Five Scholars Awarded $100,000 Killam Prize

Zoomer | April 13th, 2010
Tamer Özsu, Director, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo; John Matthews, Trustee, Killam Trusts; Joseph L. Rotman, Chair, Canada Council for the Arts; Ellen Bialystok; James Tully; Arthur McDonald; Mark Henkelmen (photo: courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts)

The recipients of the 2010 Killam Prizes for outstanding career achievements in health sciences, engineering, humanities, natural sciences and social sciences were announced this morning in Toronto. Administered by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Killam Prizes were inaugurated in 1981 to honour eminent Canadian scholars and scientists actively engaged in research.

Health Sciences

Dr. R. Mark Henkelman is a professor in the departments of medical biophysics and medical imaging at the University of  Toronto and senior scientist in imaging research with Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. A world-renowned authority in the field of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), Henkelman’s current research, centred at the Mouse Imaging Centre at the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute in Toronto, employs state-of-the-art digital imaging technologies to research human diseases.

Engineering

Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics at the University of Waterloo and co-managing editor of the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Dr. Ming Li was the recipient of a Killam Research Fellowship in 2001 and is a professor with the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Best known for co-authoring the book on the Kolmogorov complexity, a measure of the amount of information needed to specify an object, Li’s current work focuses on finding new applications in computer science, bioinformatics, philosophy, physics and statistics.

Humanities

Dr. James Tully is a professor of political science, law, indigenous governance and philosophy at the University of Victoria and is numbered among the foremost political theorists of our age. A distinguished scholar of the English philosopher John Locke, Professor Tully has published a number of influential texts on constitutional theory in an age of cultural and legal pluralism. He is currently working on a new type of public philosophy that aims to connect academic research and teaching on local/global problems with the citizens responding to these problems on the ground.

Natural Sciences

Dr. Arthur McDonald has been the scientific and operational leader of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) project, a major experiment that has provided revolutionary insight into the properties of neutrinos and energy generation in the sun’s core, for the past 20 years. As SNO Project Director, McDonald, who is also the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics at Queen’s University, has helped enable Canada to secure a leading role in neutrino physics and astrophysics.


Social Sciences

An internationally respected researcher in the field of language, bilingualism and cognitive development, Professor Ellen Bialystok of York University’s department of psychology is credited with significantly altering the way we think about language acquisition and literacy, teach literacy, and understand the cognitive processes that anchor our learning of a second language. Professor Bialystok was the first to find that bilingual children – and adults – have marked advantages, both linguistic and non-linguistic, over their unilingual counterparts. In addition, Professor Bialystok’s studies of literacy acquisition and her work on metalinguistic awareness have also garnered her significant international attention.

–Evan Rosser