Arts & Science, DeGroote School of Business, Faculty of Humanities and Faculty of Social Sciences

Thomas Lazare Wilson is a musician, artist, writer and community champion who first appeared on the Hamilton music scene as a member of the rock band The Florida Razors. He later founded Junkhouse in 1989 and a decade later co-founded Blackie and the Rodeo Kings. In the quarter century since, that band has produced 11 albums with hits including “Stoned” and “Enough of You Today” while also producing collaborative music with artists such as Patti Scialfa, Emmylou Harris, Bruce Cockburn and Vince Gill. 

As a solo artist, Mr. Wilson collaborated with Cowboy Junkies founder Michael Timmins to create the musical persona Lee Harvey Osmond, the innovator of the acid funk genre. At the same time, Mr. Wilson has also been recording with collaborators including Bob Lanois, the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra and iskwē. A multi-time Juno nominee, Mr. Wilson’s Juno wins include Junkhouse’s 1997 Juno Award for Best Video, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings’ 2000 Juno for the album: Group, and Lee Harvey Osmond’s 2020 Juno for the album: Mohawk. 

Mr. Wilson is also a respected visual artist. The Art Gallery of Burlington hosted his solo show Beautiful Scars: Mohawk Warriors, Hunters and Chiefs and the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences commissioned his large-scale work “The Mystic Highway.” His art has also featured at the Stratford Festival and in the exhibition Echoes Of The Flame: Art Inspired By The Lyrics of The Tragically Hip. 

In his 50s, Mr. Wilson discovered that he had been adopted out of the Kahnawake reserve in Québec and that he was, unbeknownst to him, Mohawk. That experience of discovery inspired his autobiography Beautiful Scars: Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the Road Home, which became a national bestseller, a CBC Best Book of 2017 and a finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Hamilton Literary Awards. 

As he has explored his Mohawk identity, Mr. Wilson has become an advocate for Indigenous issues. He created the Tom Wilson Indigenous Scholarship Award in Honour of Bunny Wilson at McMaster and he also donated his personal and artistic archive to the University. 

Tom Wilson has earned the City of Hamilton Arts Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award and was recently invested as a member of the Order of Canada.

Judith Nasby graduated from McMaster with an honours BA in studio art and a minor in art history in 1968. On the strength of her academic and extracurricular experience at McMaster and her time as the first-ever student intern at the National Gallery of Canada, she became the first art curator at the University of Guelph. She built what was a modest 150-piece collection through specialized acquisition focused on historical and contemporary Canadian art, contemporary Inuit drawings and eventually areas of strength including historical European etchings, works by contemporary Canadian silversmiths, contemporary Chinese painting and Indigenous beadwork.

When the University of Guelph, the City of Guelph, the County of Wellington and the local public school board jointly established the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in 1978, Ms. Nasby became the founding director and curator of the centre. She guided the development of the centre and its move in 1980 to its new permanent home. The centre was renamed the Art Gallery of Guelph in 2014 and now boasts a collection of more than 9,000 works. In the process of developing the gallery, Ms. Nasby also assumed teaching duties at the University of Guelph as an adjunct professor of fine art. Now retired after more than four decades of service, she holds the title of curator emerita.

A respected author, Ms. Nasby’s most recent book is The Making of a Museum, published in 2023 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. This volume tells the story of the gallery from its beginnings on the University of Guelph campus in 1916 to its newest incarnation as the Art Gallery of Guelph. In 2002, she authored Irene Avaalaaqiaq: Myth and Reality, and co-authored Asingit: The Other. She also wrote Ralph Scarlett: Canadian Modernist Painter, Designer and Jeweler which was published two years later. She has contributed articles and reviews to periodicals including Inuit Art Quarterly, Canadian Collector, Historic Guelph, Inuit Arts and Crafts, Muse and Speed. Her work has also been included in museum publications and anthologies such as Art Gallery Handbook volume 2 and Anthology of Writing on Canadian Art, the latter of which was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2003.

A member of the Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization and of the Canadian Museums Association, Ms. Nasby was president of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries from 1977 to 1979 and served in a number of leadership roles with the Canadian Association of Cultural Executives including as a member of the founding board of directors and chair of the Professional Ethics Committee. Sh earned the British Council grant for England in 1973, the Woman of Distinction Award in arts and culture from the YMCA/YWCA in 2002 and was a visiting international scholar at the University of Delaware in 2003.

Manish Verma is a Professor of Operations Management and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University.  He has an MBA and a PhD in Business Administration from the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. His research interests are in network design and multimodal transportation, risk assessment and management of dangerous goods, security issues in location and transportation, humanitarian logistics, and optimization.  His research has been funded by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and published in leading journals in transportation and operations research. He has been approached by media to comment on railroad accidents of dangerous goods, the role of pipeline, and the emergency response. To date, he has supervised over 25 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who have gone on to start their own careers in academia and the industry. Interactions with these tremendously gifted team members has ensured continuous learning and exposure to new ideas/domains, their diligence has facilitated sustained productivity, and their strong support has led to this wonderful recognition.