Exceptional scholars celebrated with prestigious Killam Awards

Research and leadership excellence recognized for faculty, postdocs and doctoral students

Every year, one of UCalgary’s most prestigious awards celebrates excellence in research and leadership. Recipients of this year’s Killam Awards are no exception. From geoscience, parents’ mental health, preventing sports injuries, and fighting cancer with the microbiome to using literature to bring Jews and Palestinians closer, there’s exceptional scholarship, teaching, and mentorship in almost every field.

Melanie Noel

University of Calgary Archives

This year’s awards, presented in a virtual ceremony on Oct. 14, celebrated the creation of a Killam Memorial Emerging Leader Chair. The traditional Killam Memorial Chair focused on scholars in the sciences or engineering, but the new chair, intended to honour early-career scholars, is open to every discipline. The inaugural recipient, Dr. Melanie Noel, PhD, received her award in the spring.

The Killam Awards were established in 1965 by Dorothy J. Killam to honour her late husband, Izaak Walton Killam. They are Canada’s largest private endowment for higher education and recognize exceptional scholars at only five universities.

President Ed McCauley

“The University of Calgary is honoured to be among such a select number of universities able to continue the Killam legacy with the Killam Awards,” said Dr. Ed McCauley, president and vice-chancellor. “And every year, I am taken with the extraordinary calibre of their recipients’ research and teaching. Their achievements are worthy of such a prestigious recognition and I congratulate them all.”

The recipient of the Killam Graduate Supervision and Mentorship Award, Dr. Jeff Dunn, PhD, of the Cumming School of Medicine, recalls a custodian enjoying his class. “I foster an idea generation culture,” he said. “We bandy ideas around like balls in a dodgeball game. I was amused when, during a planning session, a custodian was listening. They later approached me and said it sounded like an episode of the TV medical show House.”

Kathy McCoy

Dr. Kathy McCoy, PhD, holder of the Killam Memorial Chair, explained that it will “provide me with the flexibility and security to perform exciting and innovative research over the next five years. I hope to explore new questions and generate preliminary data that can be leveraged to apply for additional funds to follow exciting discoveries.” She said it will help “address new research questions that are considered high-risk yet high-reward, for which traditional channels is more difficult to obtain.”

To learn more, please visit the Killam Trusts webpage. The full list of this year’s Killam Awards recipients is:

Killam Annual Professors:

David Eaton, Faculty of Science (Geoscience)
Carolyn Emery, Faculty of Kinesiology
Nicole Letourneau, Faculty of Nursing
Penny Pexman, Faculty of Arts (Psychology)
Cora Voyageur, Faculty of Arts (Sociology)

Killam Research & Teaching Award winners:

Killam Research Excellence Award: Herman Barkema, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine
Killam Graduate Supervision and Mentorship Award: Jeff Dunn, Cumming School of Medicine (Radiology)
McCaig-Killam Teaching Award: Kyla Flanagan, Faculty of Science (Biological Sciences)
Killam Undergraduate Mentorship Award: Adam Murry, Faculty of Arts (Psychology)