Two new honorary degree recipients will be recognized at the 2015 fall commencement ceremonies at Queen’s University. Nellie Cournoyea is being honoured for helping stimulate economic, social and cultural development for Aboriginal people while Richard Battarbee is an international leader in the field of environmental science.

The degrees are awarded to those who have made remarkable contributions to the lives of people throughout the world in academia, business, politics, science and the arts.

Nellie Cournoyea, the former Premier of the Northwest Territories, was born in Aklavik, NWT, in 1940 and was educated through the Federal Aklavik Day School by Alberta correspondence courses. She worked at CBC Inuvik for nine years as an announcer and station manager and was a land claim fieldworker for the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK). Ms. Cournoyea was a founding member, and later administrator and land rights worker, of the Committee of Original Peoples’ Entitlement (COPE).

Ms. Cournoyea is currently the chair and chief executive officer of Inuvialuit Regional Corporation (IRC). The corporation was established in 1985 with the mandate to receive the Inuvialuit lands and financial compensation resulting from the 1984 land claim settlement. Today it has assets in excess of $492 million.

Ms. Cournoyea will receive her Doctor of Laws Tuesday, November 17 at 2:30pm in Grant Hall.

Richard William Battarbee is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Change at University College London (UCL) and was the director of the Environmental Change Research Centre (ECRC) at UCL from 1991 to 2007.

Throughout his career he has been involved in research on the way lake sediment records can be used to reconstruct lake-ecosystem change through time. With his colleagues in the ECRC he has successfully applied those techniques to problems of surface water acidification and climate change. In the 1980s he and his group demonstrated that acid rain was responsible for causing the acidification of surface waters in the British uplands, research that was instrumental in persuading the United Kingdom government to sign international agreements on the reductions of sulphur dioxide emissions from power stations.

His research on acid rain has continued and now focuses on lake-ecosystem recovery, especially the role of climate change in modifying recovery processes.

Richard W. Battarbee will receive his Doctor of Science Tuesday, November 17 at 6:30pm in Grant Hall.