Leo Yaffe

Who was Leo Yaffe?

Leo Yaffe, OC FRSC was a Canadian nuclear chemistry scientist and a proponent of the peaceful uses of nuclear power.

Born in Devils Lake, North Dakota, his family moved to Winnipeg in 1920. He studied at the University of Manitoba receiving a B.Sc. in 1940, a M.Sc in 1941, and was awarded an honorary D.Sc in 1982. He received a Ph.D in 1943 from McGill University.

In 1943, he was recruited by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited to work at the Université de Montréal, moving to the Chalk River Lab, on the banks of the Ottawa River, in Ontario, at the end of the war. He remained with the AECL until 1952.

In 1952, he moved to Montreal where the J.S. Foster cyclotron had just been built at McGill University. In 1958 he became the Macdonald Professor of Chemistry.

From 1963 to 1965 he was director of research at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Returning to McGill he was appointed head of the Department of Chemistry until 1972. In 1974 he was appointed Vice-Principal which he held until he retired in 1981. From 1981 to 1982, he was the president of the Chemical Institute of Canada.

He married Betty Workman and has two children: Carla Krasnick, and Mark Yaffe.