This past week, UHN hosted its inaugural Mission Excellence Awards, celebrating individuals and teams making outstanding contributions to help UHN realize its vision of A Healthier World. These awards combine the previous Local Impact Awards, Inventor of the Year, and Global Impact Awards, presenting them together in one program to elevate recognition and celebration.
During the ceremony, several members of the UHN research community were recognized for their hard work, commitment to excellence, and contribution to realizing UHN’s mission and vision.
UHN Global Impact Award
This award, which recognizes a current member or alumnus of TeamUHN, honours outstanding contributions to improving health and health care here and around the world. The UHN Global Impact Award has honoured giants in the field of medical research since its inception in 2004.
This year the award was given to Drs. Dafna Gladman, Emerita Scientist from Schroeder Arthritis Institute, and Daniel Cattran, Emeritus Scientist from the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, to honour their outstanding contributions to health care, research, and education in rheumatology and kidney disease, respectively.
UHN President’s Patient Partner Award
As part of our strategic direction of Alignment for Impact, UHN bestows this award upon the UHN Patient Partners who play a vital and active role in co-creating care models, advancing person-centred care, and contributing to health system transformation.
The 2025 UHN President’s Patient Partner Award was given to UHN’s KITE Patient Engagement in Research (PiPER) Toolkit Co-Design Team to recognize the incredible impact that co-developing the Pride in Patient Engagement in Research toolkit has had on engaging patients, and their families and caregivers in research at UHN.
UHN Inventor of the Year Award
This award recognizes outstanding achievements that enable, and lead commercialization and partnerships related to UHN innovations and help create A Healthier World.
This year’s awardees were Drs. John Dick, Senior Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (PM), Jean Wang, Clinician Scientist at PM, and Jayne Danska, Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children. The UHN Inventor of the Year Award recognizes their innovative work in cancer immunotherapy in identifying a novel way that cancer cells evade discovery.
Congratulations to all the awardees recognized on this momentous night. Your continued dedication to your work and to bettering health and health care for the UHN community and beyond is central to making UHN what it is.
Read the story with a full list of awards and awardees originally posted by UHN here.
Inventor of the Year recipients Drs. John Dick (second from the left), Jayne Danska (centre-left) and Jean Wang (centre-right), with Mark Taylor (second from right), Director of Commercialization at UHN, Dr. Brad Wouters (left), EVP of Science and Research, and Dr. Kevin Smith (right), UHN’s President and CEO.