The Killam Prize (previously the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize) was established according to the will of Dorothy J. Killam to honour the memory of her husband Izaak Walton Killam.
Five Killam Prizes, each having a value of $100,000, were awarded annually by the Canada Council for the Arts to eminent Canadian researchers who distinguish themselves in the fields of social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, health sciences, or engineering.
In August 2021, the Canada Council announced it would transition the administration of the Killam program to the National Research Council Canada (NRC) by March 2022.
The restructured Killam Program was officially launched under the administration of the NRC in April 2022. It is now called the National Killam Program and consists of the Killam Prizes and the Dorothy Killam Fellowships.
The Canada Council for the Arts, commonly called the Canada Council, is a Crown corporation established in 1957 as an arts council of the Government of Canada. It is Canada's public arts funder, with a mandate to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts.
Izaak Walton Killam was a Canadian financier.
The National Research Council Canada is the primary national agency of the Government of Canada dedicated to science and technology research and development. It is the largest federal research and development organization in Canada.
John Charles Polanyi is a German-born Canadian chemist. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in chemical kinetics.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez is a musical semiologist or semiotician and professor of musicology at the Université de Montréal. He studied semiology with Georges Mounin and Jean Molino and music semiology (doctoral) with Nicolas Ruwet.
W. Ford Doolittle is an evolutionary and molecular biologist. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is also the winner of the 2013 Herzberg Medal of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the 2017 Killam Prize.
Juan Cesar (Tito) Scaiano, OC, FRSC first came to Canada in 1975 as a visiting scientist with the National Research Council from Argentina. Returning to the NRC in 1979, he developed an innovative new program studying organic reaction intermediates using laser techniques. He then joined the University of Ottawa in 1991 as professor of chemistry.
IWK Health is a major women's and children's (pediatric) hospital and trauma centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia that provides care to maritime youth, children and women from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and beyond. The IWK is the largest facility in Atlantic Canada caring for children, youth and adolescents, and is the only Level 1 pediatric trauma centre east of Quebec.
Fernand Labrie, was a Canadian medical researcher who specializes in endocrinological research and prostate cancer research.
The Killam Trusts were established in 1965 after the death of Dorothy J. Killam, the widow of Izaak Walton Killam, a Canadian financier, for a time the wealthiest man in Canada. He died intestate in 1955, but before his death he and his wife discussed in extensive detail the scholarship plan on which the Killam Trusts were founded. Approximately one half of his estate went to the government as inheritance tax. It was used to found the Canada Council, along with similar funds from the estate of Sir James Dunn, also from Nova Scotia. The rest of Killam's estate was inherited by his widow. In the ten years between his death and hers, she doubled the Killam fortune.
Jules Hardy was a Canadian neurosurgeon.
Victoria Michelle Kaspi is a Canadian astrophysicist and a professor at McGill University. Her research primarily concerns neutron stars and pulsars.
Margaret Lock is a distinguished Canadian medical anthropologist, known for her publications in connection with an anthropology of the body and embodiment, comparative epistemologies of medical knowledge and practice, and the global impact of emerging biomedical technologies.
Dorothy J. Killam was an American-born Canadian philanthropist. She was the wife of Canadian financier Izaak Walton Killam. When he died in 1955 she inherited his fortune and continued to build it until her own death 10 years later. She engaged in philanthropic activity during her lifetime and left her estate to a number of Canadian educational and research institutions.
Julie Cruikshank is a Canadian anthropologist known for her research collaboration with Indigenous peoples of the Yukon. She is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She has lived and worked for over a decade in the Yukon Territory, creating an oral history of the region, through her work with people including Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned. Her work focuses mainly on the practical and theoretical developments in oral tradition studies.
Alan Charles Evans PhD FRSC FCAHS is a Welsh-born Canadian neuroscientist who is a James McGill Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and Biomedical Engineering, and holds the Victor Dahdaleh Chair in Neurosciences at McGill University. He is also a researcher at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre of the Montreal Neurological Institute, Co-Director of the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics and Mental Health, Director of the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Scientific Director of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform, Scientific Director of McGill's Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives program and Principal Investigator of CBRAIN, an initiative aiming to integrate Canadian neuroscience data with the Compute Canada computing network. He is recognized for his research on brain mapping, and was a co-founder of both the International Consortium for Brain Mapping and the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.
The Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital(MNI), also known as Montreal Neuro or The Neuro, is a research and medical centre dedicated to neuroscience, training and clinical care, located in the city's downtown core of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is part of the McGill University Health Centre network and it is situated on the southern slope of Mount Royal along the east side of University Street, just north of Pine Avenue. It was founded in 1934 by neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who developed the Montreal procedure there for the treatment of epilepsy.
Karel František Wiesner was a Canadian chemist of Czech origin known for his contributions to the chemistry of natural products, notably aconitum alkaloids and digitalis glycosides.
R. Mark Henkelman is a Canadian biophysics researcher in the field of medical imaging, now retired, who was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2005) and the Order of Canada (2019) in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the field of magnetic resonance imaging.
D. R. Fraser Taylor, is Chancellor's Distinguished Research Professor of International Affairs Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Taylor studies applications of cartography to development, including international development. He is best known for his work on Cybercartography.