Mitacs honours Joel Trudeau and Dawson team

Last night (Nov. 22) we watched an award show for remarkable research in Canada under the Mitacs banner. There were 8 very outstanding initiatives highlighted and honoured. These award-winning undertakings were fascinating, socially relevant, pertinent for entrepreneurial action in science, medicine, indigenous life, international collaboration, and the creation of new thinking models. Very laudable on so many fronts.

They were characterized as developing innovative ecosystems: developing new ideas at the edge of practical and theoretical knowledge.

This was the Mitacs award ceremony supported by the federal government, all provincial governments and numerous businesses and industries across the country.

And, lo and behold, at the very end of this prestigious ceremony, one college, a Cégep, and the only one in all of Canada, was singled out as doing comparable innovative work in the realm of artificial intelligence: Dawson College.

Mitacs honoured Joel Trudeau, a professor in the physics department of Dawson College as the lead in this undertaking at Dawson and Mitacs profiled Joey Yu, a graduate from Dawson last year (now at McGill university).

A special mention was also made of Computer Science faculty members Victor Ponce (research lead) and Mahsa Sadeghi who supervised the student interns. Notably, the Dawson collaboration was singled out as an example of the untapped capacity for college students and researchers to contribute to top-tiered research and development projects.

Very well done. Exemplary.

-Reported by Bob Kavanagh, retired Academic Dean of Dawson College