Suzanne Fortier OC FRSC (born November 11, 1949)[1] is a Canadian crystallographer who was the 17th Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University.

[3] She was among the first group of girls admitted to the local CEGEP, where she and a friend decided to enter the 1968 Quebec provincial science fair.

[4] Their project on the diffraction of sound waves interested a crystallographer from McGill University who was attending the science fair, and who invited Fortier and her friend to visit his lab.

This visit further confirmed her interest in science generally and crystallography in particular, a field of study that she has said "present[s] you with beautiful puzzles to solve.

During her PhD work, she attended a talk by U.S. mathematician Herbert Hauptman, who would later win the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and who studied directed methods for determining crystal structures.

[citation needed] She was interested in using artificial intelligence and other mathematical and machine learning techniques to determine the structure of proteins.