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Exceptional performance and reputation across a breadth of disciplines
The University of Toronto is a world-leader in research and innovation and is Canada’s pre-eminent research- and innovation-intensive university. Internationally, we are one of only a select few of institutions that excel across a broad range of disciplines, and our faculty are highly successful in securing prestigious national and international awards and honours.
The extraordinary breadth and depth of academic excellence across our three campuses and nine partner hospitals is reflected in the local, national and global impact of their research. Our impressive performance is a reflection of the excellence of our faculty, our graduate and undergraduate students and their collaborations with leading researchers and institutions world-wide, as well as our strong partnered research.
University-Community Engagement
Collaborative care with the City of Barrie
Faculty from the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation have partnered with the City of Barrie, the Barrie Community Family Health Team and Family Health Organization, and the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit to undertake the Healthy Barrie project, a collaborative effort to enhance integration and collaboration between healthcare services and professionals in order to place the focus on the patient and improve community health and the sustainability of the local health system.
In March 2016 Judith Andersen, an assistant professor in the
A desire to address a major worldwide health concern was the motivation behind the development of a double-fortified salt (iodine and iron) by Professor Levente Diosady and his team in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. According to the World Health Organization, iron deficiency is currently the most common and widespread nutritional disorder in the world, affecting more than two billion people, and it is a major contributor to maternal mortality.
University of Toronto faculty, librarians and students are working with the Internet Archive's End of Term project to help preserve at-risk U.S. government websites with plans to capture crucial scientific and environmental websites before they vanish. This push to preserve information before the incoming Trump administration took control of U.S. federal agencies spurred a full-day “Guerrilla Archiving Event: Saving Environmental Data from Trump” hackathon, which took place on December 17 at the Faculty of Information.
Together with experts from seven other leading research institutions, Professor Keith Pardee of the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy developed a cheap, fast and easy way to detect the Zika virus using a freeze-dried piece of paper the size of a stamp, which will help curb the spread of disease and lessen the burden on already overtaxed healthcare systems worldwide.
As part of his job as a research assistant for
Awards Leader
Although
The calibre of
The deep expertise of our faculty members is also reflected in the frequency with which they are appointed to national advisory bodies in Canada and elsewhere for scholarly and scientific matters. In addition to 25 new fellows named to Canada’s three national academies, U of T’s new honourees include a fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Society and international members of the U.S. National Academies of Engineering, Medicine, and Sciences.
University of Toronto researcher wins “Nobel of Neuroscience
Graham Collingridge (Department of Physiology) won the Brain Prize, the “Nobel of neuroscience,” together with Tim Bliss and Richard Morris of the University of Edinburgh. The award is €1 million, the world’s richest prize for brain research. Professor Collingridge’s research focuses on the brain mechanism known as long-term potentiation (LTP) that underpins the lifelong plasticity of the brain.
Collingridge’s discoveries are particularly important in the efforts to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s. His work has contributed to a medication that temporarily slows down the progression of the disease.
Sullivan is first Canadian author to win Plutarch Award
Rosemary Sullivan (Department of English) won the Plutarch Award from the Biographers International Organization for her acclaimed biography, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Sullivan was selected by a committee of distinguished biographers from a list of 10 nominees. The Plutarch Award is the only international literary award presented to a biographer, by biographers.
Sullivan is the first Canadian author to win the award since its inception in 2013. Stalin’s Daughter has also won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, the RBC Taylor Prize, and British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
Professor’s Research Makes (Gravitational) Waves
Harald Pfeiffer (Department of Physics/Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics) won the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award honours Professor Pfeiffer’s outstanding research record, and invites him to a long-term research stay in Germany. Pfeiffer was also part of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) scientific collaboration, a group of more than 1,000 scientists from universities in the United States and 14 other countries. The collaboration was recognized by a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the Gruber Prize in Cosmology for their detection of gravitational waves.
Chemistry professor receives World Technology Award
Geoffrey Ozin (Department of Chemistry) received the World Technology Award in energy for his pioneering contributions to the field of nanochemistry. These contributions have defined, enabled and popularized a chemical approach to nanomaterials, a cornerstone of modern chemistry and a foundation for nanotechnology in advanced materials and biomedical science.
Royal Society of Canada honours career contributions in critical literature
Linda Hutcheon (Department of English) received the 2016 Lorne Pierce Medal from the Royal Society of Canada for achievements in critical literature that have transformed the understanding of Canadian writing and culture.
Statistical science researcher recognized with US, UK honours
For her outstanding work in statistical sciences, Nancy Reid (Department of Statistical Sciences) was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in the United States as a Foreign Associate. She also won the Royal Statistical Society’s Guy Medal in Silver for her ground-breaking paper “Parameter Orthogonality and Approximate Conditional Inference,” written jointly with Sir David Cox of Oxford University. The award also recognises her many other important contributions to statistical theory and methodology, as well as her outstanding leadership of, and service to, the statistical research community.
The Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program enables
Shelley Craig
CRC in Sexual and Gender Minority Youth, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work
Professor Craig is working on digitizing and pilot testing smartphone-enabled coping skills designed to improve the resiliency of the country’s estimated half-a-million sexual and gender minority youth and help them thrive.
Marianne Hatzopoulou
CRC in Transportation and Air Quality, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering
Professor Hatzopoulou will be collecting and analyzing air pollution data from pedestrians and cyclists kitted out with sensors fitted with GPS units. The results will provide essential information to policy makers, allowing them to design transportation infrastructure that can minimize the impact of traffic on air quality.
Ito Peng
CRC in Global Social Policy, School of Public Policy and Governance, Faculty of Arts and Science
Professor Peng is studying policies in North America, Asia, Oceania and Europe to examine broad theoretical issues around how care and immigration policies are informed by societal and cultural norms, expectations and trends, and how these policies, in turn, help to influence these same societal and cultural norms and trends.
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