Dan Drucker, Alison Keith, Jeremy Quastel named University Professors

Dan Drucker, Alison Keith and Jeremy Quastel have been appointed University Professors by the University of Toronto.

The prestigious designation recognizes scholarly achievements and pre-eminence in a field – and represents the university’s highest and most distinguished academic rank.

Drucker is a physician and professor in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s department of medicine and senior scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital. He is best known for his research on the hormones GLP-1 and GLP-2, and the enzyme DPP4 – work that has helped revolutionize treatments for Type 2 diabetes, obesity and intestinal disorders. An officer of the Order of Canada, Fellow of the Royal Society of London and member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, his many honours include the Gairdner International Award, Warren Alpert Foundation Prize for Biomedical Research and the Wolf Prize.

Keith, a professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of classics and director of the Jackman Humanities Institute, is renowned for her intersectional research on gender and genre in Latin literature and Roman culture. Her book, Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic (Cambridge 2000), transformed the study of Latin epic poetry and remains the standard work in the discipline. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she is the president-elect for 2024 of the North American Society for Classical Studies (SCS), the largest professional association in the world for the study of ancient Greece and Rome.

Quastel, a professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of mathematics, is widely recognized as one of the top probabilists in the world. He has made major advances in the fields of hydrodynamic theory, stochastic partial differential equations, and integrable probability. His work completely reformed modern probability related to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation and led to the mathematics department becoming a leading research centre in the area of stochastic partial differential equations. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Royal Society of London, his honours include the CRM-Fields-Pims Prize (2018), and the Jeffrey-Williams Prize (2019).

“The University of Toronto owes much of its reputation for excellence to its world-class professors and I am delighted to have the opportunity to formally acknowledge the outstanding achievements of these three remarkable faculty members whose research continues to have such an extraordinary global impact,” said Vice-President and Provost Cheryl Regehr.

Read more about the 2022-23 University Professors