Monday, November 27 | 8:30 am – 10:00 am PT
Opening Keynote Speaker
David Suzuki
Ph.D., Co-Founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, Award Winning Scientist, Environmentalist + Broadcaster
Dr. David Suzuki is a world-renowned scientist, environmentalist, and broadcaster with an award-winning track record for his television and sustainable ecology work. He has garnered repeated high praise for his thirty years of work in television, conveying the complexity of science in an engaging, readily understood manner. He is well-known to millions of people as the host of the popular science television series The Nature of Things with David Suzuki on the CBC.
His eight-part series, A Planet for the Taking, received a United Nations prize. His eight-part PBS documentary, The Secret of Life, and his five-part Discovery Channel series, The Brain, accepted international acclaim. He created the long-running CBC Radio series Quirks and Quarks and has presented two major environmental documentaries, From Naked Ape to Superspecies and It′s a Matter of Survival.
David was a full professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from 1969 until his retirement in 2001. He is a retired professor from UBC′s Sustainable Development Research Institute. From 1969 to 1972, he received the renowned E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship Award for “Outstanding Canadian Research Scientist Under the Age of 35.
He is the author of 50 books and has received many prestigious awards, including a UNESCO prize for science, a United Nations Environment Program medal, and the Companion of the Order of Canada. He holds 24 honorary doctorates from universities in Canada, the United States, and Australia. David has been honoured with five names and formal adoption by two tribes for his work favouring Canada′s First Nations people.
David Suzuki was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1936. During WWII, he was incarcerated with his family in a camp in British Columbia when he was six years old. After the war, David Suzuki attended high school in London, Ontario. He graduated with honours from Amherst College in 1958 and obtained his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961.
