Rob receives this top Canadian honour for his many ground-breaking contributions to string theory - a branch of physics, expressed in mathematical equations, used to describe an infinitesimally small and mysterious world of 'vibrations' that some experts hope will help lead to a 'theory of everything.'
Professor Myers is a master at the chalkboard and an outstanding scientist on the world stage. He has played a pivotal role in the development of string theory – including 'The Myers Effect.' Among his most recent contributions is the discovery that string theory may predict the presence of extremely long 'cosmic strings' of a novel type which can stretch across the entire visible universe and have consequences for cosmological observations. Such objects, if found, could provide the long-sought smoking gun confirmation of string theory.
Rob is a Long Term Researcher with Canada's Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario – just outside Toronto. He received his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1986, after which he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He moved to McGill University in 1989, where he was a Professor of Physics until moving to Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo in the summer of 2001.
Dr. Myers has won many other prestigious research awards including the CAP's Herzberg medal (1999) and top prizes in the annual Gravity Research Foundation Prize Essay Competition. This is the same competition that famed scientist Stephen Hawking once won. Rob has since taken top spot on two separate occasions!
This latest award comes during the 'World Year of Physics' – when we celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Einstein's contributions to science. The medal and cash prize will be formally awarded at the Canadian Association of Physics convention in Vancouver in early June. Dr. Myers is also a key organizer of the global 'Strings05' convention being held later this summer in Canada.