Congratulations to Scott D. Tanner (BSc ’76, PhD ’80) for receiving a York University Alumni Award in the Outstanding Achievement category. The York U Alumni Awards recognize outstanding alumni who have achieved the extraordinary and are working to right the future by creating positive change in their fields. The Outstanding Achievement category is reserved for alumni who have achieved distinction in their field and whose integrity and ability inspire alumni, faculty, staff and students.
Tanner arrived at York in 1972 to join the gymnastics team and stayed through his BSc (’76) and PhD (’80). After his doctoral work, he joined Sciex – an innovative developer of mass spectrometry instruments and became a world leader in atomic mass spectrometry. During his 25 years at Sciex, he invented successful instruments for the measurement of pollutants in air, dioxins in soil and most notably a series of instruments for measuring the atomic composition of matter. In 2005, he joined the faculty at the University of Toronto where he was 2011 Inventor of the Year in Biomedical and Life Sciences and co-founded DVS Sciences, to bring the new power of mass cytometry to the world.
He is currently a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) and of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He has also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Plasma Spectrochemistry, the Human Proteome Organization Award for Science and Technology, the Manning Innovation Award of Distinction and the WAE McBryde Medal from the Canadian Society for Chemistry. Upon retirement in 2015, Tanner enjoyed an appointment as adjunct faculty in the Department of Chemistry at York University and sat on the board for Ontario Life Sciences and Ontario Genomics. After moving to Nova Scotia in 2020, he became chair of the Three Churches Heritage Foundation in Mahone Bay.