MaRS Director Awarded Prestigious Fellowship

Ross Wallace

Ross Wallace, Director of Corporate Strategy for MaRS, was awarded one of six Global Youth Fellowships by the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation in July. He will be studying the role of Canadian innovation and drug expertise in worldwide efforts to solve global health problems. The Foundation gives each recipient $20,000 to use at their discretion allowing them to further their work. Wallace describes how the Fellowship fits in with his work at MaRS:

Q: How did you come to want to study global health and Canadian innovation?

RW: One of the things I’ve realized working at MaRS – especially as someone without a scientific background – is the sheer number of world-class scientists and researchers stretched across the province, but especially the critical mass located in the Discovery District. When I first heard about the Fellowship, I knew that it could be a fantastic chance to look at the District in a new way – as a source of social innovation and ingenuity, in addition to the commercial opportunities MaRS is usually intent on identifying. I think that the MaRS model is so powerful precisely because it helps disparate groups like policymakers, researchers, entrepreneurs and investors communicate and collaborate in new ways – and I believe this model will have as much resonance and relevance to international development as it would to commercialization.

Q: How is the award and your project related to your work with MaRS?

RW: My role at MaRS is to identify how MaRS can best accomplish its various goals – commercializing innovation, building a global gateway to Ontario’s research assets, supporting policymakers, building community – by supporting and refining a broad array of partnerships. In some ways, my Fellowship is simply an extension of this. It will hopefully allow me to link MaRS to a new set of collaborators while building on the exciting work MaRS did to support the recent International AIDS Conference. If I can help MaRS leverage its partnerships and its model to better support Canadian innovators working on global health challenges, then I’ll consider my Fellowship a real success.

/magnoliaPublic/dms/mars/banners/rotating/small/bdg_phase2/bdg_phase2.jpg 2007-08-09 21:34

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