ZAGREB, March 28, 2018 – Davor Solter is the first Croatian scientist to win the Canadian Gairdner Award for biochemical research for the discovery of mammalian genomic imprinting that causes parent-of-origin specific gene expression and its consequences for development and disease, the Canadian Embassy in Croatia said on Wednesday.
The Gairdner Award, Canada’s most important award for scientific research, is given by the Gairdner Foundation. The purpose of the award is to recognise and reward international excellence in fundamental research that has an impact on human health.
Since 1957, Gairdner Awards have been given to 373 scientists from 30 countries, and 87 winners won the Nobel Prize after winning the Gairdner Award. All winners are presented with a reward in the amount of 100,000 Canadian dollars.
The official award-giving ceremony for this year’s winners will be held in Toronto in October.
Solter was born in Zagreb in 1941, where he graduated from the School of Medicine. He earned an MA and a PhD in biology. He has lived abroad since 1971. He worked for 10 years at the Whistar Institute in Philadelphia and in the early 1990s moved to Germany, where he worked as the director of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology.
He is one of the pioneers of the cloning technique and author of a number of research papers, some of which are considered the most important works on developmental biology, the Canadian Embassy said.
