July 20, 2006 Source: :
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin6/060720-2453.asp Sixteen elected to Royal Society of Canada
Faculty members receive highest Canadian academic accolade Each year the Royal Society of Canada, this country’s oldest and most prestigious scholarly organization, elects new fellows to its ranks and 16 U of T top faculty members are among the 82 outstanding scholars, scientists and artists elected this year. Named to the Academy of the Arts and Humanities is Professor Alan Bewell of English, Canada’s leading multidisciplinary scholar of British Romanticism. Joining the Academy of Social Sciences are Professors Ronald Beiner of political science at U of T at Mississauga, who ranks among Canada’s foremost political philosophers; Abdallah Daar of the Joint Centre for Bioethics, a leading international global health, science policy and bioethics scholar; Janet Polivy of psychology at U of T at Mississauga, whose research has made an important theoretical impact, revolutionizing research on dieting and human eating behaviour; and Mariana Valverde of the Centre of Criminology, an international leader in criminology and the sociology of law. Elected to the Academy of Sciences are Professors Jing Chen of geography, who invented a new theory and instrumentation for measuring vegetation structural parameters and pioneered techniques for retrieving these parameters from satellite observations; Joseph Culotti of medical genetics and microbiology, among Canada’s foremost geneticists and developmental neurobiologists; Lewis Kay of medical genetics and microbiology, internationally recognized as a leader in the development and application of NMR spectroscopic methods for the study of protein structure and dynamics; Hector Levesque of computer science, a foremost authority in the area of knowledge representation, the sub-area of computer science concerned with how ordinary, common-sense knowledge can be represented and used by computers; Andreas Mandelis of mechanical and industrial engineering, an expert in the development, shaping and applications of diffusion-wave sciences and associated technologies; and Pamela Ohashi of medical biophysics, an international scientific leader in the field of immunology. Also named to the Academy of Sciences are Professors Terence Picton of medicine, a major world figure in sensory and cognitive neuroscience; Stephen Scherer of medical genetics and microbiology, an internationally known geneticist making seminal contributions to the understanding of the human genome; Demetri Terzopoulos of computer science, an internationally renowned leader in the fields of computer vision and computer graphics; William Trimble of biochemistry, who has made important discoveries that help explain how cells in the brain communicate with each other; and Jeffrey Wrana of medical genetics and microbiology, who has made lasting contributions to our understanding of signal transduction. Founded in 1882, the society’s primary objective is to promote learning and research in the arts and sciences. The approximately 1,700 fellows are women and men from across the country who are selected by their peers for outstanding contributions to the natural and social sciences and in the humanities. The new fellows will be inducted at a ceremony to be held Nov. 19.
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