Claude Hillaire-Marcel


Claude Hillaire-Marcel FRSC is a Canadian geoscientist working in Quaternary research. He is known for his research on the environment, climate change, and oceanography. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and professor at l'Université du Québec à Montréal.
Hillaire-Marcel was born and educated in France. He received advanced degrees at the Sorbonne in 1968, and the University of Paris in 1979.
He moved to Canada and became a professor at l'Université du Québec à Montréal. From between 1970 and 2003, Claude Hillaire-Marcel authored or co-authored over 150 scientific papers. He supervised 20 doctoral dissertations and 37 M.Sc. and D.E.A. theses, and in addition he had 13 scientists working with him as postdoctoral fellows from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, the UK and the U.S..
His early papers covered Pleistocene marine fauna and isostatic rebound near Montreal. Later he broadened his geographic scope to include Ungava Bay and Hudson Bay. In 1976, he began writing about oxygen and carbon isotopes. By 1980 he was involved in dating studies utilizing isotopes of uranium and thorium.
Between 1985 and 1991, Hillaire-Marcel participated in, or was chief scientist on various scientific marine expeditions, including six cruises on Canadian ships and a cruise aboard the French research ship Marion-Dufresne in Greenland waters in 1999.
In 1994, a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences featured Labrador Sea studies. Nine of the 12 articles were co-authored by Claude Hillaire-Marcel. In 2001, he was lead author on a paper in Nature entitled "Absence of deep-water formation in the Labrador Sea during the last interglacial period", and he was one of several authors of an EOS article entitled "New Record Shows Pronounced Changes in Arctic Ocean Circulation and Climate".
Most of his work has been around the shores of Canada, but he has carried out field studies or been involved in research in Africa, and Europe, the World Climate Research Program, and the Joint Global Oceans Flux Studies.
He is a member of the Consultative Committee for the Environment of Hydro-Québec, the Canadian Scientific Committee for the Integrated ODP, the Scientific Committee of the Institut du Sahel, and the Executive Committee of Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies and Vice-President of the Sub-commission for the Americas of the INQUA Commission on Shorelines.
Hillaire-Marcel performs editorial duties for GpQ, CJES and QSR.
Claude Hillaire-Marcel was the Founding Director of The Centre de recherche en géochimie et géodynamique, or GEOTOP. He served twice as Chairman of the Department of Earth Sciences at UQAM
Hillaire- Marcel has held two endowed chairs: from 1989 to 2000 the Industrial Chair Hydro-Québec- NSERC-UQAM and from 2000 on the International Chair UNESCO.

Awards and Distinctions