2021 Continuing Contribution Award

Dr. Karim W. (Kay) Nasser, CM, SOM, born in a village in Lebanon, pursued high school and university education as a civil engineer (AmericanU, Beirut, 1949), in tandem with a career in construction. The StarPhoenix magazine Bridges (November 25, 2021) provides the details. His employer in Lebanon, Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company, paid his way to Kansas for his Master’s degree. Later working in Saudi Arabia, he married his wife Dora; they moved to New Jersey for his further education. He worked in Montreal and North Bay, Canada, and sixty years ago accepted a teaching position in Saskatoon, where he finished his Ph.D. (USask 1965). It became their home.

Kay retired from USask in 1994 after 33 years in the College of Engineering, during which he won acclaim as the “king of concrete” for his research and inventions, especially “the K-Slump Tester” of the consistency of concrete, used in building the CN Tower in Toronto in 1973. Meanwhile, he was spending summers developing apartment, business, and other high-rise structures in Saskatoon and region.

USRA recognized him with a Prime of Life Achievement Award in 2010. His other awards have included a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, 2012; Induction into the Business Hall of Fame, 2013, for visionary leadership and outstanding contribution to the Province; Member of the Order of Canada, 2017 (inducted 2018).

The University has recognized the Nasser family’s record-breaking philanthropy by naming the downtown campus of the Edwards School of Business the “K.W. Nasser Centre.” The family have also shared their entrepreneurial wealth to support students in need, including those struggling in the current pandemic; to develop a Lebanese and Middle Eastern collection supplementing the primarily Greco-Roman emphasis in the University’s Museum of Antiquities; and to build a downtown study centre for the School of Business. For development (2010-21), by the family’s Victor Major Investment Corp., of Parcel Y, River Landing, in the South Downtown, the City of Saskatoon on August 3, 2021, opened this stunning complex of two office buildings, a hotel, and a condominium by naming its public centre the “K.W. Nasser Plaza.” This civic honour recognizes that K. Nasser, together with his son John (current president of Victory Major), their family and business partners, had finally achieved the City’s dream for this prime downtown riverbank property after other entrepreneurs had failed.