Semiahmoo Grad Wins Governor General’s Gold Medal

Iain McKenzie admits he was a bit of a slouch as an undergraduate, but he has more than made up for lost time.

"Early on I was fairly lax," confesses the SFU graduate student and winner of the Governor General’s gold medal in science for his stellar academic record in graduate school. "It was only upon entering grad school that I came up with a research project that really stimulated my imagination and productivity."

What inspired the 27-year-old chemist was a fascination with the effect of mass on the structure and dynamics of molecules, particularly free radicals, which are generally short lived and difficult to study. At the TRIUMF cyclotron facility at UBC, he produced organic free radicals labelled with muonium, a light hydrogen isotope, allowing researchers to see isotope effects that are too small to observe using conventional, deuterium labelling.

Working at TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, "was a lot fun," says the Ottawa native who moved to south Surrey as a teenager and finished high school at Semiahmoo secondary school. "It brought out the science nerd qualities in me."

Once those qualities kicked in, McKenzie was on a roll. He produced what his PhD supervisor Paul Percival calls "a superb thesis" only four years after completing his bachelor of science. What’s more, says Percival, "it is astounding that he already has 12 journal papers to his credit, with several more in preparation."

McKenzie begins a two-year Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) postgraduate fellowship in June at the University of Stuttgart and will continue his muon labelling research at the Paul Scherrer institute cyclotron complex near Zurich, Switzerland.



- 30 –