For two years in a row, Mount Sinai doctors have been named Family Physician of the Year by the Ontario College of Family Physicians. Dr. David Tannenbaum, Family Physician-in-Chief in the Ray D. Wolfe Department of Family Medicine, and Dr. Jamie Meuser, Palliative Care Physician at the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care, were co-winners of this year’s award. This prestigious peer-nominated award recognizes outstanding dedication of family physicians to their patients, their community, and their profession.

Six researchers at Mount Sinai and its Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute were awarded prestigious Canadian Institute of Health Research grants totalling $2.8 million. Principal investigators at the Lunenfeld had a 33 per cent success rate in the application process, exceeding the national average. This year’s winners include Drs. Alan Bocking, Joseph Culotti, Daniel Drucker, Stephen Lye, Anthony Pawson and Jeffrey Wrana.

Altaf Stationwala, Senior Vice President of Operations and Re-development, was named Canada’s Outstanding Young Health Executive of the Year. The award recognizes health executives who have demonstrated leadership in improving the effectiveness and sustainability of the country’s health system. Stationwala leads Mount Sinai’s redevelopment project, Renew Sinai.

Lunenfeld Senior Investigator Dr. Dan Durocher was awarded research grants from the Canadian Cancer Society and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and received a prestigious Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. Dr. Durocher investigates how normal cells become cancerous and looks at how healthy cells detect and repair damage to their DNA.

Distinguished researcher Dr. Tony Pawson was awarded a Premier’s Summit Award from the Honorable Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario and Minister of Research and Innovation, in partnership with the Lunenfeld. In recognition for his extraordinary biomedical research, Dr. Pawson will receive $5 million over five years to further his research in cell signalling.

Dr. Anne-Claude Gingras, an investigator at the Lunenfeld, was one of just 39 researchers in the Greater Toronto Area to be awarded a prestigious Early Researcher Award totaling $100,000. The funding will help Dr. Gingras and her team investigate a drug called rapamycin, which is used to prevent rejection in organ transplantation and has proven to be a powerful drug in the fight against cancer.

Dr. Patrice Bret has a new, expanded and distinctive role as combined Chair of the Department of Medical Imaging at the University of Toronto and Radiologist-in-Chief at Mount Sinai Hospital, University Health Network, and Women’s College Hospital.

Bechara Saab, a researcher at the Lunenfeld and PhD candidate within the Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto, was the first recipient of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Synapse Award for Mentorship. The award recognizes the efforts of a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow who has made exceptional efforts to promote health research among Canada’s high school students.

Following 10 successful years as Mount Sinai’s Physician-in-Chief, Dr. Allan Detsky’s term was extended for another two years. He will also be the first to hold the new position of Associate Director of Research–Clinical in the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute.

Four Lunenfeld trainees received prestigious fellowships to continue pursuing their leading-edge breast cancer research. Dr. Jennifer Asmit (Bull Lab), Joanna Dembowy (Woodgett Lab), Dr. Tanya Hansotia (Woodgett Lab), and Catherine Forse (Andrulis Lab) were awarded fellowships from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation totaling $377,500.

Mount Sinai’s Dr. Paul Walfish was honoured by his peers across North America with two prestigious awards — the Canadian Medical Association 2007 Medal of Service and the American Thyroid Association 2007 Sidney H. Ingbar Distinguished Lectureship Award — for his lifetime of dedication to the advancement of patient care in the management and treatment of thyroid-related diseases. He also received the Order of Ontario, the Province’s highest honour, for the creation of a newborn screening program to detect an underactive thyroid condition in infants.

Dr. Laurence Pelletier joined the Lunenfeld from Montreal (by way of Germany’s Max Planck Institute) to study the centriole, which plays a key role in cell division. Dr. Pelletier’s work will complement the ongoing efforts of many other principal investigators making great strides in biomedical research here at the Lunenfeld.

Dr. Stephen Lye was the recipient of the Association of Professors of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Research Excellence Award which is given annually to one Canadian scientist who has made a sustained and significant contribution to Women's Reproductive Health Research.

A postdoctoral fellow in the Culotti lab at the Lunenfeld, Dr. Satoshi Suo was awarded a $100,000 research fellowship from Parkinson Society Canada. This funding will help Dr. Suo and his colleagues find a new potential drug target for Parkinson’s disease.

Lunenfeld Senior Investigator Dr. Frank Sicheri and graduate student Kenneth Lee found that a protein called IRE1 provides two opportunities for the development of drugs to treat diseases such as cancer using high-resolution x-ray crystallographic techniques.

TD Bank Financial Group established a $1-million fellowship program supporting the work of 25 postdoctoral fellows over the next 10 years. Dr. May Alarab and Dr. Abdallah Al-Hakim were the inaugural recipients of the award.

For the second year in a row, Mount Sinai Hospital was named a Top 50 Employer in the Greater Toronto Area, selected from a list of 1,800 companies in 40 industries.

Mount Sinai’s Cultural Competent Assertive Community Treatment Team, believed to be the only one in Ontario with a focus on Southeast Asian communities, received the 2007 Leading Practice Award from the Ontario Hospital Association for providing leading intensive treatment and psychosocial rehabilitation services to patients with severe and persistent mental illnesses.