Warren Gill Award winners

Dr. Nicholas Blomley, an influential figure in SFU geography, has dedicated 30 years to researching local issues like marginalization, exclusion and poverty. His critical legal geography work has shaped legal discourse, impacting cases on panhandling, homelessness, and bail restrictions.

Dr. Paola Ardiles Gamboa has made a lifelong commitment to deep, impactful and transformational community work. As a social change agent, systems thinker and collaborator, Paola remains deeply committed to a more equal, just and sustainable world through her teaching, research and service contributions.

A foundational principle of Dr. George Nicholas’ work with and for Indigenous communities over the past 30 years has been the belief that heritage is a basic human right and that Indigenous heritage is inseparably linked to issues of identity and rights and title. His journey to decolonize archaeology and other related heritage studies began while teaching at the SFU campus located on the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Indian Reserve in Kamloops (1991–2005) and as founder and Director of SFU’s Indigenous Archaeology program there.

Am Johal, a community convenor, a social connector, a critically-engaged scholar and teacher, and a fiercely supportive and respectful collaborator — Am has been instrumental in articulating and demonstrating what authentic community engagement looks like at SFU.

Dr. Hogg is an internationally renowned HIV researcher, scientific leader, educator and mentor to many of Canada's experts in HIV. He has dedicated his career to working with BC clinicians, community organizations and people living with HIV to find ways to overcome barriers to accessing treatment and to initiate approaches to prevent HIV. His approach has been extra-ordinarily community-oriented and exemplifies SFU's goal of achieving exemplary, high impact, community-engaged teaching and scholarly activity.

Bob has been instrumental in areas of major citizen concern for over three decades, including labour and peace/anti-war movements, human rights issues, environmental/climate justice and media democratization. He has led and engaged with others in critical analysis of political, economic and cultural issues and their effects on poverty, militarization, corporate power, labour rights and environmental degradation.

SFU professor and archaeologist Dana Lepofsky’s commitment to research partnerships with First Nations communities has earned her SFU’s inaugural Warren Gill Award for Community Impact 2017. She has spent more than two decades at SFU. Her teaching and research focus on the relationships of Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples to their environments, in the past and the present.