Carleton biology professor David Miller was recognized as a 2015 recipient of the Synergy Award for Innovation from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) on Feb. 16.
First established in 1995, the NSERC Synergy Awards aim to honour “the most outstanding achievements” made by partnerships between universities and Canadian industries, specializing in natural sciences and engineering research and development.
The winner of the award receives a $200,000 NSERC research grant, with their industrial partner receiving a $30,000 voucher towards their contribution in a Collaborative Research and Development Grant (CRD).
Having partnered with the woodlands division of J.D. Irving, Limited (JDI), Miller has conducted research for 20 years into the eastern spruce budworm, the most damaging forest insect pest in Canada.
“When I was an undergraduate student, there was a really bad eastern spruce budworm epidemic in eastern Canada,” Miller said. “It’s the kind of thing you don’t forget. I wasn’t studying that, but when you come from a place where [forestry] is an important industry, it was a big deal, and so it stuck in my mind.”
While working for Agriculture Canada about six years later, Miller said he was introduced to George Carroll at the University of Oregon, who believed the fungi living in conifer needles produced toxins that infected insects. Norman Whitney at the University of New Brunswick was also working on a project to examine the needles of trees damaged by budworms for natural fungi, known as endophytes.
With research support from NSERC, Miller and his colleagues discovered a strain of endophytes that were toxic to insects in the needles of conifer seedlings. With assistance from Greg Adams at JDI, the process was replicated in greenhouses.
JDI now mass produces endophytic fungi and has planted more than 100 million endophyte‐enhanced seedlings. The resulting trees have an increased tolerance to the eastern spruce budworm, significantly reducing the impact of an infestation.
“That’s the kind of thing that I get excited about,” Miller said. “We can explain something that people didn’t understand. Restoring the population of good endophytes is a good thing to do. We’re taking advantage of the natural resources instead of resorting to pesticides.”
Speaking about his NSERC Synergy Award, Miller said “you have to consent to being nominated, but it’s so unusual to get it. I think the nicest thing about getting it is—for me personally—that it comes with a research grant I didn’t have to fill out a form for.”
Aside from his work with the eastern spruce budworm, Miller is also an expert on natural toxins. As the chair of the Working Group for the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), he has researched fungal toxins in food that can cause devastating health problems for children in Africa and parts of Asia.
“They’re all fungi, and they all involve toxins,” Miller said about the links between his research projects. “It’s all the same thing.”
