December 2012

Josh Briggs, by all accounts, is an adventure seeker. He has years of mountain guiding experience under his belt, competed internationally in paragliding, and led private climbs and ski tours across the alpines of western Canada and parts of Europe. But now, this 35-year-old expeditionist is taking on a new challenge: medical school.

Dan Gaston, a biochemistry and molecular biology PhD student at Dalhousie University, was recently awarded the Oswald Avery Prize for Genetics Research. Gaston’s winning paper, “A phylogenetic mixture model for the identification of functionally divergent protein residues”, has been out since 2011.