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Ottawa, May 3, 2004 - Five prominent scholars in the fields of natural sciences, philosophy, music, health sciences and geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineeering will be honoured with the 2004 Killam Prizes, Canada’s most distinguished annual awards for outstanding career achievements in engineering, natural sciences, health sciences, social sciences and humanities.

The awards to James Arthur, Will Kymlicka, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Janet Rossant and R. Kerry Rowe were announced today by the Canada Council for the Arts, which administers the Killam program.

The Killam Prizes, inaugurated in 1981, are financed through funds donated to the Canada Council by Mrs. Dorothy J. Killam in memory of her husband, Izaak Walton Killam. The prizes were created to honour eminent Canadian scholars and scientists actively engaged in research, whether in industry, government agencies or universities. When the Canada Council was created in 1957, its mandate was to support both the arts and scholarly research; although this changed with the creation of separate research councils, the Canada Council retained responsibility for the Killam program. The Killam Fund at the Canada Council was valued at approximately $56 million as at March 31, 2004. The Killam Trusts, which fund scholarship and research at four Canadian universities, a research institute and the Canada Council, are valued at approximately $400 million.

The Canada Council will present the Killam Prizes at a dinner and ceremony on Wednesday, June 2 at the Arcadian Court in Toronto. The media are invited to cover the ceremony, which will begin at approximately 8:30 p.m.

Promotion of the Killam Prizes is sponsored by Scotiabank Group through support for the awards dinner and celebratory announcements in newspapers across Canada. Scotiabank is one of North America’s premier financial institutions and Canada’s most international bank. With approximately 49,000 employees, Scotiabank Group and its affiliates serve about 10 million customers in some 50 countries around the world. Scotiabank offers a diverse range of products and services including personal, commercial, corporate and investment banking. With $281 billion in assets (as at January 31, 2004), Scotiabank trades on the Toronto (BNS) and New York (BNS) Stock Exchanges. For more information please visit www.scotiabank.com.

James G. Arthur - Natural Sciences (University of Toronto)James G. Arthur is regarded as one of the leading mathematicians in the world in the fields of representation theory and automorphic forms. Representation theory is the study of the deeper aspects of symmetry. Automorphic forms is the branch of representation theory that relates symmetry with arithmetic and number theory. Professor Arthur is specifically interested the Langlands programme-a blueprint for relating arithmetic and algebra with analysis and spectral theory.

Over the past 30 years, Professor Arthur has made many fundamental discoveries, which have had a very significant impact on mathematical research. In a series of papers that span two decades, he was able to construct the general trace formula, a mathematical equation of enormous power that had been sought by mathematicians since the 1950s. His joint work with L. Clozel, which appeared in Annals of Mathematics Studies, solved a critical comparison problem for trace formulae on different groups. He has introduced a remarkable conjectural classification of automorphic representations, now known as Arthur packets.

Born in Toronto, James Arthur received B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University. He then spent nine years in the United States at Princeton University, Yale University, and Duke University, and he returned to the University of Toronto in 1979 as professor.

Professor Arthur has achieved many distinctions. Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1980 and the Royal Society of London in 1992, he became the first recipient of the Synge Award of the Royal Society of Canada in 1987. He was awarded the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques-Fields Institute Prize and the Henry Marshall Tory Medal in 1997. In 1999 he received the Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the only mathematician to have done so. He was awarded the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal from the Graduate School of Yale University and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. In 2002, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa.

Will Kymlicka - Social Sciences (Queen’s University)
Will Kymlicka received his B.A. in philosophy and politics from Queen’s University in 1984, and his D.Phil. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1987. A professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, he holds the Canada Research Chair in political philosophy and is a recurrent visiting professor in the Nationalism Studies program at the Central European University in Budapest. His ongoing research focuses on issues of citizenship in multi ethnic democratic societies and with the challenges of nationalism and multiculturalism. His works have been translated into 30 languages.

He is the author of five books published by Oxford University Press: Liberalism, Community, and Culture (1989); Contemporary Political Philosophy (1990, second edition 2002); Multicultural Citizenship (1995), which was awarded the Macpherson Prize by the Canadian Political Science Association and the Bunche Award by the American Political Science Association; Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada (1998); and Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Citizenship (2001). He is also the editor of Justice in Political Philosophy (Elgar, 1992) and The Rights of Minority Cultures (OUP, 1995); co-editor with Ian Shapiro of Ethnicity and Group Rights (NYU, 1997); co-editor with Wayne Norman of Citizenship in Diverse Societies (OUP, 2000); co-editor with Simone Chambers of Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (PUP, 2001); co-editor with Magda Opalski of Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported? (OUP, 2001); and co-editor with Alan Patten of Language Rights and Political Theory (OUP, 2003).

His awards and scholarships include the 2002 Excellence in Research Prize, Queen’s University; a Killam Research Fellowship (2002-2004); the 2001 Guiseppe Acerbi Prize (Italy); and many for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grants and fellowships.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez - Humanities (Université de Montréal)
Jean-Jacques Nattiez is a pioneer in the branch of musicology (the scientific study of music) known as musical semiology (the analysis of music dealing with musical meaning, sometimes inspired by structural linguistics). He has been at the Université de Montréal since 1970 and has been a professor of musicology at the Faculty of Music since 1972. He received two master’s degrees, one in literature, the other in linguistics, from the Université d’Aix-en-Province, and his doctorate in musical semiology from the Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes.

He first gained acclaim in 1975 as the author of the theoretical work Fondements d’une sémiologie de la musique. In Music and Discourse (1987) he defended and applied the tripartition principle provided by the theory of semiology he is using, and will continue to refine his theories in Comprendre la musique and La musique, l’histoire et la culture, which are works in progress. He also applied his concepts to the works of Wagner in Tétralogies (1983) and Wagner androgyne (1990).

Concurrently, Dr. Nattiez has extended his research into ethnomusicology, producing several recordings of Inuit (Canada), Ainu (Japan) and Baganda (Uganda) music. Several of his recorded publications have won the Grand Prix International du Disque Académie Charles-Cros. He has edited texts by composer Pierre Boulez and published a number of major articles on the composer. He has also written about the relationship between music and literature in Proust as Musician, is the author of a novel entitled Opera, and has published three collections of articles: De la sémiologie à la musique, Le combat de Chronos et d'Orphée and La musique, la recherche et la vie. He is currently the general editor of a new five-volume Encyclopedia of Music, published in Italy by Einaudi and in France by Actes Sud.

An internationally renowned scholar, Professor Nattiez has published more than 150 papers and has undertaken lecture tours in more than 20 countries. His books have been or will soon be translated into English, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez is the recipient of the Order of Canada (1990), the Ordre national du Québec (2001), and a Killam Research Fellowship (1988-90). He received the Molson Prize in 1990, the prix Léon-Gérin pour les sciences sociales du Gouvernement du Québec in 1994 and a prize for teaching excellence from the Université de Montréal in 2004. In 2003, he was a finalist for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Gold Medal. He has been a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 1988.

Janet Rossant - Health Sciences (Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital and the University of Toronto)
Dr. Janet Rossant is a Senior Investigator at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto. She is also a professor in the Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics and the Department of Obstetrics/Gynaecology, University of Toronto. Her research interests centre on understanding the genetic control of normal and abnormal development in the early mouse embryo using both cellular and genetic manipulation techniques. Recently, her research has moved in two new directions: stem cell research, with her discovery of a novel placental stem cell type, the trophoblast stem cell, and genome-wide functional genomics. She directs the Centre for Modelling Human Disease in Toronto, which is undertaking genome-wide mutagenesis in mice to develop new mouse models of human disease.

Dr. Rossant trained at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and has been in Canada since 1977, first at Brock University and then in Toronto. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada and a Distinguished Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Dr. Rossant is actively involved in the international developmental biology community. She was an Editor of the journal Development for many years. She has organized a number of international developmental biology meetings, including the International Developmental Biology Congress in 1997 and the Keystone Symposium on From Stem Cells to Therapy in 2003. She was President of the Society for Developmental Biology in 1996-97. She has also been involved in public issues related to developmental biology, most recently serving as Chair of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research working group on stem cell research.

Her awards include the National Cancer Institute of Canada Eli Lilly/Robert L. Noble Prize (1999) and the Royal Society of Canada McLaughlin Medal (1998). She was a Howard Hughes International Scholar (1992-2001) and received the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Award in 2004.

R. Kerry Rowe - Engineering (Queen’s University)
Dr. Kerry Rowe is professor of Civil Engineering and Vice-Principal (Research) at Queen’s University. Author of more than 350 publications, including more than 150 refereed journal papers and three books, he has extensive research and consulting experience in the geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering field. His expertise spans several areas, from hydrogeology to soil reinforcement, geosynthetics and waste management and containment.

Dr. Rowe’s research has been recognized with a number of awards including the Rankine Lecture (to be presented in London, UK, in March 2005), Legget Medal (2003), K.Y. Lo Medal (2003), Giroud Lecture (2002), Keefer Medal (2001), Ontario Ministry of the Environment Award of Excellence for Research and Development (1999), Professional Engineers Ontario Engineering Medal - Research and Development (1997) and the International Geosynthetics Society Award and Gold Medal (2004 and 1996), among many others. In 1989, he was the first Civil Engineer in Canada to be awarded a prestigious Steacie Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. Dr. Rowe is past-president of the Canadian Geotechnical Society, past president of the International Geosynthetics Society, editor of the journal Geotextiles and Geomembranes and member of the editorial board of 13 other journals.

Professor Rowe has been twice honoured for outstanding teaching, receiving the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations’ Excellence in Teaching Award in 1997 as well as the University of Western Ontario’s Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1996. Kerry Rowe has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering, as well as professional societies in Canada, USA and Australia.

Kerry Rowe received his B.Sc. (Computer Science), his B.E. in Civil Engineering and his PhD in Geotechnical Engineering from the University of Sydney. He was awarded a D.Eng. in recognition of outstanding contributions to Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering from the University of Sydney.

General information
The Canada Council for the Arts, in addition to its principal role of promoting and fostering the arts in Canada, administers and awards a number of distinguished prizes in the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, health sciences and engineering. Among these are the Killam Research Fellowships, the Molson Prizes, the John G. Diefenbaker Awards, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts and the Walter Carsen Prizes for Excellence in the Performing Arts.

For more information about these awards and prizes, including nomination procedures, contact Janet Riedel, Acting Director of Endowments and Prizes, at (613) 566-4414, or 1-800-263-5588, ext. 5041. E-mail: janet.riedel@canadacouncil.ca or Danielle Sarault, Endowments and Prizes Officer, at (613) 566-4414, or 1 800 263-5588, ext. 4116. E-mail: danielle.sarault@canadacouncil.ca.

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Tous les documents du Conseil des arts du Canada sont offerts en français et en anglais.

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