2019 Gairdner and Killam awards announced

Laureates for the prestigious Gairdner and Killam awards have been announced for 2019. This year marks the 60th anniversary for the Gairdner awards, the world’s most significant biomedical research award that comes with a $100,000 cash honorarium.

The winners were announced Apr. 2, 2019 at the Toronto Reference Library and a formal presentation of awards will take place Oct. 24, 2019.

The 2019 Canada Gairdner International Award for seminal discoveries or contributions to biomedical science was awarded to the following five recipients:

Susan Band Horwitz “for defining novel mechanisms of action and resistance of drugs of natural product origin, most significantly Taxol®, and promoting their use for treatment of cancer”.

Ronald Vale “for the landmark discovery of the motor protein kinesin and pioneering the understanding of its mechanism of action in driving cellular movement processes including cell division and intracellular transport”.

Timothy A. Springer “for discovery of the first immune system adhesion molecules, elucidation of their roles in antigen recognition and leukocyte homing, and translation of these discoveries into therapeutics for autoimmune diseases”.

Bruce Stillman and John F. X. Diffley “for their pioneering research on the eukaryotic DNA replication cycles including initiation, regulation and responses to DNA damage”.

The 2019 John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award for outstanding achievements in global health research was awarded to Vikram Patel “for his world-leading research in global mental health, generating knowledge on the burden and determinants of mental health problems in low- and middle-income countries and pioneering approaches for the prevention and treatment of mental health in low-resource settings”.

The 2019 Canada Gairdner Wightman Award for a Canadian scientist exhibiting outstanding leadership in medicine and medical science throughout their career was awarded to Connie Jean Eaves “for her pioneering work and leadership in the study of hematopoietic, mammary and cancer stem cells and her dedicated advocacy for early- career investigators and women in science”.

The Killam Awards, established in 1967 and awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts, also grant laureates a prize of $100,000 each. The award recognizes the career achievements of eminent Canadian scholars and scientists actively engaged in research in industry, government agencies or universities.

The 2019 Killam Award winners are:

In natural sciences, Yoshua Bengio, a deep-learning pioneer from the Université de Montréal, considered one of the world’s foremost experts in artificial intelligence.

André Blais, Université de Montréal, for social sciences. Blais is a worldwide expert in electoral studies and has examined the behaviour of parties and electors in 25 elections across five countries.

In engineering, Keith W. Hipel, University of Waterloo, for his global interdisciplinary research from a systems engineering perspective on the development of conflict resolution, multiple criteria decision analysis, time series modelling and other decision-making methodologies for addressing complex system-of-systems problems.

Stephen W. Scherer, University of Toronto, for health sciences. Through his research at The Hospital for Sick Children, Scherer has revolutionized our understanding of the human genome and contributed ground breaking insight into disease mechanisms and evolution when his group co-discovered gene copy number variation as a common type of variation in DNA.

Lynne Viola, University of Toronto, for her work in the humanities as a leading scholar of Soviet Union history. She is recognized around the world as the premier archival researcher of the Stalinist era with a research focus on the mass repression in the 1930s.

Nominees for 2020 Gairdner and Killam award recipients are now open. Deadlines for nominees are October 1, 2019, and June 15, 2019, respectively.

from left to right: keith W. hipel, André blais, lynne viola, yoshua bengio, stephen W. scherer