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Nancy E. Simpson, a well-respected geneticist, started her scientific career by obtaining an undergraduate degree in Physical and Health Education from the University of Toronto, followed by a Master of Science in Physical Education at Columbia. Simpson taught for several years but decided to change her focus to human genetics and pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto under Dr. Norma Ford Walker. Simpson researched juvenile diabetes mellitus and was able to demonstrate that Type I diabetes was genetically distinct from adult onset diabetes and had multifactorial causes. After a post-doctoral year at Nuffield Hospital in Oxford, England, Simpson became a Research Associate at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and obtained a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship in population genetics for the Medical Research Council of Canada. Additionally, Simpson spent five years in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Toronto investigating the genetics of cholinesterases with Dr. Werner Kalow.

In 1965, Simpson moved to Queen’s University and continued her research on juvenile diabetes and serum cholinesterase. Her cross-appointments to the Departments of Pediatrics and Biology brought the first medical geneticist to the Faculty. Around this time, Simpson completed an extensive analysis of factors influencing serum cholinesterase in a Brazilian population and started studying serum cholinesterase in Canadian families when one member had a prolonged apnea after succinylcholine. This began an effort to collect a reasonable number of families with extremely rare cholinesterase variants for formal genetic studies, which was commonly found in Inuit and Indigenous communities.

In the early 1970s, Simpson was part of a group of genetic pioneers in Canada who became interested in perinatal diagnosis and collaborated in a five-year national study to assess the extent and effectiveness of these new initiatives. She was particularly interested in circumpolar genetics and studies of genetics disease in polar natives and participated in international meetings to disseminate this knowledge. As part of her research, Simpson spent time in Igloolik studying its population and collecting samples and family histories. Later in the decade, she became interested in linkage and mapping studies and moved into molecular genetics in the 1980s.

Towards the end of her career, Simpson turned her energies to the mapping of the locus for multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2a (MEN-2), a form of hereditary thyroid cancer identified by surgeons at Hotel Dieu Hospital in a Prince Edward County family. Simpson even helped organize the First International MEN-2 Conference in Kingston at Queen’s in 1984. A breakthrough occurred in 1988, when she found the marker gene on chromosome 10 in collaboration with Dr. Kenneth Kidd and his group at Yale University. Her application of recombinant DNA technology and the mapping of the MEN-2 gene won her national and international acclaim, including the Queen’s University award for Excellence in Research in 1989.

Simpson was a founding member of the Canadian College of Medical Geneticists and served on the board as treasurer and later, president. In 1994, She was awarded their Founder’s Award, an annual award to one member of the College who has made an outstanding contribution to Canadian medical genetics. Simpson also served as the Director of the Division of Medical Genetics in the Department of Pediatrics from 1980-1986.

At Queen’s University, Simpson made many contributions to teaching and various committees in Biology, Pediatrics and Graduate Studies. In 2004, Queen’s University established the Nancy Simpson Scholarship in Genetics in her honor to recognize the best Masters or Ph.D. student at Queen’s in a field of genetics.

Queen's University student.

Issac Simpson, private banker, died at Kingston 2 September, 1901.While in business Simpson's premises were at the office of the Frontenac Loan and Investment Society on Clarence street. He appears to have retired from active business in, or around, 1895. Simpson was the President of the Cataraqui Bridge Company from 1881-1900 amd a shareholder in the Kingston Hoisery Company. Simpson dealt in property largely in Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox and Addington counties, but he held property all across Ontario and in Western Canada. He also held mining leases and chattel mortgages. He was survived by his wife and daughter (Annie Maude Stokes).

Farmers, Cataraqui, Ont.

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C. Simpson was a student in the School of Mining at Queen's University.

Simons and Rae, Architects, Toronto.

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Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1949, Merilyn Simonds spent her childhood in Brazil and was educated at the University of Western Ontario. She has worked as a freelance writer, a magazine editor for Harrowsmith and This Country Canada and, since 1991, has devoted herself to full-time writing. She has published ten books and scores of magazine articles on subjects ranging from the environment to soap-making, from art to war, including the book accompaniment to the controversial CBC television documentary The Valour and the Horror. She has taught several literary non-fiction courses and has been a regular on CBC Radio's Basic Black.

With the release of The Convict Lover, published by Macfarlane, Walter & Ross in 1996, Simonds became nationally known as a literary writer. The Convict Lover was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction and was chosen as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 1996 by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire Magazine, Elm Street Magazine and Maclean’s. It was translated into Chinese, Japanese, and German, and in 1997, was adapted for the stage by the Kingston Summer Theatre Festival, premiering at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto in the fall of 1998. Also in 1996, from September to December, Simonds served as the Writer in Residence at Green College, University of British Columbia.

The Lion in the Room Next Door, Simonds’s collection of linked, autobiographical stories, was published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1999 and became a national bestseller. The following year, it was published by Bloomsbury in England, by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in the United States and by btb in Germany.

The Holding is Simonds's first novel. Published by McClelland & Stewart in the spring of 2004, it was on the Canadian Booksellers' Association bestseller list for five months. In the fall of 2005 it was published in the United States, where it was selected a New York Times "Editor's Choice." The novel was released in Germany in 2007.

Simonds has edited two anthologies: Gardens: A Literary Companion (2008) and Night: A Literary Companion (2009). In 2010 a travel memoir, jointly authored with Wayne Grady, called Breakfast at the Exit Cafe: Travels through America was published. A selection of flash fictions from her work-in-progress The Paradise Project was recently featured in the Journal of the Americas special issue on contemporary Canadian writing.

Simonds lives with writer Wayne Grady on a small acreage north of Kingston. She has two sons by an earlier marriage — Karl, a musician, and Erik, a visual artist whose painting is on the cover of the original Canadian edition of The Lion in the Room Next Door.

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