Professor Myrna Simpson wins the 2023 CIC Environment Division Research and Development Dima Award. This award is awarded for distinguished contributions to research and/or development in the fields of environmental chemistry or environmental chemical engineering, while working in Canada.
"I’m very grateful to the Department of Chemistry for nominating me for this award and to all of those who supported the nomination by providing letters of support” says Simpson.
Prof. Simpson obtained her B.Sc. in Chemistry & Mathematical Sciences (1993) and Ph.D. in Environmental Soil Chemistry (1999) from the University of Alberta. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Chemistry at The Ohio State University, she moved to the University of Toronto in 2002. In 2004, Myrna co-founded the Environmental Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Centre which is the only high field NMR facility in Canada solely dedicated to environmental research. In addition, Myrna has developed mass spectrometry-based methods that is used with NMR data for a more holistic and integrative approach to unravelling complex environmental processes. She is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Integrative Molecular Biogeochemistry and has been awarded two NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (2010 & 2015). Myrna has also received international awards including the IUSS PM Huang Award, the SETAC/RSC award for Environmental Science, and the RSC Analytical Division Sir George Stokes Award with A. Simpson, A. Wheeler, Bruker BioSpin + several trainees. Over her career, she has made several distinguished contributions to the field of environmental chemistry and has authored/co-authored over 230 publications which have been cited >11,000 times (h-index of 60).