Biography

McKee is Full Professor (and Canada Research Chair in Biomineralization) in the Faculty of Dentistry at McGill University in Montreal, with a joint appointment in the Dept. of Anatomy & Cell Biology in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. McKee obtained his Ph.D. from McGill University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University/Children’s Hospital (Orthopedic Surgery) in Boston. Following appointments at the Forsyth Institute in Boston and the University of Montreal, he joined McGill University in 1998.

McKee’s research program focuses on the mechanisms regulating biomineralization in bones, teeth and other biomineralizing systems such as otoconia and eggshells, and more specifically, on the role of proteins in controlling the growth of calcium-phosphate and calcium-carbonate crystals in extracellular matrices. He also studies pathologic calcification in tissues that do not normally mineralize. His research is relevant to bone and tooth diseases affecting mineralization (the osteomalacias), and to debilitating calcification pathologies seen in, for example, cardiovascular disease and urolithiasis/kidney stones. McKee has 250 scientific articles published in books/journals, and a Google Scholar h-index of 89 for his publications with over 36,000 citations of his research. He has received two Distinguished Scientist Awards, their highest research honor (the 1996 Young Investigator Award, and the 2003 Biological Mineralization Award) from the International Association for Dental Research, the 2018 C.P. Leblond Award honoring a Quebec scientist for exceptional involvement in bone research, and the 2019 Adele L. Boskey Award from the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research (their highest research honor as one of their Esteemed Awards).