Prestigious 2022 Killam Prize recognizes Dalhousie researchers

Two researchers from Dalhousie University in Halifax, have won Canada’s top award for research excellence, the $100,000 Killam Prize. Françoise Baylis is a leading voice in human genome editing for reproduction, and Jeff Dahn is a major force in battery science creating urgently needed sustainable energy solutions.

As one of the world’s leading bioethicists, Françoise Baylis says that using her platform as an academic to raise awareness about injustice has been a driving force of her career.

“At one time I thought I could change the world—and then I grew up. I realized the most I could hope for is to influence people who have a whole lot more power than me. It was an important reframing of what my contribution could be—and that’s to make the powerful care,” said Baylis, who was the Canada Research Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy for 14 years.

Making people care is the mantra that she says pushes her to weigh in on some of the world’s most hotly contested issues. Most recently, it has taken her into a leading role in the debate about the ethics of using human-genome editing for reproduction.

“People seem to think that the only question is whether the science is safe and effective,” she says. “But that doesn’t answer the more important question of what kind of world we want to live in. That isn’t a question about facts; it’s a question about values.”

In 2019, she became a member of the WHO Advisory Committee on Developing Global Standards for Governance and Oversight of Human Genome Editing. Currently, she is a member of the planning committee for the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing scheduled for 2023. In 2020, she won the PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine for her book Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing It’s one of 18 other books, 100 peerreviewed articles and more than 40 expert testimony appearances and briefs for the Canadian federal government. She is a member of both the Order of Canada and the Order of Nova Scotia, and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. In 2017, she was awarded the Canadian Bioethics Society Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2021 she was elected to the Governing Board of the International Science Council.

Building a bigger, better battery has driven Jeff Dahn’s research for the last 40 years. A global expert in lithium-ion batteries, Dahn’s pioneering research has driven innovation in the field and helped create the science necessary for lithium-ion batteries to become a preferred power source for such things as portable electronic devices and electric vehicles. Now, he is focused on building the technology to make the batteries last even longer, possibly even

In 2019, Dahn was awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s prestigious Henry Marshall Tory Medal for outstanding research. And in 2020, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Two spinoff companies have come out of his Dalhousie lab: DPM Solutions, a supplier of custom-designed machine solutions, and Novonix, a battery and technology company that brings better battery technology to market rapidly. It produces and sells high-precision battery test equipment and synthetic graphite for use in lithium-ion batteries. Dahn says he will use his Killam Prize to support the Jeff Dahn Bursary in Physics, and to aid a new start-up from his lab, Zen Electric Bikes.

Window on marine ecosystem health

FRANÇOISE BAYLIS

JEFF DAHN

Photo credit: Nick Pearce for decades.

“Over the years, we have made many useful contributions in all areas of lithium-ion battery technology, ranging from faster charge, higher energy density, improved safety and most recently, longer lifetime,” said Dahn, referencing the work of his lab at Dalhousie. “Positive electrode materials that were actually invented in the labs of Dalhousie are used in some lithium-ion batteries today.”

Dahn’s work has covered fundamental physics in insertion compounds, as well as technical engineering issues in batteries.

“The lithium-ion battery is a multidisciplinary puzzle,” he explains. “There is lots of great science to do with a huge payback to society. I have been in the game since the beginning and have witnessed lithium-ion batteries take over and dominate so many different markets.”

Dahn has co-authored over 750 refereed journal papers and has coinvented 73 inventions with patents issued or filed. He is a winner of both research and technology awards of the Battery Division of the Electrochemical Society. In 2017, he received the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council’s Herzberg Canada Gold Medal—Canada’s top science prize.

Scientists at Simon Fraser University have developed a new science-based indicator that measures oceanic biodiversity to help with marine management. While loss of species, ecosystems and genetic diversity on land is documented, the extent to which these patterns appear in the oceans is not yet known. The researchers examined seven decades of records on the extinction risk of predatory fishes including 52 populations of 18 different species of tuna, billfish and sharks. They found that since the 1950s the global extinction risk of oceanic predatory fishes, particularly sharks, has continuously worsened due to excessive fishing pressure until the late 2000s.

New biomanufacturing training centre opens

The Canadian Alliance for Skills and Training in Life Sciences has officially opened their new biomanufacturing training facility in Charlottetown. Equipped with laboratories and classrooms, the new centre contains state-of-the-art pilot-scale bioprocessing equipment that will allow employees to gain practical skills that are immediately transferable to process, scale-up and clean room environments.