April 2007
Order of Canada honours Ontario innovators
A pioneer in Canadian Internet technologies and an ORION Award winner have both recently been honoured by the Governor General by being named Officers of the Order of Canada. Dr. Nicolas D. Georganas and Dr. Arthur B. McDonald were two of the 89 new appointments to the Order of Canada, including three Companions (C.C.), 29 Officers (O.C.) and 57 Members (C.M.).
For decades, Professor Nicolas Georganas has been breaking new ground in the fields of collaborative virtual reality, interactive multimedia, computer networks and wireless communications for handheld Internet appliances. In 1997, Dr. Georganas established DISCOVER, a research laboratory of collective research on hapto-virtual environments, and is also the founder (1984) and past director of the Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory (MCRLab) at the University of Ottawa's School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE).
Prof. Georganas' previous multimedia research at the MCRLab resulted in a multimedia medical communications prototype (IRIS), which linked the radiology and emergency medicine departments in the Civic campus and the cancer wards at the Civic and General campuses of the Ottawa Hospital (1989), and was also used at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute (1990). In 2001, he was appointed Distinguished University Professor and received the Order of Ontario, the province's highest and most prestigious honour. From 2001 to 2005, he held a Canada Research Chair in Information Technology.
Professor Art McDonald, the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics at Queen's University, is recognized for his lifetime scientific contributions in the field of nuclear physics and particle astrophysics. He is the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), the world's deepest underground laboratory located at Inco Ltd.'s Creighton nickel mine near Sudbury. Prof. McDonald was awarded an ORION Award in 2006 on behalf of the SNO team.
The international SNO team, including many Queen's faculty, graduate and undergraduate students over the years, discovered that solar neutrinos - weakly interacting subatomic particles produced in the core of the Sun - change into other neutrino types en route to Earth. This discovery, which solved the 30-year old "Solar Neutrino Problem" and confirmed that neutrinos must have mass - was ranked the second most important scientific breakthrough in the world in 2001 by the international journal Science.
For more information, visit www.gg.ca/media.
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