Keynote Speaker - Dr. David Suzuki
Dr. David Suzuki is one of Canada's most recognizable and beloved public figures. An award-winning scientist, environmentalist, and broadcaster, his television appearances, most notably as host of the internationally-acclaimed The Nature of Things, explain the complexities of the natural sciences in a compelling and easily understood way.

Dr. Suzuki is recognized as a world leader in sustainable ecology and has received the Kalinga Prize for Science, the United Nations Environmental Medal and the Global 500. He has received twelve honorary degrees in Canada, the United States and Australia. He holds an Honours B.A in Biology and a Ph.D., in zoology from the University of Chicago, and is currently Assistant Professor in Zoology at The University of British Columbia and a member of the Sustainable Development Research Institute at that same school.

Dr. David Suzuki has made it his life's work to help humanity understand, appreciate, respect and protect the natural world. He is a gifted interpreter of science and nature. His keynote speeches provide audiences with a compelling look at the state of our environment, underscoring both the successes we have achieved in the battle for environmental sustainability, and the strides we still have to make if Earth will remain a welcoming home for all nature's creatures.

Plenary Speaker - Dr. David Sinclair
Department of Physics, Carleton University and
Deputy Director, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
Other than the photons which make up the light, 99.99999999% of the particles in the universe are thought to be neutrinos. We know very little about these strange particles because they interact very weakly with regular matter. To have any hope of studying these fundamental constituents of matter, scientists need to make very large detectors shielded from the cosmic ray backgrounds by kilometers of rock. This simple fact has led to the construction of a deep underground laboratory near Sudbury known as SNOLAB. The first experiment conducted at the laboratory was aimed at solving the 'Solar Neutrino Problem'. The Sun should be an intense source of neutrinos producing a flux of about 10 11 particles per cm 2 per second at the earth. These neutrinos are created in the nuclear processes which produce the energy that powers the Sun and one would have expected that we could predict this flux if we understood the energy producing processes in the Sun. The first experiments to look for this flux showed, however, that the observed flux was much smaller than expected. The SNO experiment was developed to solve this problem. It took the form of a large heavy water filled detector the size of a 10 storey building, located 2 km underground in Inco's Creighton mine. This experiment successfully solved the mystery by showing that neutrinos actually change their appearance as they travel to the earth. From this scientists can show that the neutrinos must have a small mass and hence critical new information about fundamental science has been obtained. This success has led to many new questions. The neutrinos mass is too small to explain the 'Dark Matter' so what is it? Why do neutrinos have mass but a mass much smaller than any other known particle? Do we owe our existence to special neutrino properties? Can we see the neutrinos produced in the earth and use this to determine the total radioactivity of the earth? These are some of the questions to be probed by new experiments planned for an expanded deep underground laboratory. This talk will outline the scientific motivation for these studies, and discuss some of the unique engineering, technical, and research facility construction challenges that had to be addressed to unlock some of nature's most closely guarded secrets.