Linguist, Biologist and Poet are UVic's Newest Royal Fellows

John Esling, a linguist and phonetician whose ground-breaking work has advanced understanding of how we speak; Ben Koop, a biologist whose current research is uncovering the genetic secrets of the notorious sea louse; and Lorna Crozier, one of the country’s most honoured poets, are the University of Victoria’s newest fellows of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC). The distinction is considered Canada’s highest academic honour.

While most linguists focus on the words that people speak, Esling also observes how people use their vocal apparatus to further his—and our—knowledge of the building blocks to language acquisition. Throughout his career, using increasingly smaller endoscopes attached to cameras, Esling has observed the larynx and pharynx in subjects speaking languages that span the globe, clarifying a new model of how the organs work. His research has also determined that during their first few months of life, babies throughout the world learn to make all the sounds they need to speak their respective languages.

Esling’s work has benefited ear, nose and throat specialists as well as the many students he’s taught and supervised. After graduation, they frequently go on to careers in speech pathology and audiology.

Koop currently co-leads the three-year Genomics in Lice and Salmon project which is using advanced genomics tools to understand how Pacific sea lice interact with their salmonid hosts. A former winner of the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, awarded to Canada’s top young scientists, Koop is also the Canada Research Chair in Genomics and Molecular Biology. He was also part of the worldwide team of scientists who mapped the human genome.

Koop’s team is already a world leader in salmonid genomics. Over the past five years the team has identified about 90 per cent of salmonid genes and developed a new research tool for studying what each gene does. The tool is now widely used by researchers around the world.

Since winning CBC’s National Writing Competition in 1987, Crozier has continued to collect awards and acclaim for the brilliant imagery in her poetry and the intense honesty of her creative non-fiction. She won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1992 for Inventing the Hawk and the Dorothy Livesay Award for best book of poetry by a BC author for Whetstone in 2005. Her creative non-fiction has been published in major anthologies including Dropped Threads, edited by Carol Shields.

Crozier has written 15 books and is in high demand as a guest at literary festivals around the world. She was named a UVic Distinguished Professor in 2004 in recognition of her outstanding teaching and scholarly research and has received two honorary degrees for her contribution to Canadian literature. She has composed poems for audiences as diverse as the City of Victoria and Canada’s women’s hockey team. Crozier’s most recent non-fiction work is Small Beneath the Sky and a bilingual edition of her poems, La Perspectivo del Gato, was recently launched in Mexico City.

With these two appointments, 42 former or current UVic faculty members are fellows with the RSC, the country’s senior national body of distinguished Canadian scientists and scholars, which promotes learning and research in the natural and social sciences and the humanities.
 

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