Professor David Sankoff, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics at the University of Ottawa, was awarded the 2004 Weldon Memorial Prize by Oxford University. He is the first Canadian to receive this prestigious award.
The prize, founded in 1907 in memory of zoologist Walter Weldon, the Linacre Professor of Comparative Anatomy (1899–1906) at Oxford University, is presented every two years for the most noteworthy contribution to biometric science (the development of mathematical or statistical methods applied to problems in biology).
It has been awarded previously to eminent scientists from around the world, including biologists and mathematicians, Sir Ronald Fischer and Motoo Kimura, and geneticists, J. B. S. Haldane and Sewell Wright.
Sankoff, who received a PhD in Mathematics from McGill University in 1969, is a leader in applying mathematical approaches to the study of genes and genomes. He joined the University in 2002.
