The recipients of the 2017 Principal’s Research Excellence Awards were announced on April 3 at a ceremony at the Glendon Campus. Professor Valérie Schoof from Glendon’s new Biology Program has received the award in the early-career category and French Studies Professor Swann Paradis has been selected in the established scholar category. The awards are given annually and honour full-time Glendon faculty members who have made an outstanding contribution to research in the last five years.
“It is a great pleasure to award Professors Schoof and Paradis this year’s research awards,” said Donald Ipperciel, principal of Glendon. “These outstanding scholars represent the linguistic and disciplinary diversity to which Glendon is committed.”
Valérie Schoof
Valérie Schoof, who has been at Glendon for less than two years, has already made major contributions to research that span her home discipline of biology, with other fields, like anthropology. Her external referee characterizes Schoof as an “outstanding researcher and scholar in the field of primate behavioural ecology”. In the past five years, she has published 15 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in top-tier publications and given numerous public and academic talks. Last year – during her first year at Glendon – Schoof secured a five-year $140,000 Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada grant for her research program on the behavioural endocrinology and life-history of vervet monkeys, adding to an already impressive track record of external funding.
“I am honoured to receive this award recognizing my research on primate socioendocrinology,” said Schoof. “This award is meaningful to an early career scientist such as myself, because, while it recognizes past efforts, it encourages me to continue contributing to my field both as a researcher and an instructor.”
Swann Paradis
A veterinarian, writer and poetry specialist, Paradis exemplifies exceptional inter-disciplinarity, which contributes to the richness of his research. In the past five years, he has published four chapters and five peer-reviewed articles. His forthcoming book, Le sixième sens de la taupe. Buffon dans la fabrique des quadrupèdes, is expected in September 2017 with the prestigious publisher Éditions Hermann. This manuscript is the result of almost 15 years of research and constitutes the first comprehensive work dedicated to the relationships between science, literature and iconography in the animal descriptions of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle. In 2016, Paradis received a $93,152 SSHRC Insight Grant for his project De la ménagerie du Prince d’Orange au Jardin du Roi : Arnout Vosmaer (1720-1799) dans l’ombre de Buffon (1707-1788).
“I receive this award with much humility and with gratitude to the selection committee, who was bold enough to recognize a project that falls within a field of research that does not usually find itself in the spotlight, pre-Revolution French literature being covered less than other subjects more anchored in the everyday,” said Paradis.