Dr. Michael Hayden of University of British Columbia
The Canada Council for the Arts calls it this country's Nobel Prize. And today, the Killam Prize recognized five more of Canada's finest academics for their devoted work to scientific and scholastic research over their lifetime, from an oft-quoted social psychologist to a humanitarian doctor.
Winners of the $100,000 prize, rewarded for research in health sciences, engineering, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, were announced Wednesday. The prize is one of the country's most distinguished, its limited number reserving it only for the best minds in Canada.
Past winners say the prestige of the award speaks for itself. "It's not simply an academic prize. It recognizes work of a broad perspective, and people who've done that on multiple occasions," said Dr. Philippe Gros, who won in 2009 for his work in identifying a gene that causes a common birth defect.
"It is something that researchers look up to because they just don't give out too many. It carries this prestige that provides instant recognition amongst your peers."
The first Killam Prizes were awarded in 1981, created by Dorothy Johnston Killam in memory of her husband, Izaak Walton Killam, one of Canada's richest men, to "increase the scientific and scholastic attainments of Canadians". But more than simply rewarding pure achievement, the awards mandate that winners "should not be one-sided and a sound character should complement their intellect."
His estate was largely donated towards the Killam Trusts, held by five Canadian universities. That estate has also funded a children's hospital and the establishment of the Canada Council for the Arts, and over 4500 fellowships and scholarships across the country.
Ever since 2002, when the number of winners were expanded from three to five, the Killam Prizes have recognized at least one past winner of the Killam research fellowship, a two-year annual commitment of $70,000 towards research in the five aforementioned fields.
This year's winners are:
Gilles Brassard
Quantum physics isn't exactly the stuff of gripping dinnertime conversation. But the work of the Université de Montréal's Gilles Brassard - described as "one of Canada's science superstars" by British astronomer David Darling - tries to bring it into practical terms. Specifically, the BB84 protocol, which MIT listed as one of the ten emerging technologies that would change the world in 2003, is a way to ensure no one can eavesdrop when qubits of data are being transferred. Going against traditional thinking of creating a foolproof lock for sensitive data - there is no such thing - the protocol safeguards the key and lets both parties to compare the results to see if any qubits are missing. A Killam research fellowship winner in 1997, Brassard has asserted that in the land of the secretive, the quantum cryptologist is king.
Michael Hayden
Scientific philosopher Thomas Browne once said that "No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer." Michael Hayden certainly does not, with a compassionate approach to science. The South Africa native had just graduated from the University of Cape Town, when he found a patient who had Huntington's disease where he was working at. It touched off a lifetime's research project that led scientists to now be able to identify the genes responsible for Huntington disease, Lou Gehrig disease, type 2 diabetes, and more. When he was named Canada's researcher of the year by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research in 2008, he donated all the prize money--half a million dollars--to a charity that trains aspiring doctors. Because of his donation, that organization, Ripples of Hope, can bring international students to train at the University of British Columbia as post doctoral fellows.
Keren Rice
The work of the University of Toronto's Keren Rice is literally defining to the field of linguistics. A Killam research fellowship winner in 1992, she has spent three decades working to write the grammar rules and dictionary of the Slavey language, an Aboriginal dialect spoken in Canada's Northwest Territories. She has served on a committee to standardize the language's writing system, and is the founding director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto.
Lotfollah Shafai
We live in a world where our communications are driven by antennas and satellites. And as a distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba, and the Canada Research Chair in Applied Electromagnetics, Dr. Lotfollah Shafai's work has helped connect us better. His early work has found his projects in space, helping produce the first picoterminals on the Canadian satellite Hermes; his later work finds him focussed on Earth, specifically its bodies of water and the electromagnetic mapping of global warming's possible effect on Arctic ice.
Mark P. Zanna
Mark Zanna, a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, is considered one of the most cited social psychologists in the world. His work is focussed on issues of the explicit and the implicit: of people who show implicit prejudices rather than explicit ones, of the implicit ways smoking in movies influences us to smoke, of whether or not Canada's new warning labels on cigarette boxes are explicit enough.