Order of British Columbia

Jane Buxton, Professor Emeritus from the School of Population and Public Health (2022)

Dr. Jane Buxton is a dedicated and passionate public-health physician who has championed a harm-reduction approach to substance use, fought for the greater inclusion in health policy of people who use drugs and seen her influence extended by teaching and mentoring a generation of public-health trainees.

As a public-health physician and the medical lead for harm reduction at the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), Buxton has made the Province’s harm-reduction infrastructure what it is today: a system that distributes millions of items of safer substance-use supplies throughout the province in order to decrease the risk of infectious disease and engage people who use drugs in the health-care system.

Buxton’s belief in the importance of this work carried the BCCDC’s programing through years in which harm reduction was deprioritized federally and resources were scarce. It was her leadership during this time that enabled B.C., in 2012, to be one of the first provinces to implement a take-home naloxone program. This program has distributed more than one million naloxone kits and saved thousands of lives. Buxton also co-leads impactful provincial committees, including the B.C. Harm Reduction Services and B.C. Overdose Prevention Strategies Committee in partnership with the B.C. Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions. In 2011, Buxton developed the B.C. Drug Overdose and Alerting Partnership, an intersectoral collaboration that interprets and shares information to reduce drug harms and has become a best-practice model for jurisdictions across Canada.

Buxton has been able to accomplish so much because of her deep belief that public-health physicians must partner with people who use drugs. She ensures that people with lived experience of drug use are involved in developing priorities for research, policy and harm-reduction program evaluation.

Buxton is also a gifted educator who has contributed to a strong network of informed and compassionate harm reductionists in medical and public-health practice. In her role at the BCCDC and as a professor at University of British Columbia’s (UBC) school of population and public health, she has supervised more than 100 trainees, including masters, PhD and medical students. In recognition of her strengths in medical education, the UBC teaching award for medical residents (trainee public-health physicians) is named the Dr. Jane Buxton Teaching Award.

Additionally, Buxton is an accomplished researcher with 350 publications and more than 5,000 citations – a major contribution to the scientific body of knowledge on drug-use harms, prevention and best practices. Her work has supported positive change in attitudes toward harm reduction and led to improved health and engagement of people who use substances.

Buxton is an influential advocate who is immensely respected by the public-health and medical community, in the research community and by people who use substances.

Pieter Cullis, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2021)

Dr. Pieter R. Cullis is a Canadian physicist, biochemist and scientific entrepreneur known for his contributions in the field of nanomedicines.

He is a professor at UBC. Cullis has co-founded more than 10 biotechnology companies and three not-for-profit organizations centred around lipid-based drug-delivery systems, personalized medicine and enhancing the probability that academic discoveries are translated into new drugs and devices. Cullis received a bachelor of science (physics) and a PhD (solid state physics) in 1972 from UBC. He did post-doctoral work at Oxford University and Utrecht University, using nuclear magnetic resonance to study membrane lipids.

Cullis is globally best known for his work on lipid-based drug-delivery systems. This work has led to two devices to manufacture liposomes and lipid nanoparticle (LNP) systems (the Extruder and the NanoAssemblr), as well as five drugs that have received regulatory approval. Of note is Comirnaty, the Pfizer/ BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine that uses LNP system provided by Acuitas, one of the companies that Pieter co-founded. Comirnaty is the most successful new medicine of all time in terms of sales made, doses administered and global effect on human health.

Cullis’s basic research concerns the physical properties and functional roles of lipids in biological membranes, particularly lipid polymorphism and lipid asymmetry. His applied research interests to the development of LNP systems for small molecule drugs (anticancer drugs) and nucleic acid-based drugs.

Technologies that have originated from his work include the high-pressure extrusion process to manufacture unilamellar liposomes, microfluidic mixing process for manufacturing LNP systems, methods to load cancer drugs into LNP, methods to load nucleic acid-based drugs into LNP systems and methods to deliver nucleic acid-based drugs into target cells in vivo.

Companies that Pieter has co-founded include:

• Lipex Biomembranes (now part of Evonik Industries) to manufacture the Extruder;
• The Canadian Liposome Company to develop ABELCET and Myocet;
• lnex Pharmaceuticals (now GeneVant) to develop Marqibo;
• Northern Lipids (now part of Evonik Industries);
• Protiva Biotherapeutics (now Arbutus);
• Acuitas Therapeutics to develop LNPs used in Onpattro and Comirnaty;
• Precision NanoSystems (now part of Danaher) to develop the NanoAssemblr;
• Integrated NanoTherapeutics; and
• NanoVation Therapeutics.

Cullis has also co-founded companies focused on personalized medicine, such as Molecular You to provide multi-Omic analyses to guide preventive medicine strategies and GenXys Healthcare to use genetic analyses to guide drug-prescription practices.

Cullis has co-founded not-for profit enterprises, including two national centres of excellence, namely the Centre for Drug Research and Development (CORD) (now AdMare) and NanoMedicines Innovation Network (NMIN).

Cullis has authored more than 400 research articles, holds more than 100 patents and, as of 2023, has been cited more than 60,000 times. As a result of his contributions, he has received multiple awards. These include the Order of Canada in 2021, Prince Mahidol Prize (Thailand), VinFuture Prize (Vietnam), Gairdner International Award (Canada), Tang Award (Taiwan), BloomBurton Award (Canada) in 2022 and Killam Award (Canada) in 2023. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 2023.

Jane Coop, Professor Emerita of Music (2012)

Jane Coop is a preeminent concert pianist, mentor and educator whose 40-year international career includes four Juno award nominations and the founding of the Skylark Music recording label, which serves West Coast, Canadian and international composers. By the age of 20, Coop had already won such prestigious contests as the CBC National Young Performer Competition and the Maryland International Piano Competition, launching her career as a concerto soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, and recording artist. Coop has performed around the globe with some of the world’s finest orchestras. She has played as a solo recitalist in the most prestigious musical venues in the world including Wigmore Hall in London, and Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York.

As a distinguished University of British Columbia professor of piano and chamber music, she is an inspirational force for her students. She has also given master classes at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Shanghai and Beijing Conservatories, and the Juilliard and Manhattan Schools. Her discography includes seven concertos and the great masterworks of, among others, Haydn and Mozart. With Maestro Mario Bernardi, she recorded two collections of concertos and with violinist Andrew Dawes she made landmark chamber recordings of Beethoven’s piano and violin sonatas. Coop’s performances were lauded by the New York Times for having “not only technical prowess but intellectual perception and telling interpretive instincts.” Coop has shared her talents in every region of the province and in smaller communities through her classes and performances.

Carl Walters, Professor Emeritus of Fisheries and Zoology(2013)

Dr. Carl Walters, an icon of the world’s fisheries science community, conducted research and developed computer models that are considered to have had an important impact on the development of fisheries science in the last 50 years. During his career at University of British Columbia, Dr. Walters’ approach to quantitative ecology used computer simulations to generate dynamics of populations and ecological systems that help to set research priorities, test hypotheses and evaluate fisheries management options. His seminal writings on adaptive management and fisheries assessment are widely used throughout the world by ecologists, scientists and managers. Drs. Hilborn and Walters’ 1992 book on assessment science is the third-most cited text in fisheries research.

While he remained at the forefront of both the development and application of mathematical modelling in various fields of ecology, two common threads ran throughout his research: innovation and application to real‐world problems. A sought after expert, every commission of inquiry into fishing activities in B.C. has relied on Dr. Walters’ advice. At the Cohen Commission of Inquiry into the Declining of Sockeye Salmon in the Fraser River, he served as a scientific expert and witness, even offering fisheries workshops to lawyers representing small-scale fisheries. Dr. Walters’ appeared as a scientific expert for the defendant in the landmark Sparrow case, which led to the Supreme Court of Canada’s affirmation that First Nations have an existing Aboriginal right to fish under the constitution. Dr. Walters was a 2006 recipient of the prestigious Volvo Environment Prize for outstanding innovations or scientific discoveries and of several outstanding achievement awards from fisheries organizations. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.