Wpg Free Press: Winnipeg chemist earns prestigious British science award

As the Winnipeg Free Press reports:

A Winnipeg-born scientist who divides his time between Toronto and Hamburg, Germany, is one of this year’s winners of a prestigious British science award.

Prof. R.J. Dwayne Miller has been named a winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry Centenary Prize.

The announcement was made in a Royal Society of Chemistry statement last week.

Miller makes movies about atoms and he is also the founder of Science Rendezvous, an annual Canada-wide event to promote science to the public. It involves more than 160,000 people and an additional 4,000 volunteers in 30-plus cities.

Miller was born in Winnipeg and attended the University of Manitoba, graduating with a bachelor of science degree in chemistry and immunology in 1978.

He chalked up exhaustive post-graduate work before breaking new ground in science.

“Miller works to track chemical reactions on the atomic level using atomic movies, a method of observing the movements of atoms in real time. By doing so he has shown that chemistry can be distilled down to a handful of key atomic motions,” the Royal Society said in a statement announcing Miller’s prize.

“This insight will have profound implications for our understanding of biological processes and how to treat disease.”