Chair, Canadian Steel Industry Research Association until 1995, McGill U.
John Jonas is a metallurgist who graduated from McGill in 1954, and earned his PhD in mechanical sciences at Cambridge after working in the mills of the Steel Company of Wales for a year. He has contributed to advances in steel rolling techniques, which differ with each alloy, and has five patents in the process that produces the niobium-laced steel used in Canada's far north. The steel doesn't crack in extreme cold, and thus keeps the oil in the pipelines and off the tundra and out of the sea. He develops molecular models as to what's happening to that red hot steel as it shoots 60 miles an hour through the rollers, since it is notoriously difficult to observe under such conditions. Jonas is funded by the Canadian Steel Industry Research Association (CSIRA) and NSERC. Recipient of la Grande Médaille of the Société Française de Métallurgie et de Matériaux, the first Canadian to be so honored, and numerous other awards.
