Dr Jeff Dahn has been awarded the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering for his pioneering research to improve lithium ion battery technology – one of a clutch of high-profile awards announced last night by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. Dahn, a Canada Research Chair in Materials for Advanced Batteries at Dalhousie Univ, was honored at a gala dinner at the Governor General’s residence in Ottawa attended by Science minister Kirsty Duncan. His lab’s research has dramatically improved electric-vehicle and grid energy-storage technology, attracted the interest and participation of Tesla Motors and spun off two companies.

Other award winners include:

·         NSERC John C. Polanyi Award – Dr Sylvain Moineau, a professor with Laval Univ’s Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Bioinformatics, whose research has played a leading role in an international collaboration that has identified the adaptive immunity system known as CRISPR-Cas (Clustered, Regularly Interspaced, Short Palindromic Repeats), found in about half of all bacteria;

·         Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering – André Longtin and Leonard Maler, professors with the Univ of Ottawa’s Department of Physics, Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, for identifying key features of the neural code that underlies the operation of the brain;

·         Synergy Awards for Innovation – the Univ of British Columbia’s Guy Dumont and industry partner Lionsgate Technologies, for Kenek O2, a small, diagnostic tool connected to a mobile device allowing patients to test for early signs of a range of preventable diseases; Laval Univ’s Laurent Drissen and industrial partner ABB Inc for development of the the SpIOMM imaging Fourier transform spectrometer; and, the Univ of Calgary’s Zhangxing (John) Chen and a consortium of nine oil-and-gas sector partners for modelling to produce dynamic simulations to test new operations that produce more while reducing environmental impact.

Here is the full list of award winners.