Dr John Polanyi

Dr John Polanyi has been awarded the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). Polanyi was chosen for the award — which provides $1 million in research funding over five years –— for his research into chemical lasers which led to his sharing the 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Drs Yuan Lee and Dudley Herschbach. Born in Berlin, he emigrated to Canada in 1952 to work for the National Research Council and joined the Univ of Toronto in 1956 where he has remained. He currently leads research into surface aligned photochemistry. Finalists for the Herzberg Medal were Dr Graham Bell (McGill Univ), an evolutionary biologist and a pioneer in the use of experimental methods to study the evolution of microbial populations in real time, and Dr Gilles Brassard (Univ of Montreal), a computer science researcher credited with discovering quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation. The finalists receive $50,000 research grants. Polanyi and Bell also received the NSERC Award of Excellence....