Prizes

U of T's Peter St George-Hyslop wins leading Alzheimer’s research prize

ullahnor — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 11:44:11 +0000

U of T's Peter St George-Hyslop wins leading Alzheimer’s research prize

ullahnor Wed, 08/09/2017 - 07:44

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New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English (left), University Professor Peter St George-Hyslop (centre) and Ryman Prize juror Dr. Naoko Muramatsu (right) at the 2017 Ryman Prize ceremony in Wellington, New Zealand (photo courtesy of Ryman Healthcare)

Heidi Singer

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St George-Hyslop

Peter St George-Hyslop, one of the world’s top neurodegenerative disease researchers, has won the 2017 Ryman Prize in recognition of his more than 30 years of groundbreaking research into the causes of Alzheimer’s disease.

The prize was awarded by an international jury of academic researchers and announced Aug. 9 by New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English at a ceremony in Wellington, New Zealand.

The honour “signifies a sea-change in how society perceives disorders affecting the health and well-being of their older members,” said St George-Hyslop, director of the Faculty of Medicine’s Tanz Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases. “It signals a growing understanding of the urgency of getting to grips with these increasingly common, devastating conditions that impact not only those individuals affected by them but also their family and their caregivers, and the state in which they live.”

St George-Hyslop has been cited by other researchers more than 33,000 times for discovering key genes and proteins that cause cells to degenerate in diseases such as early onset Alzheimer’s disease. He showed conclusively that Alzheimer’s is caused by a variety of factors, genetic and non-genetic, an observation that has since profoundly influenced research. In 2003, he was appointed University Professor, U of T’s highest rank.

Read: St George-Hyslop receives Dan David Prize

Read: St George-Hyslop receives BIAL Award in Medical Sciences

“We’re incredibly proud that U of T Professor Peter St George-Hyslop has won the 2017 Ryman Prize, which is awarded by the Ryman Foundation to researchers whose work is enhancing the quality of life for older people around the world,” said Vivek Goel, vice-president of research and innovation. “He is an outstanding physician-scientist whose work in the field of neurodegenerative disease has led to several groundbreaking discoveries, including understanding the genetics of Alzheimer’s.”

Professor Trevor Young, dean of the Faculty of Medicine, called the honour “well deserved.”

“It’s a pleasure to see Dr. St George-Hyslop’s achievements recognized with the Ryman Prize,” Young said. “For more than 30 years, his work has advanced research on Alzheimer’s disease and sought to enhance the quality of life for older people.”

In his acceptance speech, St George-Hyslop described a lifelong fascination with Alzheimer’s that began when he was a medical student in the 1970s and saw his first case of the tragic disease. As a researcher, he took an “outside the box” approach to discovery, which wasn’t always rewarded.

“We decided early on that using the then emerging recombinant DNA technology to hunt down genes causing the disorder would be productive. And it has been. But at the beginning, it was widely debunked,” he said. “The prize nicely underscores that other people think that ‘outside the box approach’ was a good idea.”

Ryman Prize juror Dr. Naoko Muramatsu said St George-Hyslop’s research had led to a much better understanding of neurodegenerative diseases.

“Since the mid-1980s he has carried out pioneering research in a field which was little understood. Millions of people around the world have Alzheimer’s and Peter’s research has had a profound influence on its understanding, and the ability to diagnose and treat it. He thoroughly deserves this award for his many decades of commitment to scientific discovery, teaching and sheer hard work.”

Born in Kenya, St George-Hyslop was educated in the United Kingdom and in Canada. He divides his time currently between laboratories at U of T and at the University of Cambridge.

The Ryman Prize rewards the best work in the world that has enhanced quality of life for older people. It is the world’s richest prize of its type and was established to create the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for people working in the field of the health of older people.

Rosemary Sullivan wins RBC Taylor Prize

sgupta — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 14:00:29 +0000

Rosemary Sullivan wins RBC Taylor Prize sgupta Tue, 03/08/2016 - 09:00

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Latest of many awards for “Stalin's Daughter” author

�ؿ�ζSM Professor Emerita Rosemary Sullivan has won the prestigious RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction for Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.

A professor of English and a noted critic, poet and biographer, Sullivan beat out several others for the $25,000 prize, which was awarded by a jury consisting of Susanne Boyce, Joseph Kertes and Munk School of Global Affairs Director Stephen J. Toope.

Sullivan will be invited to read at the International Festival of Authors, held in October at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto and will receive promotional support for her book, as part of the award package. Sullivan has also won the Hilary Weston Prize and the BC National Book Award for her biography of the daughter of former USSR dictator Josef Stalin.

Last October, Diana Kuprel, a writer with the Faculty of Arts & Science, interviewed Sullivan for U of T News. That interview, and an audio excerpt from Stalin’s Daughter, can be found here.

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Polanyi Prize goes to U of T researcher for his work on more efficient solar materials

sgupta — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 12:57:54 +0000

Polanyi Prize goes to U of T researcher for his work on more efficient solar materials sgupta Tue, 11/17/2015 - 07:57

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(photo by Marit Mitchell)

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Engineering postdoc one of five recognized as outstanding Ontario researchers in early states of their careers

Riccardo Comin, a postdoctoral fellow in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, has won the 2015 John Charles Polanyi Prize for Physics for his research into a rapidly emerging new class of materials, called perovskites, for more efficient solar cells and lighting.

The Polanyi Prizes are given annually to outstanding researchers in the early stages of their careers. The prizes, worth $20,000 each, are awarded in five areas: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economic science. Comin is the only recipient from the �ؿ�ζSM this year. (Read about some of U of T's previous Polanyi Prize winners.)

“By scientific upbringing, I’m a solid state physicist,” said Comin. “I take new compounds, films or crystals, crafted by chemists, and I analyze them to figure out what’s special about those materials.”

Comin’s work, under the direction of Professor Ted Sargent, is to investigate the mysterious properties of a very special family of hybrid organic-inorganic materials called perovskites. Perovskites show great promise for a range of applications, from more efficient LED technologies to high-efficiency flexible and lightweight solar cells.

Read more about Comin’s recent work, published in the journals Science and Nature:

“My work in the Sargent Group has been to explore various key characteristics of perovskites, including their chemical composition, crystalline structure, and electronic structure,” said Comin. “Thanks to the Polanyi Prize, I plan to expand my work into using x-ray methods to look at the collective phenomena involving the reorientation of the organic molecules embedded in the inorganic crystalline structure of these hybrid materials.”

Comin earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Universita degli Studi di Trieste in Italy, both in physics. He completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Andrea Damascelli, where he worked on characterizing quantum materials. When he joined the Sargent Group for his postdoctoral fellowship, he was ready to take a more applied approach to his research.

“I’d done a lot of fundamental materials science, and I was thinking, ‘What are the strategies and processes involved in harnessing and functionalizing the material properties that are key for devices that realize solar, imaging or lighting applications?’” he said “Here, we’re trying not just to develop high-quality materials, but also to combine them into device architectures that use the best properties of these materials. Ultimately, the metric for the quality of the work is the efficiency and performance of our devices.”

The John Charles Polanyi prize was created in honour of the achievement of John Charles Polanyi, recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and a professor in the �ؿ�ζSM’s department of chemistry.

“My congratulations to Riccardo, who is doing exceptional research,” said Professor Sargent, vice-dean, research for the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, and Comin’s supervisor.

“It’s particularly wonderful to see him honoured with this award, named after one of the greatest investigators in the �ؿ�ζSM’s long history.”

Learn more about the other 2015 John Charles Polanyi winners

Marit Mitchell is a writer with the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at the �ؿ�ζSM

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Rosemary Sullivan awarded Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

sgupta — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 11:56:13 +0000

Rosemary Sullivan awarded Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction sgupta Wed, 10/07/2015 - 07:56

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A Q & A with the celebrated author

Rosemary Sullivan, the �ؿ�ζSM professor emerita of English and celebrated critic, poet and biographer, has won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

The $60,000 award, one of the most prestigious in the country, goes to Sullivan’s latest book, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Published earlier this year to critical acclaim, the book tells the astonishing story of a woman fated to live in the shadow of one of history’s most monstrous dictators.

The prize is the latest in a series of accolades for Sullivan’s work. Her first collection of poetry, The Space a Name Makes (1986), was awarded the Gerald Lampert Award. Her biography of Gwendolyn MacEwen, Shadow Maker (1995), won the Governor General's Award. She was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2012 for her outstanding contributions to Canadian literature and culture.

On November 1, Sullivan is appearing at the International Festival of Authors, where she will be in conversation with U of T alumna Anne Michaels; they will be joined onstage by Chrese, Svetlana’s daughter, in a rare public appearance.

Listen to an excerpt from Stalin's Daughter on the Faculty of Arts and Science Planet artsci podcast below:

Diana Kuprel, a writer with the Faculty of Arts & Science, interviewed Sullivan.

What inspired you to write a literary biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva, otherwise known as Stalin’s daughter?

When the obituaries of Lana Peters (aka Svetlana Alliluyeva) began to appear in November 2011, I was intrigued by her quoted words: “No matter where I go, to Australia, to some island, I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name.” What would it be like to live in the shadow of such a name? She was also quoted as saying: “You can’t regret your life, but I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.” To range from tragedy to humour! Who would this woman turn out to be? I talked with my editor at HarperCollins, NY, and she gave me seven days to write a proposal; it was accepted immediately.

I have always been fascinated by Russia – I first visited in 1979 in the Brezhnev era. I knew this would have to be a book focused on a woman’s life, but in the background would be the most tragic events of the 20th century: from Stalin’s Terror and his postwar anti-Semitic campaigns, to the Cold War and up to current Russian politics.

Your research is prodigious, including interviews, Alliluyeva’s own letters, the contents of CIA, KGB and Soviet archives – and your journey took you across three continents. Can you describe what was involved?

I began my research by contacting two people: Svetlana’s American daughter and Robert Rayle, the CIA officer who escorted her out of India. Chrese gave me permission to quote from her mother’s published and unpublished manuscripts and letters, and Rayle gave me his unpublished account of Svetlana’s defection as well as copies of several hundred letters she had written to the Rayles over the years. Once I had their cooperation, I knew I had a book.

I contacted Lynne Viola, a U of T historian, to ask for her recommendations about Russian-speaking research assistants. She was wonderfully generous and put me in touch with my brilliant young researcher, Anastassia. Then came the collecting of material under FIOA. The FBI files had just been released; there were troves of material at the Yale and Princeton libraries. My US research assistant, Sim, found me an invaluable collection of Svetlana’s papers at the Hoover Institute, which included some authentic KGB documents. Each time I met someone, the circle of people I had to interview widened.

People, including Stalin’s relatives, were very willing to talk with me and to give me copies of their correspondence with Svetlana. They wanted the real story told. When I’d finished the book, I asked Lynne to read it to correct any inaccuracies I might have made in the historical backdrop; she was wonderfully generous with her time.

It turned out this was the right moment to write this story. Several of the people I interviewed have, sadly, since died. It was an honour to meet them.

Svetlana seems to be different to every person with whom she came in contact – or rather, each person cast upon her their own interpretation of who she was. Who, for you, is the ‘real Svetlana’?

This would seem to suggest she was unstable, as she was often portrayed in the US. But she only “changed her identity” once. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, she assumed her mother’s name Alliluyeva, which was a common practice in the US. She did say the name Stalina felt like steel in her mouth. In 1970, she married Wesley Peters and legally became Mrs. Lana Peters, the name she kept for the rest of her life. But yes, she was on the receiving end of people’s projections, though, as the Dowager Lady Pamela Egremont told me, Svetlana herself was solid as a rock.

Svetlana was a writer at a time when “Soviet officialdom believed books were bombs”. This is something she understood well. Do you think her contemporaries in the West understood or appreciated this? What power can books today wield?

It is a strange irony that under any repressive political system, literature often flourishes because it is driven by a moral imperative to break the silence. So many writers wrote “for the drawer,” as they said in the USSR, and circulated their manuscripts as samizdat. Literature was a matter of life or death. The price is high – I think of Sinyavsky sentenced to seven years in the labour camps as late as 1966 for allowing his work to be published in the West. The regimes are always afraid of books, of writers who can touch the heart of a people. Most of the masterpieces of Latin American literature were written by writers exiled from their countries.

In the West, alas, books are often seen as a commodity. I doubt that Svetlana understood this. Selling her memoir for $1.5 million in 1967 had no meaning for her. As a Soviet, she did not understand the concept of money and lost most of it. And I wonder if, since 1967 when she defected, things have only gotten worse. Often the books that achieve prominence are self-help books, or formula novels, which get the publicity departments of publishing houses behind them. But this may be an exaggeration: books will always be read, and they do have an impact.

What reception do you think your biography will have in the former Soviet Union?

Russian rights were sold early on for a modest sum. Someone wanted to know the story. Because I quote Svetlana’s correspondence after 1999, in which she warns friends that the election of a former KGB colonel would inevitably mean the development of a parallel government run by the FSB, the secret service, and was very critical of President Putin’s echoing her father’s cult of personality, there may be problems. According to the historian Stephen Cohen, modern Russian is split 50/50 on their response to Stalin, whose memory is still very much alive. Perhaps the reception of my book in Russia will follow the same lines.

What does Svetlana’s story tell us – in Western democratic countries – about our own society and what we should take heed of?

Perhaps one of the surprises of my research was to discover that the US State Department initially refused Svetlana political asylum when she defected. My book opens with the cloak and dagger intrigue of her flight from India in March 1967. I suppose what we may learn from Svetlana’s story is that power structures control our lives in ways that we do not imagine. We think these are abstract matters, but in fact, political power structures are created by the personalities of the people who run them. Svetlana was a brilliant reader of the subtext of politics, which is why she detested politics.

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