Each year, Caldwell Partners International chooses 40 Canadians who were under 40 in the past year to honour for their outstanding achievements. Click here to learn more about the program, and find more winners in the list below.
David Vocadlo didn't start out wanting to be a chemist. "I wanted to be an architect and was very enthusiastic about the idea." It was an article in Scientific American that changed his focus; the story was about proteins that regulate genes being turned on and off. "Thinking of how these tiny proteins bind to DNA in a very specific way and so play critical roles in biology was amazing to me."
Mr. Vocadlo was born in Brantford, Ont., to a Czech father and a Finnish mother who met in Canada. Growing up, he lived overseas and in Montreal and Vancouver, thanks to his father's work as an academic and consulting engineer.
Currently on sabbatical in France, Mr. Vocadlo says there was no real plan for his professional trajectory until he "… became fired up about biochemistry and chemistry at the end of my undergraduate studies." Things were refined with the decision to go to grad school; working as a lab technician before starting graduate studies helped him focus still further. "I had the opportunity to interact with a number of scientists and see different types of biochemistry, molecular biology, and chemistry being carried out."
His current research focuses on understanding processes that could enable new treatments for serious diseases such as Alzheimer's and bacterial infections. Specifically, his lab is developing new chemical tools that enable researchers to study the role of specialized sugars in health and disease.
In addition to research and teaching, Mr. Vocadlo is co-founder of Alectos Therapeutics Inc., a small-molecule drug development company that is a spinoff enterprise from his SFU research.
"Starting up a biotechnology company was a big undertaking, tremendously exciting, but time intensive," he adds. "It has worked out well in part because I was fortunate to work with a really good partner [Ernest McEachern]to get it going."
His favourite thing in life? "Without a doubt it is my children." He and his wife Krystyna have two children under 5, a boy and a girl.
And professionally? "When you really dig into what we know and ask 'Why?' you very often and very quickly run into the answer 'We don't know.' To me, that is exciting."
More winners:
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Karen Bakker, 39 -
Keith Bilous, 39 -
Leonard Brody, 39 -
Naman Budhdeo, 38 -
Michael Burns, 39 -
Craig Campbell, 34 -
Norie Campbell, 39 -
Jody Campeau, 39 -
Cody Church, 39 -
Brian Coombes, 36 -
Matthew Corrin, 29 -
Frederick Dryden, 39 -
Dominic Giroux, 35 -
Deirdre Horgan, 38 -
Kyle Jeworski, 36 -
Nicholas Johnson, 38 -
Dr. Kirsten Johnson, 39 -
Kevin Li, 39 -
Stewart Lyons, 37 -
Muhammad Mamdani, 39 -
Andy McCreath, 35, and Christian Darbyshire, 35 -
Calvin McDonald, 39 -
Duke McKenzie, 35 -
Glori Meldrum, 37 -
Michele Mosca, 39 -
Suresh Narine, 39 -
Sean O'Reilly, 36 -
John Poulos, 36 -
Andrew Reid, 34 -
Gregory Roberts, 38 -
Angela Santiago, 39 -
Bradley Schwartz, 39 -
Leerom Segal, 31 -
Som Seif, 34 -
Natasha Sharpe, 39 -
Andrew Smith, 38 -
Steve Sousa, 39 -
Marie-Pier St-Hilaire, 33 -
David Vocadlo, 37 -
Nolan Watson, 31