Keith Laidler Award

Sponsored by the CSC Physical, Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Division

This award recognizes outstanding early-career contributions to physical chemistry, for research carried out in Canada, by a scientist residing in Canada.

View the Terms of Reference and list of Past Winners

The 2026 winner of the Keith Laidler Award is:

Mita Dasog
Dalhousie University
 

Dr. Mita Dasog is an Associate Professor and Tier I Canada Research Chair in the Departments of Chemistry and Civil and Resource Engineering at Dalhousie University. She earned her B.Sc. from the University of Saskatchewan and Ph.D. from the University of Alberta, followed by research appointments as a Green Talents Visiting Scholar at the Technical University of Munich and an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech. Since joining Dalhousie in 2016, her group has pioneered the development of low-cost, earth-abundant refractory plasmonic materials and their photothermal applications through integrated experimental and computational approaches. Notably, her team has shown that these alternative plasmonic materials can match or even outperform noble metals in light absorption and heat conversion. Building on this, her group has developed solar-driven desalination prototypes capable of producing potable water using only sunlight, alongside technologies for passive mining of critical minerals and carbon capture.

Website

Past Winners