From the tender age of five, all Hans Larsson ever wanted to be was a vertebrate paleontologist. He devoured dinosaur books and pestered his parents into summer camping trips in the fossil-rich Alberta badlands—which is how a 14-year-old Larsson ended up meeting paleontology legend Philip Currie. Currie was impressed by this enthusiastic kid and gave him two pieces of advice: keep pursuing scientific study, and go to McGill. Larsson did both.
McGill University has a strong track record of industry collaboration—in fact, the cover story of this issue of Headway looks at some of the outstanding research that has led to many successful, life-improving ventures—but we know there’s much more work to be done.
A new endowed chair aims to strengthen the already deep relationship between McGill researchers and the aerospace industry. Stephen Yue, a professor in the Department of Mining and Materials Engineering, works with cold-spray manufacturing, a new process that creates aerospace parts by building up layers of metal powder — a far less wasteful process than traditional machining methods.
The Canada Council awards the annual Killam Prizes to distinguished Canadian scholars in the fields of health sciences, natural sciences, engineering, social sciences and humanities. Five $100,000 prizes are awarded each year—one in each field—and on May 11, McGill researchers took home three of them.
McGill is thrilled about its double success in the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies’ October 2008 Strategic Cluster competition.
They show no symptoms. They’re not contagious. But one-third of the world’s population (according to World Health Organization estimates) carries the latent form of tuberculosis—meaning they can develop the active form at any time.
On April 23, 2009, Raymond Bachand, Quebec’s Minister of Finance and Minister of Economic Development, Innovation and Foreign Trade, announced $3,458,000 to fund 17 international research projects. McGill University researchers are leading six of the projects.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Proof of Principle program is designed to advance discoveries toward commercializable technologies, with a view to attracting new investment and creating new science-based businesses. In the latest round of funding, McGill researchers were successful in all of their applications, receiving five of the 12 “Phase 1” grants.
After 15 years of wildly mixed results from colloidal quantum dot light-amplification experiments, many researchers were convinced that some unknown law of physics was stymieing their efforts to drive forward telecommunications technology. Now Patanjali Kambhampati begs to differ.
Each year, a jury of researchers and science journalists selects Québec Science magazine’s top 10 discoveries of the year. Then readers vote on their single favourite—and the 2008 top honour goes to Dr. Janusz Rak and his team for their discovery of a new way that tumour cells communicate.
