Professor Don Mackay wins prestigious International Honda Award
It was a proud moment for Trent University, Chemistry and Environmental & Resource Studies, and, in particular, one professor and the students who work with him. On Tuesday, October 2, 2001, Professor Donald Mackay was presented with the prestigious Honda Award for his work in 'Eco-Technology.'
Professor Mackay is the first Canadian to receive this prestigious international award which includes a certificate, a medal and a sum of 10 million yen ($130,000 Cdn.). The award is presented annually; Masaru Inoue and Yutaka Ishihara, both of the Honda Foundation in Japan, made the presentation to Professor Mackay.
Previous laureates include Ilya Prigogine of the Free University of Brussels (1983), Carl Sagan of Cornell University (1985), Benoit Mandelbrot of Yale (1994), Bruce Ames of UC Berkeley (1996), Hubert Curien of the University of Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris (1998), Aleksandra Kornhauser of the University of Ljubljana (1999) and Shuji Nakamura of UC Santa Barbara (2000).
Trent President and Vice Chancellor Bonnie Patterson offered her praise for Mackay and the vital research he is conducting. "Professor Mackay's leading edge research affirms the leadership role that Trent University is playing in the field of environmental sciences. The Mackay models have practical applications that are being used by researchers and governments throughout the world. On behalf of the Trent community, I want to congratulate Don and commend him for his contributions to scholarly research."
The Honda Foundation recognizes that modern society has achieved great prosperity as a result of sustained economic growth and technological innovations in production, transportation, communication and chemistry. These achievements have also had negative effects such as environmental destruction, pollution, high urban densities, population explosions, food shortages and growing nationalism.
Underlying the Foundation's activities is the desire to create a humane civilization by advocating the growth of "Eco-Technology", the development of a technology more harmonious with the environment, instead of using it solely for the pursuit of efficiency and human interest. The Honda Prize is awarded to encourage individuals fulfilling or supporting the idea of "Eco-Technology."Professor Mackay's research at Trent University contributes to the "Eco-Technology" concept by developing techniques to apply theoretical concepts such as fugacity as a component of comprehensive and systematic modeling techniques to predict the fate of chemicals in environmental media such as air, water, soils, sediments and biota. These models, known as "Mackay Models", are widely used in universities, industry and national and international government organizations. Much of his work has been devoted to understanding the fate of chemicals in the entire global environment and especially the tendency of certain chemicals to accumulate to undesirable concentrations by long range transport to arctic regions such as Northern Canada. Also recognized is Dr. Mackay's work on elucidating the behaviour of oil spills on land, in oceans and especially in cold Arctic waters.
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Last updated October 11, 2001