Polanyi Prize

The �鶹��Ƶ winners are Mamatha Bhat of the Faculty of Medicine and the University Health Network (UHN), Maria Drout of the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Audrey Walton of the department of English – both in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

“To receive this prize is an enormous achievement,” says Vivek Goel, �鶹��Ƶ's vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives.

“The Polanyi prize is an important honour and a clear sign that an early-career researcher's work is having an impact.”

The $20,000 annual prizes, funded by the Ontario government and awarded by the Council of Ontario Universities, are given to five outstanding researchers in the early stages of their career who are pursuing post-doctoral studies or who have recently been appointed faculty at an Ontario university. The prizes are distributed among five fields: chemistry, physics, economic science, physiology/medicine and literature.

Bhat, an assistant professor in the department of medicine and a staff hepatologist and clinician-scientist at UHN, was recognized for her research into the long-term health outcomes of patients after a liver transplant. Drout, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics, was honoured for her work in the new field of “multi-messenger” astronomy. Walton, an assistant professor of English who is also at the Centre for Medieval Studies, received the prize for her research showing that medieval England produced a large body of literature in the vernacular as opposed to Latin.

The award is named after John Polanyi, a �鶹��Ƶ University Professor of chemistry and joint winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes.”

Mamatha Bhat: Improving long-term outcomes for liver-transplant patients

(photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

Mamatha Bhat became fascinated with the liver as a resident in gastroenterology at McGill University during her hepatology rotation.

“It performs hundreds of functions that most people aren’t even aware of,” she says.

She went on to complete a fellowship in transplant hepatology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., followed by a PhD in medical biophysics with a focus on molecular and computational biology.

Today, her research focuses on how to ensure the long-term health of patients after they undergo a liver transplant.

“When you look at the short-term health outcomes of liver transplant patients – within the first year following the transplant, success rates have increased substantially over the last 30 years. But when you look at long-term survival and outcomes beyond one year, there has been very little improvement,” she says.

A lot of the focus of clinical research has been on ensuring the organ isn’t rejected by the patient’s immune system. However, Bhat says long-term considerations, including an increased risk of cancer and metabolic disease, have not been as thoroughly investigated.

It’s a problem that is becoming more pronounced as more Ontarians receive a liver transplant and as higher success rates mean transplant patients live longer.

Based in UHN’s Multi-Organ Transplant Program, the largest adult transplant program in North America, Bhat is well positioned to tackle the challenge. Last year, UHN performed more than 700 transplants, including more than 200 liver transplants.

Emphasizing the need for translational research, Bhat is leading a team that includes both lab-based and clinical trainees at different stages of training.

“I find the best research emerges from the exchanges between trainees and researchers,” she says. “Each brings their own perspective – whether it’s a focus on clinical care or lab-based knowledge. The back-and-forth of new ideas leads to some exciting outcomes.”

Winning the Polanyi Prize in Physiology/Medicine is a great honour, says Bhat, adding that it speaks to larger research goals.

“It’s a wonderful sign of support for the importance of this translational research that will provide improved long-term outcomes for our patients,” she says. “That’s what means the most.”

Maria Drout: Ushering in a new era of astronomical research

(photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

In August 2017, Drout and her collaborators witnessed an event that had never been seen before: a kilonova – an explosion resulting from the collision of two neutron stars. But what made the observation truly historic was the fact that the stellar merger that created the explosion in a galaxy 130 million light-years away also generated gravitational waves that were detected here on Earth.

It was the first time a single cosmic phenomenon was observed in both visible light and gravitational waves, ushering in the “multi-messenger” era in astronomy.

For her research in this new field, as well as the study of short-lived events like supernovas and the evolution of massive stars, Maria Drout was awarded the Polanyi Prize in Physics.

“I’m incredibly honoured to receive the prize,” says Drout. “John Polanyi is an inspiration not only because of his dedication to groundbreaking research, but because of his ability to effect real change that benefits the world.

“I hope to honour this legacy by continuing my work and by building new initiatives to promote effective science communication across Canada."

Drout’s research is providing insight into multiple areas of investigation: the fundamental physics of matter in extreme conditions; the origin of the heaviest elements on the periodic table; and new and unusual types of explosions that challenge our theoretical understanding of stellar death. For example, Drout led the analysis of observations of the kilonova that proved heavy elements like gold and platinum were created in neutron star mergers and not – as had been proposed for decades – in supernovas.

“The Polyani Prize is wonderful recognition of Maria’s highly innovative research, which has seen her rise to international prominence within a few years of receiving her PhD,” says Professor Ray Carlberg, chair of the astronomy and astrophysics department.

Audrey Walton: Understanding medieval England's role in popularizing the vernacular

(photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

Audrey Walton’s award-winning scholarship focuses on sacred language, literary cultures, vernacularity and world religions – with particular focus on the early medieval period in England.

Walton was awarded the Polanyi Prize in Literature for her ongoing work on how and why medieval England was a European leader in developing a large body of literature in the vernacular, meaning a local native language rather than Latin.

While established scholarship has focused on the notion that medieval authors viewed Latin as sacred, Walton’s work challenges this assumption and shows that English authors often blurred the boundary between local speech and standardized sacred language. Her research aims to revise the conventional understanding of the historical development of European literature.

More generally, Walton’s work is concerned with multilingualism, linguistic divides and the exchange of ideas across regions in medieval Europe, with particular focus on social, political and religious developments concurrent with these phenomena.

“We are all immensely proud of Audrey,” says Professor Paul Stevens, chair of �鶹��Ƶ’s English department.

“Audrey joins five other members of the department in winning this prestigious award – Angela Esterhammer, Andrea Most, Katie Larson, Andrea Charise and most recently Danny Wright,” Stevens said.

“It’s an outstanding group, remarkable for the rigour, originality and diversity of their research. Audrey’s work on the complex constitution of Anglo-Saxon textual culture is a revelation.”

Three �鶹��Ƶ early-career researchers awarded prestigious Polanyi Prize

perry.king — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 05:00:00 +0000

Three �鶹��Ƶ early-career researchers awarded prestigious Polanyi Prize

perry.king Tue, 01/22/2019 - 00:00

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Three University of Toronto early-career researchers – Assistant Professor Husam Abdel-Qadir, Assistant Professor Jiaying Gu and post-doctoral researcher Jason Hunt – are three of five 2018 Polanyi Prize winners (all photos by Perry King)

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Husam Abdel-Qadir is making strides in breast cancer treatment. Jason Hunt is giving a clearer vision of our galaxy. Jiaying Gu is making economic behaviour more accessible.

The University of Toronto researchers are among this year’s winners of the John Charles Polanyi Prize, which recognizes researchers in the early stages of their career – pursuing post-doctoral studies or having recently been appointed as faculty at an Ontario university. The $20,000 prizes, awarded by the Council of Ontario Universities, are named after �鶹��Ƶ University Professor John Polanyi, who received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Of the five Polanyi Prize recipients this year, three are �鶹��Ƶ researchers.

"The University of Toronto is proud of our researchers who are being recognized for their contributions to medicine, astrophysics and economics,” said Vivek Goel, �鶹��Ƶ's vice-president of research and innovation.

"The prize is a significant early-career recognition that they are having an impact. It really helps to raise the profile for these researchers and gives them further opportunities as they continue in their careers.”

Meet this year's winners from �鶹��Ƶ:

Husam Abdel-Qadir: Researching the link between breast cancer treatment and cardiovascular condition

Dr, Husam Abdel-Qadir, an assistant professor in �鶹��Ƶ’s department of medicine, is being recognized for his focus on the cardiovascular health of breast cancer survivors. As a clinician-scientist at Women’s College Hospital and University Health Network, he examines the suspected link between breast cancer treatments – including chemotherapy and radiation therapy – with the development of heart diseases, including atrial fibrillation, a serious heart rhythm abnormality.

In previous research involving the rates of hospitalization for women with heart problems after breast cancer, Abdel-Qadir found that women who had breast cancer had a higher risk of atrial fibrillation. He's now working to prove the link by studying data on all women in Ontario who were diagnosed with early stage breast cancer between 1988 and 2016, and comparing the data to women with no history of cancer.

He says he sees the Polanyi Prize as positive reinforcement of the work he’s pursuing.

“My career trajectory has involved a lot of delayed gratification,” he said, adding that he has spent almost 20 years as a postsecondary student.

He considers it a privilege to both practise medicine and conduct relevant research. “To walk down that path requires positive feedback to keep you motivated, and getting awards along the way, in particular the Polanyi Prize, is a very powerful form of positive motivation,” said Abdel-Qadir, who is also the director of continuing professional development for the Black Physicians’ Association of Ontario.

Abdel-Qadir has also received an early-career chair in women's heart and brain health from the Heart & Stroke Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to support his work. He aims to use this chair to bring more structured solutions to patients with complicated health profiles.

“I want to develop a better understanding of breast cancer patients' level of depression, anxiety and stress and I want to see how that relates to their social environment,” he said.

Jiaying Gu: 'Bringing the economic theory to the data'

Jiaying Gu, an assistant professor in the department of economics, was awarded the Polanyi Prize for her work that focuses on econometrics, which emphasizes the use of statistical methods in describing economic behaviour. She is seeking to understand the impact of an individual’s tastes and economic choices on the larger economic landscape.

The practice of econometrics, explaining traits like heterogeneity and employing multi-linear regression models, can be dense and complicated. But Gu has been working at translating the discipline into terms that the public can easily understand – beginning in the classroom.

“I do try to emphasize the kind of application, the methodology that I’m developing that can help to apply in real-life situations,” said Gu.

She is using the data to better understand purchasing decisions, and describes it as "bringing the economic theory to the data."

One example of her work involves teachers' performance evaluations. Teachers are often judged on student grades, but their evaluations often don't factor in individual teaching styles. By analyzing data from U.S. primary schools, she is hoping to develop a fairer method of evaluating teachers.

She says the Polanyi Prize was a welcome bit of news.

“It was definitely a very pleasant surprise,” Gu said. “If the work is very technical, then it’s harder for a big audience to accept, so it’s certainly very encouraging, and I’ll definitely continue to produce high-quality research. [The prize] relieves some pressure as well going forward.”

Jason Hunt: Answering galactic questions

The core of the work of Jason Hunt, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, revolves around the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way. As part of a global consortium of researchers, Hunt uses raw data obtained from the Gaia mission, a deep space probe launched by the European Space Agency, to uncover our galaxy’s many mysteries.

He received his PhD in 2015 from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College in London and has been working with �鶹��Ƶ Assistant Professor Jo Bovy since 2016.

“We’re getting detailed positions and motions of about 1.5 billion stars, and this is orders of magnitude more data – both in terms of quality and quantity – than we’ve ever had before,” said Hunt, who began his digging with Gaia in 2013.

He added that despite what we know about our home galaxy, there’s still an innumerable amount we do not, including the number of stars in the Milky Way.

“It’s important for a lot of things and it’s still not super well constrained,” said the native of Devon, England. “Even Gaia, you would see only one per cent of the stars.

"It's up to us to try and work out what else is there.”

About the Polanyi Prize, Hunt says he's "pretty proud to be within that same bracket of people, looking back over the past winners."

Two up-and-coming �鶹��Ƶ researchers win Polanyi Prize

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 15:16:50 +0000

Two up-and-coming �鶹��Ƶ researchers win Polanyi Prize

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 11/15/2017 - 10:16

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Areti Angeliki Veroniki is a statistician and scientist at St. Michael's Hospital and Ismael Mourifié is an assistant professor in �鶹��Ƶ's department of economics (photos courtesy of Council of Ontario Universities)

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Areti Angeliki Veroniki is a studier of studies.

A scientist at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital, Veroniki’s post-doctoral research at the University of Toronto is focused on pulling new insights from the hundreds of medical studies done on a particular illness – right down to the level of individual patients.

Working under the supervision of Dr. Sharon Straus, a professor in �鶹��Ƶ’s Faculty of Medicine and a Canada research chair in knowledge translation and quality of care, Veroniki is performing what’s known as an individual patient data network meta-analysis on studies pertaining to Type 1 diabetes and Alzheimer’s dementia.

Put simply, it’s a statistical analysis of the many studies done on a number of clinical treatments related to a specific illness that, unlike more straightforward network meta-analyses, still takes into account individual data from all the studies’ patient participants.

“We’re able to explore potential treatment-by-covariate interactions, which are interactions that may happen between the characteristics of the patients and the treatment effect that we’re not always able to see with aggregated data,” says Veroniki, who did her PhD in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Ioannina in Greece.

“We’re able to tailor the results for certain characteristics of patients that, previously, published studies didn’t address. We can then use the data that has been previously collected to explore further treatment effects – usually with greater power.”

Veroniki is one of two researchers at �鶹��Ƶ who were honoured with this year’s Polanyi Prize, which was awarded to just five researchers in the province in total. The $20,000 prizes, in honour of �鶹��Ƶ University Professor John Charles Polanyi, who received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, are given to up to five outstanding researchers in the early stages of their careers who are either pursuing post-doctoral studies or have recently been appointed faculty at an Ontario university.

The other �鶹��Ƶ winner is Ismael Mourifié, an assistant professor in �鶹��Ƶ’s department of economics in the Faculty of Arts & Science. His current research is focused on understanding why there aren't more women like Veroniki studying STEM subjects and working in related professions.

Read about Mourifié's STEM research in the Globe and Mail

Mourifié says there are essentially two competing theories. The first hinges on the idea that women in STEM – science, technology, engineering, mathematics – are underpaid relative to their male counterparts and therefore decide to pursue fields with less wage discrimination. The other suggests that women are steered away from STEM subjects at an early age because they’re socialized to think they belong elsewhere.

The problem, Mourifié says, is the policy solutions are very different depending on which theory one ascribes to. If it’s the latter, he says, “even if you mandate equal pay, women won’t come and your policy won’t work.”

Finding a policy solution is further complicated by the fact that what may work for a small group of survey subjects often can’t be reliably scaled up to a larger population. That’s because it’s difficult to completely take into account the myriad attitudes and perspectives – including those held by different cultural or generational groups – that may lead women to shun STEM studies.

�鶹��Ƶ's Ismael Mourifié says his experiences as a new immigrant has helped shape his research (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Mourifié has personal experience with feeling pressured to do things against his wishes.

Though he always wanted to pursue a career in the social sciences, when it came time to apply to university, he instead opted to accept a government scholarship to pursue a bachelor’s degree in math and physics at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Morocco. Why? His home country of Côte d'Ivoire was spiralling into civil war and, given his math skills, he figured it would be the most expedient way to secure a spot studying abroad.

“It was not a decision that was being made based on my preferences,” he says.

Even after arriving in Canada, Mourifié says he sometimes felt like he was being subtly discouraged from trying to complete his PhD in economics at the University of Montreal, including by well-meaning members of his own community. They felt it wasn’t realistic for someone of African heritage to aspire to become an economics professor, he says.

“One thing that’s very important to me is to show new immigrants – the new generation – that being African and coming from a small country is not something that should shape your future in Canada,” Mourifié says. “If you work hard, you should be able to make your path.

“It should be the same thing for women."

�鶹��Ƶ literature and physics researchers recognized with Polanyi Prizes

ullahnor — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 17:32:22 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ literature and physics researchers recognized with Polanyi Prizes

ullahnor Tue, 11/15/2016 - 12:32

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�鶹��Ƶ researchers Ioannis (John) Antoniadis and Daniel Wright were named today as Polanyi Prize winners

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Two University of Toronto researchers, Daniel Wright and Ioannis (John) Antoniadis, have won Polanyi Prizes – Wright for his work examining the political creativity of Victorian poets and novelists and Antoniadis for his research into pulsars as laboratories to study fundamental physics.

“It’s a real honour. It’s heartening that a prize like the Polanyi recognizes the humanities alongside fields like the sciences and medicine,” said Wright, an assistant professor in English at �鶹��Ƶ Mississauga.

Also among this year's winners is alumnus Stephen Newman. Newman, who earned his PhD at �鶹��Ƶ, is now assistant professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in the University of Ottawa’s department of chemistry and biomolecular sciences.

The prize, awarded by the Council of Ontario Universities, was created to honour the achievement of �鶹��Ƶ’s John Charles Polanyi, who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Read about John Charles Polanyi

Up to five Polanyi prizes worth $20,000 are awarded each year to outstanding researchers in the early stages of their career who are continuing to post-doctoral studies or have recently started a faculty appointment at an Ontario university. They are available in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economic science.

“Recipients of the Polanyi Prizes represent the best university-based researchers across Ontario, and this year’s group is no exception,” said Deb Matthews, Ontario’s minister of advanced education and skills development.

Watch a video of the award ceremony

Wright’s research, which won in the literature category, examines the novels and poems of mid-19th century writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, who used their work to probe and draw larger public attention to the social problems of the Industrial Revolution.

“We often hold that literature has the power to cultivate new modes of sympathy, to change hearts and minds and to give form to complex political arguments,” Wright said. “And yet despite our hopeful conviction that literary art has political effects, we must also admit that these effects are diffuse, slow, unsteady and unpredictable.”

The political questions writers in the Victorian period wrestled with may be different than those we confront in the 21st century but their struggle with the question of a novelist’s or poet’s capacity to act as a leader of political change is one that remains relevant today, he explained.

“I argue that Victorian poets and novelists cope with the problem of the political ineffectuality of literary art through a multifaceted appeal to the cultivation of creativity as a political practice,” he said. “What I call ‘political creativity’ is an absorption in the present moment by which the future is made multiple in its possibilities, radically open-ended and therefore radically malleable.”

The Polanyi winner in physics, Antoniadis, is a researcher at �鶹��Ƶ’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. In 2013, he was part of an international team that discovered the most massive neutron star to date – PSR J0348+0432 – which is located more than 5,000 light years from Earth in the Milky Way Galaxy. That may seem like a long way away – and it is – but in the vastness of space, it’s still “located in the neighbourhood,” he said.

Neutron stars are both incredibly dense and very small, Antoniadis said. For example, PSR J0348+0432 is twice as heavy as the Sun but smaller than Toronto.

They are also very “stable rotators that resemble very precise clocks,” which makes them ideal to study the underlying laws of physics like gravitational waves, but “we don’t know how physics work in their core,” he said.

Eventually, neutron stars turn into black holes but no one knows “their tipping point yet,” Antoniadis explained. “We’re not trying to find one that will collapse in real time.”

Canada and Toronto, in particular, is a magnet for this type of research since the pulsar community here is small but quite active, he says.

And there is a lot of excitement about the CHIME project, also known as the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, which is led by a team of Canadian cosmologists, including Dunlap’s Assistant Professor Keith Vanderlinde.

The new ground-breaking radio telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia will map the 21-centimetre signature of neutral hydrogen within the largest volume of space ever surveyed, encompassing a 3D swath of the universe that covers half the sky and is billions of light years deep.

Polanyi Prize

Three �鶹��Ƶ researchers win Polanyi Prize for work in astronomy, English and medicine

Mamatha Bhat: Improving long-term outcomes for liver-transplant patients

Maria Drout: Ushering in a new era of astronomical research

Audrey Walton: Understanding medieval England's role in popularizing the vernacular

Three �鶹��Ƶ early-career researchers awarded prestigious Polanyi Prize

Husam Abdel-Qadir: Researching the link between breast cancer treatment and cardiovascular condition

Jiaying Gu: 'Bringing the economic theory to the data'

Jason Hunt: Answering galactic questions

Two up-and-coming �鶹��Ƶ researchers win Polanyi Prize

Read about Mourifié's STEM research in the Globe and Mail

�鶹��Ƶ literature and physics researchers recognized with Polanyi Prizes

Read about John Charles Polanyi

Watch a video of the award ceremony

Read about last year's Polanyi Prize winner from �鶹��Ƶ