2010 Killam Prizes are announced

Toronto, ON – Five prominent scholars have been awarded Canada’s most distinguished annual awards for outstanding career achievements in health sciences, engineering, humanities, natural sciences and social sciences. Each prize is worth $100,000 to the recipient.

The recipients are:

Professor Ellen Bialystok – York University – Social Sciences
Professor Bialystok of York University’s Department of Psychology has changed how we think about language acquisition and literacy, how we teach literacy, and our understanding of the cognitive processes that anchor our learning of a second language.

Dr R Mark Henkelman – University of Toronto – Health Sciences
Dr Henkelman is using state-of-the-art digital imaging technologies to research human diseases. This is just the latest endeavour by this groundbreaking Canadian scientist in the field of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). After introducing Canada’s first MRI equipment to the Ontario Cancer Institute in the early 1980s, Dr Henkelman shifted his focus to the application of modern imaging technology to the diagnosis of cancer and other diseases, including spearheading the development of real-time MRI for use in neurosurgery.

Dr Ming Li – University of Waterloo – Engineering
Dr Li is one of a handful of internationally acclaimed computer scientists whose research has had major impacts outside his own discipline. His work is now finding new applications in computer science, bioinformatics, philosophy, physics and statistics. Dr Li is Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics at the University of Waterloo and currently serves as co-managing editor of the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

Dr Arthur McDonald – Queen’s University – Natural Sciences
Dr McDonald’s achievements in the areas of nuclear and particle physics span more than four decades. For the past 20 years, he has been the scientific and operational leader of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) project, a major experiment which has provided revolutionary insight into the properties of neutrinos and energy generation in the sun’s core. Now the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Dr McDonald holds a PhD from the California Institute of Technology.

Dr James Tully – University of Victoria – Humanities
Professor Tully is one of the foremost political theorists of our age and has made substantial contributions to scholarly research that have been illuminating and influential. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2000, he is a professor of political science, law, indigenous governance and philosophy at the University of Victoria.