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Well I was fortunate enough to receive four book prizes for my book, Priests of Prosperity.
What I investigate in the book is how central bankers primarily in North America and western
Europe worked to try to transform the central banks of the post-communist world after the
collapse of communism.
What the awards have done for me?
At this point, is given my research a much broader platform than it would have received
otherwise.
I work on central banking, right - It's a topic that a lot of people are a little intimidated
by or think is somehow esoteric, but one of things I try to do in this book and one of
things I think the awards reflect, is that it's actually a topic that is of great importance
to all of us, and it doesn't need to be so unapproachable.
It's something that we all can understand and should as citizens, understand.
Prizes are something that people pay attention to, not just within academia but beyond, and
that's ultimately part of what we want to do is get the results of our work out beyond
our narrow communities.
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2017 was a good year for me, I won two prizes - the Cole Prize of the American
Mathematical Society and the CRM-Fields-PIMS prize.
My area of research is pure mathematics, more specifically number theory, which is a very
old branch of mathematics concerned with questions concerning the distribution of prime numbers,
polynomial equations in whole numbers.
Some of the questions that are essential to this subject have been around for a very long time,
as far back as the ancient Greeks in some cases.
My biggest advice would be to not take prizes and recognition too seriously.
It's not the primary goal of research, it's a kind of pleasant consequence when it happens.
Of course universities don't exist in a vacuum, they like to be accountable to society and
I think that prizes do serve that function of showcasing some of the good research
which is being done in the university.
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In 2017, I received two awards - one from the Canadian Cancer Research Society,
the Robert L. Noble Prize for excellence in basic biomedical cancer research.
I was also inducted into the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
My research is focused on understanding cancer at the basic mechanistic level, but translating
this to the clinic, and nowadays starting with the clinic and bringing it to the bench.
The award from the Canadian Cancer Society is a recognition of my lifetime's work, and
this is a recognition by my peers and these are important to me.
Prizes and awards are important for McGill because they recognize the excellence in research
at McGill University.
They recognize the leadership of researchers at McGill University and it places McGill
on the national and international stage.
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2017 was a really fantastic year for awards because the group got awarded
the Steacie Memorial Fellowship from NSERC, which is an award that's given to six researchers
across all of Canada, in all disciplines of science and engineering - so it's very competitive.
My research group's work is focusing on developing cleaner and safer chemistry, so called
"Green Chemistry."
Really, to put it in a nutshell, what we are trying to do is develop ways to conduct chemistry
that do not require any solvents at all.
The way we do it is by something that is called mechanochemistry, which is chemistry through
mechanical force, which is a very fancy way of saying "smashing" things together.
Getting an award like the Steacie Fellowship, it's a fantastic recognition of the work done
by the students and the post-docs in the group, but it's also a good way to recognize the
importance and the impact of different initiatives that are taking place at the university.
It allows my institution to become more visible, to play a more significant role in creating
future policies.
It's all around recognition.
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