Professor Emeritus Joseph Schatzker of surgery has been named to the Order of Canada, this country’s highest honour for lifetime achievement. Schatzker, who has been named a member, is an expert in trauma and fracture management. Six professors have been named Order of Ontario recipients: Richard Bond, a University Professor in astronomy and astrophysics; Tak Mak, a University Professor in biomedical physics and immunology; Janice Gross Stein, a University Professor in political science and director of the Munk Centre for International Studies; Roderick McInnes of molecular genetics; Frances Shepherd of medicine; and Paul Walfish, a professor emeritus of medicine.

Two U of  T scientists have received Killam Research Fellowships, Canada’s most distinguished research award. Professors Elizabeth Edwards and Molly Shoichet, both in the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry, were two of 10 researchers chosen for the award. Edwards’ research has looked at how microbes break down solvents such as dry-cleaning and degreasing agents. Shoichet is breaking new ground in tissue engineering research.

Call it youthful innovation, or the upending of corporate hierarchy. Many of today’s young graduates, born in the
1970s, are taking the quick route to the top by setting up their own companies and using the Internet to promulgate their ideas. Their outlook is entrepreneurial and international. They thrive on change. And their ideas are now shaping how we live.

Think of Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, the twenty-something founders of popular video-sharing website YouTube, who sold their fledgling company to Google last fall for almost $2 billion. Or Mark Zuckerberg, whose online social network, Facebook, is now used by tens of millions of people. He just turned 23.

Digital technology is creating new opportunities for young people. But this generation’s “do-it-yourself ” attitude has spilled over to a whole range of endeavours. While some, like Zuckerberg, are devising innovative online tools, others are using the Internet to sell (or share ideas about) music, clothing, video games, films or books they’ve made themselves. Never before have the tools of marketing and distribution – a computer and access to the Internet – been available to so many.

You’ll find some of the faces of this revolution in the following pages – U of T grads under 40 who, for the most part, have developed interesting ideas and are forging their own unique career paths. Many live in Canada, but their perspective is global; their ambitions reach beyond national borders.

Twenty-four-year-old Ben Barry didn’t like the ultra-narrow criteria used by most modeling agencies, so he set up his own business and scored a major coup with the Dove “Real Beauty” Campaign. He’s now doing a PhD at Cambridge University in England.

Commerce graduate Andrea Brueckner, 30, designs and sells handbags in the highly competitive world of New York City fashion.

Raja Khanna, 34, co-founded Quick- Play Media, to bring Canadians video via their mobile phones. AndSara Seager, a 35-year-old astronomer at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., studies planets outside our solar system to determine whether they can support life.

Of course, there are thousands of young U of T alumni whose intriguing ideas will shape the future of their chosen fields. The ones profiled here offer but a taste of what’s to come.

By his early teens, Lam – who earned his medical degree from U of T in 1999 – knew he wanted to be a writer and wanted to emulate authors such as Hemingway, who had 
a large appetite for life away from the page. “I thought, very naively, ‘Oh well – what will I do? I’ll just become a doctor.’” As he got older, he realized he wanted to pursue medicine for its own sake.

In the summer of 2002, Lam was working as a ship’s doctor for an Arctic cruise line. In a coincidence that would seem far-fetched in a fictional work, Margaret Atwood (BA 1961 Victoria) was also on the cruise. After asking her if she would read his short stories, Atwood replied: “Do you want me to tell you something nice or do you want me to tell you the truth?” And he answered, “Well, the truth.” Shortly after, Lam received an e-mail from Atwood assuring him he could indeed write. He is now working on his first novel, Cholon, Near Forgotten, about a headmaster and inveterate gambler in Saigon – a story inspired by his own grandfather.

Since winning the Giller Prize, Lam, 32, also has the role of “public figure” in common with Hemingway. Getting recognized by patients has taken a little getting used to for the modest writer. “Usually, you’re just another emergency doc in a set of greens with a stethoscope,” he says. “It’s very anonymous. And writing is the exact opposite, because you bare your soul on the page. So it’s kind of weird when you’re the emergency doc and someone’s reading your book. They actually have access to your literary soul.”

An intrepid traveller, Schatzker saw Siberia by rail, kayaked up Italy’s Amalfi coast and walked across the entire country of Monaco. Avoiding air travel was a logistic challenge, but it forced him, as he puts it, to “see, feel and taste the differences in the land.” While riding horseback through Mongolia, he encountered nomadic herdsmen and discussed Buddhism with a monk.

Although parts of the journey were uncomfortable, Schatzker travelled in luxury at times. He sped from New York to California in a souped-up Mercedes-Benz, visited the world-famous five-star Raffles Hotel in Beijing and arrived back in New York City, where his trip began, after crossing the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary 2.

Now that he’s travelled around the world, does Schatzker plan to stay in one place for a while? Not on your life. “I experienced only a thin strip of it,” he says. “There’s still so much to see.”

Her first book – Kill the Robot, published in 2005 – has a U of T connection; she workshopped it in a creative-writing class.At University College’s afternoon teas, she met people who had already published books. “Writing stories and being published was more accessible than I’d realized,” she says. “The message with writing and creative pursuits is always, ‘It’s so hard.’ This made me realize,‘Wow, you can do these things.’”

MacDonald’s can-do outlook infuses her musical pursuits, too. She joined The Hidden Cameras in 2001 – and only afterward learned to play keyboards. She was later involved in two other fiercely independent bands – Republic of Safety and Barcelona Pavilion – and created the rock opera The Rat King, which will be remounted at New York’s fringe festival in August. MacDonald’s new novel is very loosely inspired by her band tours, which conveniently brings two of her passions together. “You could say I’m a writer-slash-adventurer.”

Barry, now 24, founded Ben Barry Agency Inc. in his Ottawa home when he was 14 after a childhood friend – who wore a size 8 – was turned down as a model for being “too big.”

From the beginning, Barry decided his agency would represent women of all ages, shapes and sizes. But prospective clients were not always thrilled with this approach. “People would say to me, ‘We’re sorry consumers feel badly about their bodies, but that’s not our problem.They’re still buying the product.’”

Barry persevered, and landed his first major campaign in 2003 when Dove hired him to scout models for their “Real Beauty” campaign.Now he employs a staff of 20 and counts Nike and Macy’s among his clients.

As a student at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School in England, Barry is currently working on a six-country survey of consumer reactions to models who don’t conform to the usual “under-21, size 0” demographic. “My hope,” says Barry, “is that my dissertation will provide me with concrete data I can take to the boardroom of Vogue and the offices of Paris designers.” In March, he published his first book, Fashioning Reality:A New Generation of Entrepreneurship (Key Porter Books).

Barry calls himself a “business activist,” and although he occasionally considers quitting the agency for academia, he says he won’t stop until models of all ages and sizes can find work on the runways of Milan and in the pages of fashion glossies. “It’s more attainable than we think,” he says.

But that dream has edged closer to reality, thanks to Seager (BSc 1994). A planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she is examining some of the 200-plus planets that have been discovered orbiting distant stars. Seager, 35, has devised a way to assess the atmospheres of these faraway planets – a crucial step in determining whether they can support life. At the same time, she is helping with instrument design for NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder, a space-based observatory that likely will be launched in the next 15 years.

So far, almost all of the known extrasolar planets are more like Jupiter than Earth – gas giants inhospitable to life. The real prize will go to whoever discovers a world similar to our own blue-green orb – rocky, temperate and with an atmosphere containing water, carbon dioxide and ozone. Seager expects one to be found in her lifetime. “Every single day I wonder if there is life on another planet,” she says. “And I wonder what kind of life it might be.”

Maybe not, but Raja Khanna (BSc 1993 UTM) could have. As chief creative officer of QuickPlay Media, the self-described “digital media pioneer” provides video downloading and streaming to the Canadian mobile phone market. In three years, the company he co-founded has won two national awards, grown from two to 80 employees and steered phones straight into the heady world of the Internet. Not everyone has phone video now, but Khanna thinks the change will happen fast. “The bottom line,” he says, “is that 
if you’ve got this powerful device in your pocket at all times that’s always connected, always reliable and simple to use, of course you’re going to use it for media consumption.”

But this 34-year-old tech exec doesn’t just frame how content is presented – as a guitarist and composer for the band Dirty Penny, he also creates it himself. Khanna’s simultaneous embrace of art and science came early, when he enrolled in genetics and philosophy at Erindale College (now University of Toronto Mississauga). He went on to obtain a law degree, but demand for one of his side talents – designing websites – led to his current career. “In our family, we had computers before most other people did, since my dad was in the industry,” he says.

Thus was born his first company, Snap Media, which ran into hard times during the dot-com
crash several years ago. (“I had to fire many of my friends in order to pull through,” says Khanna ruefully.)
But he rebounded, dove into the world of telecommunications – and, with offices in England and the United States, is now taking on the world.

“That excites me, because I think we can help create a hub here in Canada for digital media,” says the affable Khanna, who’s surprisingly calm considering all that’s happened to him in the last year (including fatherhood).“We have all the right people here, all the right skills, to make this a centre of excellence.” A sentiment with which Graham Bell – the sometime Canadian – would no doubt agree.

Now she’s come full circle. Last fall, Leitch, 36, helped launch a new Health Sector MBA at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London. The new business degree is tailored to health-care professionals – from doctors and nurses to health administrators and pharmacists. The aim is to impart leadership and management skills to both front-line workers and industry decision-makers. “We really need leaders in the system who understand the managerial side but also the clinical side of the equation,” says Leitch.

That description could apply to Leitch herself; besides serving as co-director of the Health Sector MBA, she’s the chair of pediatric surgery at Western’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry and chief of pediatric surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Western Ontario. She joined the hospital after a one-year fellowship at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

“It cost Canadian taxpayers almost a million dollars to train me, so the least I could do was come home and take care of Canadian kids,” she says. To that end, in March, she signed on as the federal government’s new advisor on Healthy Children and Youth; she’ll present recommendations this summer. Even with all that juggling, Leitch makes sure to maintain her own clinic hours. “I’m very fortunate – I get to fix kids who can’t play on the playground, and let them go play.”

Chu’s parents established Mission Hills in 1992, well before golf enjoyed its current popularity in China (the country’s first golf course was built just 22 years ago). Chu joined the company in 2001, after finishing his economics degree at 
U of T, and set about putting Mission Hills on the international map. Now expansion is at the top of his to-do list. “There’s a lot of unexplored territory,” says Chu, noting that China has roughly 250 golf courses, compared with more than 20,000 in the United States. “We want to make Mission Hills the golfing capital of not only China, but also the world.”

Chu balances a busy work schedule with family life, which leaves him little time to play golf himself unless entertaining government officials or attending charity events. Still, he considers it his favourite sport. “Just because you have a swimming pool in your backyard,” he says, “doesn’t mean that you swim every day.’”

Chan, Davis and Mukhayesh (who attended the University of Western Ontario) are the principal partners in Precipice Studios Inc., their Toronto-based design firm. “Precipice” was the name 
of Davis and Chan’s fictional design firm at U of T. “[The name] 
is so fitting for what we do,” says Chan, 34, who is also a
part-time adjunct professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. The trio, after all, has dozens of design projects underway in Canada and the U.S., and Designer Guys shoots 26 shows – each one a separate renovation project – during a frenetic six-month schedule.“We’re always on the edge of madness or insanity…everything’s about to fall over the edge,” says Chan.

This summer, he’ll have a chance to convince them.

Jacob, 36, is one of two Canadian artists asked to participate in “documenta 12,” a massive contemporary art exhibition taking place from June to September in Kassel, Germany. For Jacob, it’s a rare opportunity to show his work to a huge international audience; more than 650,000 people are expected to attend.

The UC grad will unveil two pieces in mid-June as part of a single installation. One is called – take a deep breath – A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice, Based on the Choreography of Françoise Sullivan and the Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth (with Sign Language Supplements); the other is Album III, a collection of images concerning fluidity and rigidity, says Jacob.

Like its title, the first work is complex, involving video and print. The central focus is a high-definition video of fellow Toronto artist Keith Cole performing an homage to Danse dans la neige (1948), a choreography by Québécois artist and dancer Françoise Sullivan.

To a viewer, the dancer comes across as a metaphor for the artist in a coldly conservative milieu – the artist attempting to “melt our hearts.”

Being passionate about one’s art is crucial to Jacob, who laments the ironic detachment so prevalent in today’s art scene. His recent work hearkens back to artists of an earlier, less cynical era. “Sullivan talked passionately about art in a way that to contemporary ears would sound awkward and embarrassing,” he says. “To me, it’s instructive.”

Jacob was born in Lima, Peru, and immigrated to Canada with his family when he was 10. Active in the Toronto anarchist community, Jacob believes non-hierarchical models of organization are the only ethical ones and tries to advance this idea in his work. “Activism has an important place in an art practice,” he says.

Although he has been working single-mindedly on his “documenta” piece for several months, Jacob is also well known around Toronto as a DJ – and an energetic dancer. “Dance has been an outlet for me ever since I was old enough to go to nightclubs,” he says. “It’s a cathartic experience that I totally love.”