Killam Prizes for 2004 are announced

Ottawa, ON – May 3, 2004 – Five prominent scholars in the fields of natural sciences, philosophy, music, health sciences and geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineeering will be honoured with the 2004 Killam prizes, Canada’s most distinguished annual awards for outstanding career achievements in engineering, natural sciences, health sciences, social sciences and humanities.

The awards to James Arthur, Janet Rossant, R Kerry Rowe ,Will Kymlicka, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez were announced today by the Canada Council for the Arts, which administers the Killam program.

The Killam Prizes, inaugurated in 1981, are financed through funds donated to the Canada Council by Mrs Dorothy J Killam in memory of her husband, Izaak Walton Killam. The prizes were created to honour eminent Canadian scholars and scientists actively engaged in research, whether in industry, government agencies or universities.

This year’s prizes will be presented at a ceremony on Wednesday, June 2 in Toronto.

James G Arthur at the University of Toronto won in the natural sciences category. He is regarded as one of the leading mathematicians in the world in the fields of representation theory and automorphic forms. He is specifically interested the Langlands programme – a blueprint for relating arithmetic and algebra with analysis and spectral theory.

Born in Toronto, Dr Arthur received his BSc and MSc from the University of Toronto. He received his PhD from Yale University. He then spent nine years at Princeton, Yale, and Duke universities, and returned to the University of Toronto in 1979 as professor.

Janet Rossant, who is with the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital and the University of Toronto, won in the health sciences category. Her research interests centre on understanding the genetic control of normal and abnormal development in the early mouse embryo using both cellular and genetic manipulation techniques. Recently, her research has moved in two new directions: stem cell research, with her discovery of a novel placental stem cell type, the trophoblast stem cell, and genome-wide functional genomics. She directs the Centre for Modelling Human Disease in Toronto, which is undertaking genome-wide mutagenesis in mice to develop new mouse models of human disease.

Dr Rossant trained at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and has been in Canada since 1977, first at Brock University and then in Toronto. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada and a Distinguished Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

R Kerry Rowe of Queen’s University won in the engineering category. Dr Rowe is professor of civil engineering and vice-principal (research) at Queen’s University. He received his BSc (computer science), BE in civil engineering and his PhD in geotechnical engineering from the University of Sydney. He was awarded a DEng in recognition of outstanding contributions to geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering from the University of Sydney. Author of more than 350 publications, including more than 150 refereed journal papers and three books, he has extensive research and consulting experience in the geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering field. His expertise spans several areas, from hydrogeology to soil reinforcement, geosynthetics and waste management and containment.

Will Kymlicka of Queen’s University won in the social sciences category. A professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, he holds the Canada Research Chair in political philosophy and is a recurrent visiting professor in the Nationalism Studies program at the Central European University in Budapest.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez of the Universit de Montral won in the humanities category. A pioneer in the branch of musicology (the scientific study of music) known as musical semiology, he has been at the Universit de Montral since 1970 and has been a professor of musicology at the Faculty of Music since 1972.