McLaren, Digby Johns, 1919- : Digby Johns McLaren was born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland and attended schools in England. He received a BA in geology at Cambridge in 1940, but his studies were interrupted by six years service in the Royal Artillery, much of it in the Middle East and Europe. He returned to Cambridge and received his MA in geology in 1948. In the same year he moved with his family to Canada and joined the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC). Between 1948 and 1951 he worked on his PhD part time at the University of Michigan.
As a geologist, McLaren spent 19 summers on field surveys studying Devonian stratigraphy and palaeontology in the Rocky Mountains, the Mackenzie River Valley and on Arctic islands. From 1959 to 1967 he was head of the palaeontology section of the GSC. In 1967 he was named as the first director of the Institute of Sedimentary and Petroleum Geology of the GSC in Calgary. Its function was to identify and explore the oil and gas regions of western Canada.
In 1973 McLaren was named Director of the Geological Survey of Canada. As head, he had responsibility for geological exploration across Canada. In 1981 he was named Assistant Deputy Minister of Science and Technology for Energy, Mines and Resources Canada (EMR). McLaren, desiring to return to research, was named Visiting Professor in the Department of Geology of the University of Ottawa. There he was able to do research on meteors hitting earth and subsequent mass extinctions. McLaren was the president of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), from 1987 to 1990. The main preoccupations during his term were to find stable funding for RSC activities as well as world over-population and reduction of natural resources.
McLaren was president of the Paleontological Society of America (1969), the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists (1971) and the Geological Society of America (1982). He worked on various committees of the International Union of Geological Sciences (1968-81) as well as a board member and later president of the International Geological Correlation Program (1971-81). McLaren won many geological medals and awards as the result of his work. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society (London), a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and others. In 1987 he became an Officer of the Order of Canada.
