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Ron O’Dor was a Dalhousie professor and biologist widely known for his contributions to cephalod ecology and physiology, which he achieved through innovated interdisciplinary techniques including behaviour and ecology, physiology and innovative telemetry tracking techniques.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he completed his BSc in biochemistry at University of California, Berkley, and his PhD in medical physiology at the University of British Columbia. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University in England and the Stazione Zoological in Naples, in 1973 he was hired in the Department of Biology at Dalhousie University. He continued with his work on oceanic squid, developing an active research lab at the university’s Aquatron seawater facility.

O’Dor published frequently in scientific journals and supervised over forty graduate students and numerous honours students. He served as Chair of Biology, Director of the Aquatron facility, and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Science. In addition, he was a frequent visiting scientist or research fellow at institutes and with research projects around the globe.

In 2001 O'Dor was appointed Senior Scientist with the Census of Marine Life, a ten-year international program to assess and explain the diversity and distribution of ocean life. In 2006 he was the key figure behind the establishment of Dalhousie’s Ocean Tracking Network, which became one of Canada’s National Research Facilities. Other achievements include an honorary degree from Lakehead University (2011), Canadian Geographic's Environmental Scientist of the Year award (2009), and the Discovery Centre's award for Professional of Distinction (2012). He died in 2020.

D.C. (Donald Cameron) Mackay was born in 1906 in Fredericton, New Brunswick, son of William and Jane. The family moved to Nova Scotia in 1912 and Mackay began his education at Halifax Academy. After a brief period of study at Dalhousie University, Mackay entered the Nova Scotia College of Art, graduating in 1928. In 1929 he began graduate studies at the Chelsea School of Art in London, England, and took classes at the Académie Colorossi in Paris.

In 1930 MacKay moved to Toronto, Ontario. He worked as an illustrator while studying at the University of Toronto, then taught illustration and etching at the Northern Vocational School and at the Art Gallery of Toronto. In 1934 he was married to Mollie Bell and returned to Halifax, where he began work as an instructor and later served as vice-principal at the Nova Scotia College of Art. He also held an appointment as special lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts at Dalhousie.

Mackay joined the Canadian Navy at the beginning of World War Two and in 1943 he was appointed an Official War Artist. He retired from service in 1945 and returned to the Nova Scotia College of Art as principal, also taking up his lecturing position at Dalhousie. After the death of his wife, Mollie, he was remarried in 1966 to Margaret MacNeil, with whom he had one daughter, Margot. Mackay remained principal of the Nova Scotia College of Art until his retirement in 1971. He was the illustrator and co-author, with Harry Pier, of Master Goldsmiths and Silversmiths of Nova Scotia and their Marks (1948) and Silversmiths and Related Craftsmen of the Atlantic Provinces (1973). Mackay illustrated many other books and periodicals, especially those related to Canadian history. He died in 1979.

Between 1891-1902 the Dalhousie calendars sporadically listed a two-year course in “Subjects Bearing on Commerce,” along with the suggestion that it be supplemented by practical training at a business college during summer vacations. Commerce then disappeared from the Dalhousie curriculum for two decades, until the university received a gift of $60,000 to endow a chair in business studies. Bishop Carleton Hunt was appointed the first William Black Professor of Commerce in 1921 and courses were offered leading to a Bachelor of Commerce degree. Following several years of staffing challenges, in 1930 James MacDonald replaced Hunt and was appointed the inaugural head of a Department of Commerce.

The School of Business Administration replaced the Department of Commerce on 1 July 1976, a year after the establishment of the Faculty of Administrative Studies, which was an initiative designed to bring together business and public administration under one umbrella, and also included the schools of library services and social work. The BCom became a four-year program and a Centre for International Business Studies was created. In 2012 the school was renamed the Rowe School of Business after Kenneth C. Rowe in recognition of his business leadership and his transformative gift to Dalhousie’s business program. The school is among the five percent of business schools around the world accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

The School for Information Management was established in 1969 as the School of Library Service, and it awarded its first Master of Library Service (MLS) degrees in May 1971. Originally administered by the Faculty of Graduate Studies, the school became affiliated with the Faculty of Administrative Studies in 1975, which became the Faculty of Management Studies in 1984, and later simply the Faculty of Management.

Between 1979-1985 the library services curriculum was subject to ongoing revision, and in 1987 the school was renamed the School of Library and Information Studies. In 2005 it changed names again and became the School of Information Management, moving out of its longtime home on the third floor of the Killam Library to new digs in the Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building. It continued to offer a Master of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) degree, which in 2019 became a Master of Information (MI). In 2008 the school launched a graduate program for mid-career professionals leading to a Master of Information Management (MIM). The school has been continuously accredited by the American Library Association (ALA) since 1971.

The School of Public Administration was established on 1 July 1975, the same date as the new Faculty of Administrative Studies opened. However, the public administration tradition at Dalhousie goes back to 1936, when it became the first university in Canada to offer classes in public policy and public management. Between 1938-1949 the Faculty of Graduate Studies awarded 13 Master of Public Administration (MPA) degrees to students through Dalhousie's Institute of Public Affairs. This graduate program fell dormant after 1951 and, in an effort to revive a degree course in public administration, in 1969 three programs were launched designed to meet the needs of practising and prospective civil servants, including the Master of Public Administration (MPA) program. These were administered by the Department of Political Science, with decisions and structures shared with the Department of Commerce.

The school continues to provide foundational training in all aspects of public management and policy making to foster the development of future public sector leaders. Its Master of Public Administration (MPA) and Master of Public Administration – Management (MPA/M) programs are accredited by the Canadian Association of Programs in Public Administration (CAPPA).

The Faculty of Dentistry is the only dental school east of Montreal and educates over three-quarters of dentists practising in Atlantic Canada. Dalhousie created the faculty in 1908 in affiliation with the recently established Maritime Dental College for the purpose of examining candidates and conferring the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery. Dalhousie also provided lecture and clinical facilities in what is now known as the Forrest Building; in 1912 Dalhousie also assumed responsibility for instruction, and the four students who graduated that year did so as the first class in the Faculty of Dentistry. Teaching continued to be carried out by part-time dental practitioners; with the exception of a brief period in the late forties, until 1953 there was only one full-time faculty member, J. Stanley Bagnall, who himself had graduated from Dalhousie in 1921.

The introduction of government grants as well as private donations and gifts from the Kellogg Foundation enabled the dental school to expand dramatically throughout the 1950s, including the number of full-time faculty, the creation of a school of dental hygiene, and the building of the current Dentistry Building at the corner of Robie Street and University Avenue. By 1967 there were 15 full-time academic staff and 31 part-time faculty members, supported by 20 administrative and technical personnel.

In 1969 the faculty, which, since its beginnings, had operated as a single administrative department, established four departments: Oral Biology; Oral Medicine and Surgery; Restorative Dentistry; and Paediatric and Community Dentistry, with independent department heads or chairs. Today the faculty comprises the School of Dental Hygiene and the departments of Dental Clinical Sciences, Applied Oral Sciences and Oral and Maxillofacial Sciences, each made up of its own internal divisions.

The Chebucto Symphony Orchestra was first established in 1975 with a grant provided by the Department of Recreation of the Province of Nova Scotia. In September 1979, the Orchestra gained the support of the Department of Continuing Education of the Dartmouth Schools. The Orchestra is also a member of the Association of Canadian Orchestras.

The Chebucto Symphony Orchestra was formed to provide a platform for career music teachers, advanced music students, experienced amateurs and ex-career musicians to practice and perform music with a full orchestra. The Orchestra brings high level classical music to a range of local and provincial audiences by hosting public performances and events. All players must demonstrate their ability to meet playing requirements before performing with the Orchestra. As a community orchestra the Chebucto Symphony Orchestra has significant participant turnover. Over two hundred community players have participated in the Orchestra since its inception in 1997. Members of the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra have also participated in Chebucto Symphony Orchestra performances to fill gaps in instrumentation.

The Faculty of Science was established 1 July 1988, composed of science departments within the former Faculty of Arts and Science. The restructuring of the Faculty began in 1986 with the establishment of a committee to consider its future direction. The Smith Report, drafted in 1987 by Rowland Smith, McCulloch Professor of English and Acting Dean of Arts and Science, recommended the division of Arts and Science, which was followed by a faculty-wide referendum resulting in marginal favour of the decision.

Historically, a Department of Science was first established in connection with the Faculty of Arts in 1878. In 1880 it became the Faculty of Science, reorganized in 1891 as the Faculty of Pure and Applied Science. By 1906, that faculty had been divided and the Department of Pure Science united with the Faculty of Arts to become the Faculty of Arts and Science, a title which lasted until the administrative division in 1988. The Faculty of Applied Science became the first (short-lived) Faculty of Engineering, discontinued after the 1909 opening of the Nova Scotia Technical College.

Dal Science is currently Dalhousie University's largest faculty, with eight departments offering 19 undergraduate degree programs and 10 programs leading to graduate degrees.

The Spanish Department was established in 1973 and in 2010 its name and teaching mandate expanded to include Latin American Studies.

As early as 1843, the Dalhousie Board of Governors hired a professor of modern languages—French, Italian and Spanish. However, the newly appointed Lorenzo Lacoste met an untimely death shortly before Dalhousie College itself floundered and shut down. When the college reopened in 1863, only French and German were offered under the heading of modern languages. Spanish 1 first appears as a course in the 1921/22 university calendar, although a lecturer in Spanish was hired the year before. It remained a singular course for some time: Spanish 2 was added in 1928/29 and Spanish 3 in 1932/34. Around 1930 the university calendars started to group Spanish along with German and French—and later Russian—under the Department of Modern Languages, which in 1957/58 became the Department of Romance Languages, a department not recognized officially by Senate until 1970. Soon after that a proposal to organize Spanish as an independent department was passed by Senate and the Department of Spanish is first listed in the 1973/74 calendar.

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences was established on 1 July 1988, composed of humanities and social science departments within the former Faculty of Arts and Science. The restructuring of the Faculty began in 1986 with the establishment of a committee to consider its future direction. The Smith Report, drafted in 1987 by Rowland Smith, McCulloch Professor of English and Acting Dean of Arts and Science, recommended the division of the Faculty, which was followed by a faculty-wide referendum resulting in marginal favour of the decision.

The earliest university calendar lists only a Faculty of Arts. However, to obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree, students were first required to pass matriculation examinations in classics, mathematics and English, while subsequent classes included rhetoric, logic and psychology, natural philosophy (experimental physics), modern languages, metaphysics, chemistry, ethics, political economy, and history. MA degrees were granted on completion of a thesis on a literary, scientific or professional subject.

In 1878 a Department of Science was established in connection with the Faculty of Arts, and in 1880 the university calendar lists a Faculty of Science. By 1906, the university calendars refer to a single Faculty of Arts and Science, a title which lasted until the administrative division in 1988.

Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law originated as the first university law school established in the common-law provinces of Canada, and became the model for legal education across the country. The school was opened in 1883 with Richard Chapman Weldon as dean, supported by a volunteer faculty of Halifax lawyers and judges.

After four years in temporary housing, in 1887 the law school moved into a corner of the new Dalhousie College, known from 1919 as the Forrest Building. In 1951 the school moved to the Law Building (currently the University Club), which had been designed and built for the purpose thirty years earlier, but commandeered for other uses; by 1966 the law students and faculty had outgrown the space and moved into their current residence, the Weldon Law Building, named for the school’s first dean. After the fifth-floor library was destroyed by fire in 1985, the building was expanded and renovated to create the new James Dunn Law Library.

The Faculty of Law counts among its notable graduates Dalhousie’s first black graduate, James Robinson Johnston, who earned his law degree in 1898. In 1918 Frances Fish became the first woman to graduate from Dalhousie Law School and later the first woman to be admitted to the Barristers’ Society of Nova Scotia. By 1936 Dalhousie Law School graduates sat on the bench of all but three Provincial Supreme Courts, and in 1950 the faculty began offering graduate programs.

During the second half of the twentieth century the law school established initiatives and programs including Dalhousie Legal Aid (1970); the Marine and Environmental Law Program (1974); the Indigenous Blacks and Mi’kmaq Initiative (1989); the Health Law Institute (1992); and the Law and Technbology Institute (2001). In 2009 Sir Seymour Schulich donated $20 million to fund 40 new annual scholarships, the largest gift of its kind ever made to a Canadian law school, and the school was renamed the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.

A $3 million gift from John McCall MacBain in 2011 established the MacBain Chair in Health Law and Policy, and Joanna Erdman was the first person to hold the chair.

Robert Archibald Logan was born on in Middle Musquodoboit, N.S. on August 17, 1892. Born to small land-owning farmers, he helped his mother on the farm whilst attending school. On his graduation, he attended the Technical University of Nova Scotia to become a Dominion Land Surveyor. When war broke out in 1914, he learned to fly an airplane at his own expense, and became the first Canadian civilian pilot to earn a commission in the British Royal Flying Corps. During the war he distinguished himself as a pilot and navigator, and was involved in training other pilots. On Apr. 8, 1917, he was shot down behind enemy lines by an aerial attack led by Baron von Richtoven. He and his observer survived the crash and spent the rest of World War I in 6 different German POW camps, including Schweidnitz. He began to study languages during his internment, which began an interest that continued for the rest of his life.

When the War ended, Logan participated in a Canadian government expedition by boat into the Arctic, and helped to establish the first air landing fields in the far north, including on Ellesmere Island. He also became involved in the new field of aerial surveying, which led him to south-central Africa for two years. Upon his return to the USA, he was employed by Pan-American Airways, where he investigated potential landing sites for the airline through travels that took him from Alaska to Argentina, and was Operations Manager for Pan-Am in Argentina and Brazil.

In 1933, he participated in the "Jelling" North Atlantic voyage with the Lindberghs, which investigated fueling and landing sites for Pan-Am’s cross-Atlantic routes. He also began and managed a gold mining operation in Nova Scotia during this time. He was then hired by the Irish national airline Aer Lingus Teoranta, and was its general manager until World War II necessitated the shutdown of its operations.

During WWII, Logan worked for the RCAF as a Command Navigation Officer in Nova Scotia, and Lt. Colonel and Director of Intelligence in Ottawa until the USA entered the War. In 1941, he participated in a secret Arctic expedition to Greenland and Iceland with the US military for the establishment of northern military airbases. After that, he continued work with the American military, and was sent on an another special mission to the South Pacific in 1943 with Rear Admiral Richard Byrd (who he knew from their mutual association with the Explorer’s Club in New York), again to research potential airfield and fuelling sites for the US military. Due to a leg injury during this expedition, he was given a medical retirement discharge, and retired as a Colonel.

After Logan retired from the military, he devoted most of his time to writing. His research and writing spanned a great deal of topics, such as genealogy, history, astrology, philosophy, mineralogy, writing systems, and fiction. He also compiled and published a two-volume Cree-English dictionary, and had it distributed to many academic libraries across N. America at his own expense.

Logan remained active in these pursuits well into the later years of his life, and his achievements have been noted by organizations like the International Biographical Associations of the UK and the USA, and the Explorer’s Club. He died shortly after his 100th birthday in 1992, in Duluth, Minnesota.

Susan Sherwin is an internationally-renowned feminist philosopher and health care ethicist and a Dalhousie professor emeritus. She was born in Toronto in 1947 and educated at York University and Stanford University, where she wrote the first doctoral dissertation in the United States on feminist ethics. In 1974 she became the first woman to be hired by Dalhousie's Department of Philosophy, later serving as the first woman to serve as president of the Dalhousie Faculty Association (DFA). She has served on numerous significant committees, including the Royal College Ethics and Equity Committee; the Standing Committee on Ethics at Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); the Advisory Group on Reproductive and Genetic Technologies at Health Canada; and the Chief Public Health Officer’s Ethics Advisory Committee for the Public Health Agency of Canada. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1999) and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (2007). In 2006, she won the Killam Prize in Humanities and, in 2007, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Bioethics Society. Her book No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics and Health Care (1992) was revolutionary in the emergent field of feminist bioethics; she is also the author of The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy (1998). In 2015 she received the Order of Canada.

In 2018 Sue Sherwin was named one of 52 Dalhousie Originals, a list of individuals identified as having made a significant impact on the university and the broader community since Dalhousie's inception in 1818. https://www.dal.ca/about-dal/dalhousie-originals/eliza-ritchie.html

Dalhousie Medical School is an internationally-recognized faculty in undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing medical education. The only medical school in the Maritime provinces, it is closely affiliated with the provincial healthcare systems in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, and is affiliated with over one hundred teaching sites, including nine teaching hospitals.

The Dalhousie College Act, ratified in 1863, stipulated the establishment of a medical faculty; with the support of the premier and the provincially-funded Halifax Hospital, the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1868, half a century after the university's founding, and the fifth medical school in Canada, preceded by McGill (1842), Queens (1854), Laval (1823) and Toronto (1843).

The initial class of 14 students was taught by a volunteer faculty of Halifax physicians under the leadership of Dr. Alexander P. Reid. Primary subjects only were offered, and students transferred to McGill, Harvard or New York to complete their training; by 1870 a full program was available and in 1872 the first class graduated from Dalhousie’s Faculty of Medicine. In 1873 financial difficulties forced the school’s closure and two years later the independent Halifax Medical College was formed, with Dr. Reid as president. After an ambiguous affiliation with the college, in 1889 Dalhousie’s Faculty of Medicine was re-established, with the Halifax Medical College remaining as the teaching body while the Faculty of Medicine took over the role of examining body.

With the support of the Carnegie Foundation, the medical school was reorganized; in 1911 the Halifax Medical School was fully reintegrated into the university, with a full-time pre-clinical teaching staff and strict entrance requirements. In the early 1920s further grants from the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations enabled the construction of the Dalhousie Public Health Clinic and the Medical Sciences Building, as well as the expansion of the Pathology Institute. In 1925 the school obtained an A1 accreditation from the American Medical Association.

Financial challenges throughout the 1930s and 1940s were alleviated by contributions from the provincial governments of Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, and during this period the faculty established the first continuing medical education program in Canada. In 1967 the Sir Charles Tupper Medical Building was completed, housing the W.K. Kellogg Health Sciences Library, several medical science faculties, and facilities for teaching and research.