Congratulations to Subha Kalyaanamoorthy, Scott Hopkins, and Roger Melko for being named the winners of the 2024 Excellence in Science Research Award winners!
Inaugurated in 2021, the Excellence in Science Research Awards recognize outstanding research accomplishments by Science faculty members. Each year, three researchers from across the Faculty of Science are chosen to be celebrated. One tenure-track faculty, one mid-career tenured faculty (up to 10 years post-tenure), and one senior-career tenured faculty (more than 10 years post-tenure).
These awards draw attention to the research area of each recipient, recognize research excellence at the University, and strengthen subsequent nominations for external research awards.
Subha Kalyaanamoorthy (tenure-track faculty)
Subha Kalyaanamoorthy is a Professor of Chemistry in the Faculty of Science. Her research is focused on developing and employing computational methods to address biological, health and environmental challenges. She involves a hybrid scientific approach, where she and her research group make new novel hypotheses using in silico approaches and validate them in their wet lab.
Their research mainly engages multiple disciplines including molecular modelling and molecular dynamics simulations, Quantum modelling and simulations, protein biochemistry, machine learning, phylogenetic inference and bioinformatics to understand the structure, function, dynamics and evolution of proteins of interest. Drug discovery and synthetic biology are the key application areas of her research.
I am excited to receive the Science Excellence in Research Award. This recognition extends to my excellent team, whose dedication has been instrumental in our success. The award motivates us to continue developing efficient biocatalysts and therapeutics to improve the environment and human health.
Scott Hopkins (mid-career faculty)
Scott Hopkins is a Professor of Chemistry in the Faculty of Science. His research interests lie at the intersection of chemistry and physics for charged molecules and clusters, where he applies experimental, theoretical, and machine-learning methods to deduce molecular properties. Dr. Hopkins has received several awards for his research including the Keith Laidler Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry and the PerkinElmer Award of the Canadian Society for Analytical Sciences and Spectroscopy. Dr. Hopkins has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in highly regarded journals including the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie, and Nature Communications, and he has co-authored six patents. He is the project lead and director for the new Canadian free electron laser facility that is being built at the University of Waterloo.
It is an honour to be recognized with an ESRA. This award will give me more time to focus on graduate student training and establishing a world-class free electron laser facility at the University of Waterloo.
Roger Melko (senior-career faculty)
Roger Melko is a Professor of Physics in the Faculty of Science. Dr. Melko's research interests involve strongly-correlated many-body systems, with a focus on emergent phenomena, ground state phases, phase transitions, quantum criticality, and entanglement. He emphasizes computational methods as a theoretical technique, in particular the development of state-of-the-art algorithms for the study of strongly-interacting systems. Dr. Melko's work has employed computer simulations to explore the low-temperature physics of classical and quantum magnetic materials, cold atoms in optical lattices, bosonic fluids and quantum computers. He is particularly interested in microscopic models that display interesting quantum behavior in the bulk, such as superconducting, spin liquid, or topological phases. He is also interested in broader ideas in computational physics, the development of novel algorithms such as machine learning for simulating quantum mechanical systems on classical computers, and the relationship of these methods to the field of quantum information science.
It's a great honour to receive the Excellence in Science Research Award. I'd like to thank all of my talented graduate students and postdocs whose hard work is recognized by this award.