Congratulations to Professor Monica Boyd who received the Canadian Population Society Award for 2017. The CPS awards this prize once every two years to a Canadian scholar who "has shown outstanding commitment to the profession of demography and whose cumulative work has contributed in important ways to the advancement of the discipline in Canada, through publications, teaching and/or service." In honouring Professor Boyd, the Canadian Population Society recognized her outstanding research, teaching and service contributions over the past four decades.
Professor Boyd is particularly well known for her pioneering work in incorporating an understanding of gender into the field of immigration studies, and for her more recent work on the integration of 1.5 and second generation immigrants. Her 1989 article in the International Migration Review broke new ground by showing the relationship between gender and networks in the migration process. This continues to be a widely-read and cited article and Professor Boyd has developed an international reputation as an expert in the gendered dimensions of international migration. Professor Boyd's more recent work has had a significant impact on our understanding of the socioeconomic achievements of people who migrate as children (the 1.5 generation) and those who are the children of migrants (the second generation). Her finding that visible minority immigrant children in Canada - unlike in the United States - do not have lower educational attainments than their non-migrant peers demonstrates the importance of institutional setting and historical contexts for understanding patterns of immigrant integration.
In addition to her research, the CPS award also recognizes Professor Boyd's extensive service to the profession. She recently served in elected positions as the President of Academy II of the Royal Society (Vice President of the RSC), the President of the Canadian Sociological Association and the chair of the International Migration section of the American Sociological Association. From 1988-1990 she served as President of the Canadian Population Society, and has also recently served as Associate Editor of the premier journal of International Migration, the International Migration Review. For three decades, Professor Boyd was a member of the National Statistics Council, the Advisory Board to the Chief Statistician of Canada and has been sought out by the United Nations for her expertise as a migration scholar.
The honour is no surprise to the many students and faculty members here who have benefited over the years from working with Professor Boyd. She has already received a teaching award for her contributions to undergraduate education and earlier this year received the department's graduate faculty mentoring award. This is also not the first scholarly organization to recognize Professor Boyd's contributions to the field. She held a Canada Research Chair for fourteen years, was named a Fellow for the Royal Society of Canada in 1997 and received a Outstanding Contribution Award from the Canadian Sociological Association in 2015.