NSERC announces award winners

Dr Ford Doolittle has won this year's Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. The medal comes with $1 million and is the top prize awarded annually by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). Doolittle, professor emeritus at Dalhousie Unix Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, was recognized for his research into cell evolution and the forces and mechanisms determining the structure of genomes.

Doolittle was one of 36 Canadian researchers honored by NSERC at a gala ceremony hosted by governor general David Johnston in Ottawa on February 4th.

The Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering was awarded to Dr. John P. Smol and Dr. Jules Blais, half brothers at Univ of Ottawa's Department of Biology. They were recognized for their collaborative research into the environmental history of lakes and rivers the effects of industrial pollutants on ecological systems.

The John C Polanyi Award went to the ALPHA-Canada Team, part of an international initiative at the CERN facility near Geneva that developed methods leading to the first measurement of the properties of atomic antimatter. The six-member Canadian team is led by Dr. Makoto C Fujiwara (TRIUMF/Univ of Calgary).

The recipient of the Gilles Brassard Doctoral Prize for Interdisciplinary Research is Dr Zhihui Yi, École Polytechnique de Montréal's Department of Chemical Engineering, for applying chemistry, physics, engineering and biology to study organic bioelectronics. The Howard Alper Postdoctoral Prize was made to Dr Marinus van Loenhout at the Univ of British Columbia's Department of Physics and Astronomy

Other prizes included six Steacie Fellowships recipients, five André Hamer Postgraduate Prizes, three Innovation Challenge Awards, three Synergy Awards, five André Hamer Postgraduate Prizes and a Science Promotion award.

FMI: www.nserc.gc.ca.