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Canada's Nobel Prize Winners

Frederick Banting

(b. Alliston, 1891 - d. Musgrave Harbour, 1941)

Jointly awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with John James Rickard Macleod (1876-1935), for discovering insulin, a treatment for diabetes.

William Giauque

(b. Niagara Falls, 1895 - d. Berkeley, 1982)

Awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for thermodynamics research "concerning the behaviour of substances at extremely low temperatures."

Lester B. Pearson

(b. Toronto, 1897 - d. Ottawa, 1972)

Awarded the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for helping mediate the end of the Suez Crisis and establishing the United Nations Emergency Force.

Charles Huggins

(b. Halifax, 1901 - d. Chicago, 1997)

Jointly awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Peyton Rous (1879-1972), "for his discoveries concerning hormonal treatment of prostatic cancer."

Gerhard Herzberg

(b. Hamburg, 1904 - d. Ottawa, 1999)

Awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work involving the "electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals."

David Hubel

(b. Windsor, 1926 - d. Lincoln, 2013)

Jointly awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Roger W. Sperry (1913-1994), and Torsten N. Wiesel (b. 1924), for their discoveries regarding how the human brain processes images.

Henry Taube

(b. Neudorf, 1915 - d. Stanford, 2005)

Awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on the mechanisms of electron transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes."

John Polanyi

(b. 1929)

Jointly awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Yuan T. Lee (b. 1936) and Dudley Herschbach (b. 1932) for for "their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes."

Sidney Altman

(b. 1939)

Jointly awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Thomas R. Cech (b. 1947), for discovering the catalytic properties of ribonucleic acid in living cells.

Richard E. Taylor

(b. 1929)

Jointly awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Jerome I. Friedman (b. 1930) and Henry W. Kendall (1926-1999), for their investigations of the "quark model in particle physics."

Rudolph Marcus

(b. 1923)

Awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems."

Bertram Brockhouse

(b. Lethbridge, 1918 - d. Hamilton, 2003)

Jointly awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Clifford G. Shull (1915-2001), "for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter."

William Vickrey

(b. Victoria, 1914 - b. New York, 1996)

Jointly awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Economics, along with James A. Mirrlees, "for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information."

Myron Scholes

(b. 1941)

Jointly awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, along with Robert C. Merton (b. 1944), for their "new method to determine the value of derivatives."

Robert A. Mundell

(b. 1932)

Awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Economics "for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas."

Willard S. Boyle

(b. Amherst, 1924 - d. Truro, 2011)

Jointly awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Charles Kuen Kao (b. 1933) and George E. Smith (b. 1930), for his invention of the CCD sensor.

Ralph M. Steinman

(b. Montreal, 1943 - d. New York, 2011)

Jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Bruce A. Beutler (b. 1957) and Jules A. Hoffmann (b. 1941), "for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity." Dr. Steinman received the award posthumously.

Alice Munro

(b. 1931)

Awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her short stories.

Donna Strickland

(b. 1959)

Jointly awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Arthur Ashkin (b. 1922) and Gérard Mourou (b. 1944) for "for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses."

David Card

(b. 1956)

Jointly awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics along with Joshua Angrist (b. 1960) and Guido Imbens (b. 1963) for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.

Special Cases

The 1963 Nobel Prize for Peace was jointly awarded to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the League of Red Cross Societies. Canadian John MacAulay (1895-1978) was head of the ICRC at the time and accepted the prize on behalf of his organization, though the award was not given to him, specifically.

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) won the 1976 Nobel Prize for literature. Whether he counts as a Canadian depends entirely on your definition. He was born in Lachine, Montreal but emigrated to Chicago at age nine and lived the remainder of his life in the United States. It is not uncommon for Canadian Nobel Prize winners to emigrate to the United States at some point in their careers, but Bellow is the only one who did so as a child.

Andrew Waver (b. 1961) and Kirsty Duncan (b. 1966) are two Canadian scientists (and later politicians) who worked for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prior to it winning the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. At times, they (and other Canadian scientists who worked for the IPCC prior to 2007) have been casually referred to as a “Nobel Prize winning scientists”  The UN, however, says no IPCC scientist should be referred to this way, since the 2007 Nobel Prize was awarded to the IPCC as an institution, and not the specific scientists who worked for it.