Professor Donald A. Dawson earned his B.Sc. (1958) and M.Sc. (1959) at McGill University and his Ph.D. (1963) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then returned to McGill University as an Assistant Professor in 1963 and became an Associate Professor in 1967. In 1970 he moved to Carleton University where he attained the rank of Professor in 1971. He has remained at Carleton University since that time. He has also held visiting positions at many universities in diverse nations. 

Among the honours previously earned by Professor Dawson are a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (1959), Fellowship in the International Statistical Institute (1975) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1977), a Killam Senior Research Scholarship (1977-79), and Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada (1987).

Professor Dawson's achievements are impressive both in terms of his own research and in terms of his contributions to the development of other researchers. He has published extensively and continues to do so, with more than 70 papers so far. Many of his papers are ground-breaking in character. Most of his papers are in the areas of Markov pro cesses and more particularly diffusion processes. He mainly studies models which arise through the investigation of complex physical systems. 

As weIl as doing his own research, Professor Dawson has contributed to the development of probability in a variety of ways. He has supervised 16 Ph.D. theses. He has also served as Associate Editor of The Canadian Journal of Statistics (1980-87) and the Annals of Probability (1974-78, 1988-91), and he is currently Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics. He has served on various scientific committees including the NSERC Grant Nominating Committee for the Statistical Sciences (1982-85), which he chaired (1984-85).