Fellows are from McMaster University. Two instructors are named 3M teaching fellows again in 2012. Overall, 15 McMaster teachers have been named 3M Fellows since 1986.

McMaster is named the most research-intensive university in the country by Research Infosource.

McMaster’s civil engineering program is ranked 29^th in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and ranks second in Canada for metallurgical engineering.

McMaster is ranked 78^th in the world and fourth in Canada by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine is ranked 23^rd in the world and second in Canada. McMaster’s nursing program ranks 27^th in the world and physiology 36th by the QS World University Rankings.

McMaster wins the second-ever Global Teaching Excellence Award from the UK-based Higher Education Academy, in partnership with Times Higher Education.