The Office of the Secretary to the Governor General has announced the six winners of the 2018 Governor General’s Innovation Awards (GGIA), which recognize Canadian individuals, teams, and organizations that are making strides across a breadth of sectors.
The awards are meant to showcase innovators that inspire other Canadians — particularly young people — to pursue entrepreneurship. Each year, up to six winners are selected through a merit-based selection process, and the Office says that selected winners must “have a positive impact on quality of life in Canada.”
Industries represented on the winners list range from education, to healthtech, to social impact. Recipients include Blue Dot founder Dr. Kamran Khan, whose platform uses natural language processing and AI to help predict and track dangerous infectious diseases like Ebola and the Zika virus. Memorial University researchers Terry-Lynn Young, Sean Connors, Kathleen Hodgkinson, and Daryl Pullman were recognized with uncovering a deadly gene mutation that has caused 25 cardiac deaths in Newfoundland, while Winnipeg-based Dr. Gary Kobinger and Dr. Xiangguo Qiu created the ZMapp cocktail of antibody therapies to successfully treat patients with the Ebola virus.
View the full list of winners here.
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