Bernard Belleau Award

Sponsored by Paraza Pharma Inc.

The Bernard Belleau Award is presented to a scientist residing in Canada who has made a distinguished contribution to the field of medicinal chemistry through research involving biochemical or organic chemical mechanisms.

The 2026 awards are now open for submission.
Nominate yourself or a colleague deserving of recognition.

Press release: Award winners will be recognized at the x2026 Conference.

View the Terms of Reference and list of Past Winners

The 2025 winner of the Bernard Belleau Award is:

Robert Britton
Simon Fraser University

Professor Robert Britton obtained his B. Sc. from the University of Waterloo in 1996 working with Professor Victor Snieckus, and his Ph. D. in natural product isolation, structural elucidation, and total synthesis from the University of British Columbia in 2002 with Professors Edward Piers and Raymond Anderson. He spent two years at the University of Cambridge with Professor Ian Paterson as an NSERC PDF then joined the Process Research Group at Merck as a Senior Scientist. In 2005, he started an independent academic career at Simon Fraser University and was promoted to Professor in 2015. He is a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Career Scholar and holds the inaugural SFU Innovation Fellow Award. Professor Britton has broad research interests that include natural product synthesis, nucleic acid chemistry, medicinal chemistry, radiotracer development and insect communication. Research in these areas have led to commercial traps for bed bugs and other crop pests, 18F-labelled amino acids and peptides for PET imaging in oncology, new platform technologies for nucleoside synthesis and the late-stage modification of drug leads, and new strategies for synthesizing structurally complex natural products.

Website

Past Winners