Canada Gairdner International Award

Dr. Everett Peter Greenberg received his PhD in Microbiology in 1977 from the University of Massachusetts. After finishing his postdoctoral at Harvard University (1977-1978), he joined the faculty at Cornell University Microbiology (1978-1984). He later moved to the University of Iowa as Professor of Microbiology (1988-2000) and Shepperd Professor of Microbiology (2000-2005), finally joining the University of Washington in 2005 where he currently is the Nester Professor of Microbiology. Dr. Greenberg has studied quorum sensing since the late 1970s and is widely considered the father of the field of microbial quorum sensing. The term “quorum sensing” originates in a 1994 Journal of Bacteriology article on which he was senior author.

Demis Hassabis is the Founder and CEO of DeepMind, the world’s leading AI research company, and now a part of Alphabet. Founded in 2010, DeepMind has been at the forefront of the field ever since, producing landmark research breakthroughs such as AlphaGo, the first program to beat the world champion at the complex game of Go, and AlphaFold, which was heralded as a solution to the 50-year grand challenge of protein folding.