Jasper McKee was born James Stanley Colton McKee in Belfast, Northern Ireland on June 6, 1930. He obtained a B.Sc. in Physics with honours and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Queen’s University in Belfast, in 1952 and 1956 respectively. McKee also spent a Fulbright Year at UC Berkeley in California. He completed a rarely-awarded Doctor of Science degree in Physics at the University of Birmingham in 1968. McKee was a Director of the University of Manitoba’s Cyclotron Laboratory and Accelerator Centre from 1975-1996. He became a Professor of Physics at the University of Manitoba in 1974, a position he has continued to hold to the present day.

McKee has obtained many awards and achievements, including the Outreach Award from the University of Manitoba in 1986 and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002. Jasper McKee has also represented Atomic Energy of Canada Limited abroad, notably during commissioning of CANDU reactors in South Korea and China during the 1980s.

McKee is also a published author of both fiction and nonfiction. His nonfiction includes 60 Years A-Growing: A History of the Canadian Association of Physicists – 1945-2005 (2005), The View from Below Cashel Hill (2000), Physics in the Real World (1999), and Random Recollections of a Peripatetic Physicist (1998). His fiction includes The Heroic Failures of Anderton Snipe (2004), a novel, and Tails and Tales: True Stories and Shaggy-Dog Fiction (2004).