Alzheimer’s Research, Evolutionary Biology Garner Killam Fellowships at UBC

UBC chemist Chris Orvig and evolutionary biologist Dolph Schulter have been awarded 2011 Killam Research Fellowships, among Canada's most distinguished research awards.

The funded research will focus on the preclinical discovery and testing of compounds that will slow, halt or reverse the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's Disease, and investigate the changes that occur during evolution in three-spined stickleback fish in British Columbia's coastal lakes.

The fellowships provide $70,000 a year for two years. Eight researchers across Canada were selected from 74 applications, with UBC and Queens being the only universities to garner two fellowships each.

In 2009, Professor Orvig won both the Rio Tinto Alcan Award from the Canadian Society of Chemistry and the Bioinorganic Chemistry Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2010.

The Canada Research Chair in Evolutionary Biology, Professor Schluter is renowned in the area of evolutionary biology. He will undertake research with three-spined stickleback fish in the B.C. coastal lakes in order to understand the genetic changes that occur during evolution. He will also use this species, considered an ideal model for this type of research, to test how evolution occurs from the ecological to the genetic level.


The recipients were chosen by the Killam Selection Committee, which included 14 eminent scientists and scholars representing a broad range of disciplines.

www.canadacouncil.ca/news/releases/2011/pz129434696008377992.htm