5 top Canadian researchers win bright-idea awards

The Canada Council Killam Prize has been dubbed “Canada’s Nobel.” Five top-of-their-game researchers receive $100,000 each and are celebrated for their innovative work that pushes boundaries, challenges assumptions and inspires new ways of thinking about the world.

This year’s crop of winners covers everything from innovations in breast cancer screening to literary theory. The awards were presented by Gov. Gen. David Johnston at Rideau Hall on May 3.

Elizabeth Edwards, engineering

Microbes that can fight toxic waste 

(Killam)

“You want to make a difference somehow — that’s what drives me,” says Prof. Edwards at her lab at the University of Toronto.

She uncovers how microbes can be used to help clean up toxic waste in soil and groundwater. With 22,000 contaminated or suspected contaminated sites on federal land alone, Edwards’ innovations can contribute to the cleanup.

Daniel Trefler, social sciences

What medieval Venice can teach us about economic policy 

(Killam)

“There are many lessons we can take from the rise and fall of medieval Venice,” says Prof. Trefler. He is the Canada Research Chair in Competitiveness and Prosperity at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and is known for his support of NAFTA and for his expertise in international trade policy.

He warns that the growing concentration of wealth and power we’ve seen since the 1960s, a trend that has accelerated since 2008, can harm the institutions that make a society strong.

Axel Becke, natural sciences

Creating a chemistry lab on a computer 

(NSERC)

“I’ve always thought of myself as a creative artist. My approach to science is to seek out simplicity,” says Prof. Becke, chemistry professor emeritus at Dalhousie University.

His intuition that drives his research, and he does his best to avoid long, complicated mathematical formulas. His intuition led him to great leaps in an area of computational quantum mechanical modelling called density functional theory, which he calls the “theory of everything around us.”

Basically, it predicts the movement of electrons in any kind of molecule when it comes in contact with any other kind of molecule. And those predictions can all be done on a computer. The British scientific journal Nature ranked two of Becke’s papers as the eighth and 25th most-cited scientific papers of all time.

“It’s a way of simulating chemistry on computers,” says Becke. “So you can imagine the possibilities are endless.”

Isabelle Daunais, humanities

Nothing happens in Québécois novels, and that’s OK 

(Killam)

“Quebec is a place where things change very slowly and never quite profoundly,” says Prof. Daunais, Canada Research Chair in the Aesthetics and Art of the Novel at McGill University.

While she is celebrated internationally for her work on French realist writing, she’s recently turned her attention to figuring out why Quebec novels don’t travel well outside the province. And she argues it comes down to the fact that nothing really happens in the novels, reflecting a fairly calm and unchanging society.

“I expected there to be more controversy around my work,” she says.

Steven Narod, health sciences

Breast cancer research that challenges assumptions 

(Killam)

“We have to spend a lot of time now asking fundamental questions,” says Dr. Narod, who is one of the world’s foremost breast cancer researchers with over 700 publications. He is based at Women’s College Hospital at the University of Toronto, where he is the Canada Research Chair in Breast Cancer.

Dr. Narod’s thorough research can sometimes span decades, and the results sometimes go against the grain of standard medical assumptions. For example, this 2015 study analyzed the medical records of 100,000 women with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). It found that women who undergo single or double mastectomies or radiation as treatment do not appear to be increasing their chances of survival.

“I’ve been in a fortunate position with the university where they support this kind of freedom of thought,” says Dr. Narod, acknowledging that not every researcher has that luxury.