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Behavioral ecologist Leanne Grieves has received the Alice Wilson Award from the Royal Society of Canada.

Leanne is an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in McMaster University’s Department of Biology and the School of Earth, Environment and Society, supervised by Jim Quinn and Greg Slater. Leanne combines field and laboratory methods to study the behavior, chemical and microbial ecology of birds.

The Alice Wilson Award is presented annually to three women of exceptional academic accomplishments in the Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences or Sciences who are entering a career in scholarship or research at the postdoctoral level. Recipients are chosen from women who have received postdoctoral fellowships from Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

The award was established by the Royal Society of Canada in 1991 at the behest of the Committee for Advancement of Women in Scholarship, to honour the memory of Alice Evelyn Wilson, the first woman elected to the RSC in 1938. Dr. Wilson was a world-renowned paleontologist and one of Canada’s foremost geologists. 

“The Royal Society of Canada Alice Wilson Award provides important recognition for women in academia, who still face barriers to equity,” says Leanne. “I am grateful to be a 2021 award recipient and I intend to honour Alice Evelyn Wilson’s legacy by continuing to make my research accessible to the public. I am privileged to have many wonderful academic mentors, but I would particularly like to acknowledge my undergraduate and graduate mentors: Scott Forbes, Susan Lingle, Jim Quinn, David Logue, Beth MacDougall-Shackleton, Mark Bernards, and Greg Gloor.”
 
Leanne was a Vanier Scholar and recipient of the NSERC Gilles Brassard Doctoral Prize for Interdisciplinary Research while completing her PhD at Western University. Leanne was also a McCall McBain Postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster in 2020-2021.
 
“McMaster University is incredibly proud of Leanne – she’s an exceptional researcher and a rising star,” says Maureen MacDonald, Dean of the Faculty of Science. “We are also grateful to the Royal Society of Canada for recognizing outstanding women in academia with this prestigious national honour.”

Congratulate Leanne by sending an email to grievel@mcmaster.ca.