William Leiss
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William Leiss, O.C., Ph.D., F.R.S.C. (born 1939) was President of the Royal Society of Canada from 1999-2001.
Born in Long Island, New York at the end of 1939, he grew up in rural Pennsylvania. He began his university education in New Jersey, at Fairleigh Dickinson University, graduating in 1956 with a B.A. summa cum laude (major in history and minor in accounting); then in Massachusetts, with a M.A. in the History of Ideas Program at Brandeis University (1963); and finally in La Jolla, California, with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego (1969).
Dr. Leiss started his academic career in the Political Science Department at the University of Regina, before moving on in 1973 to two stints with the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University (also Political Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought there), interrupted by a brief stay at the University of Toronto's Department of Sociology; then in 1980 to the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, where he was department chair for six years and later Vice-President, Research. He was awarded the five-year, externally-funded Eco-Research Chair in Environmental Policy at the School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, in 1994 and is currently in the Faculty of Management at the University of Calgary where he holds another five-year research chair, the NSERC/SSHRC/Industry Chair in Risk Communication and Public Policy, funded under the granting councils' Management of Technological Change program.
He has written several well-known books: The Domination of Nature, first published in 1972; The Limits to Satisfaction (1976); Under Technology's Thumb (1990); Risk and Responsibility (1994); and Mad Cows and Mother's Milk (1997), Social Communication in Advertising (1986), C. B. Macpherson (1988), and In the Chamber of Risks (2001).
In 2003, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
