The Sidney Prize is awarded monthly for outstanding investigative journalism that exposes social and economic injustices. Nominations are due by the last day of each month. Past winners have included an essay by Helen Andrews about the cruelty of online harassment, and a report by Overland on the denial of emergency abortion in Georgia.
The prize is named in honour of the late Professor Sir Sidney Cox. It is a scholarship for undergraduate students. The award is administered by a committee, which includes Robert Frost ’96 and A. B. Guthrie as honorary chairmen and Budd Schulberg ’36 as active chairman. The committee also oversees a number of other prizes at the university.
Each year the society awards several prizes to celebrate academic excellence in particular units or programs of study. The university also offers a range of literary prizes that require an application and the submission of written work on a specific topic. All of these awards are offered as a way to both acknowledge student academic achievements and encourage students to develop their writing skills.
Founded in 1927, the Sidney Medal is one of the most prestigious in the history of the University. It is awarded annually to a member of the University community who has achieved distinction in an area of scholarship and has made a significant contribution to the advancement of knowledge. The medal is supported by an endowment from the WC Wentworth Trust Fund.
The winner of the 2023 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize is Annie Zhang, a writer and editor living on unceded Wangal land. Her winning entry, ‘Who Rattles the Night?’, is about a couple who learns to live with ghosts in their new home.
In 1989, a team led by molecular biologist Sidney Altman shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery that RNA (ribonucleic acid) actively aids chemical reactions within cells, which is known as enzymatic activity. Prior to this breakthrough, it was thought that molecules could either carry genetic codes between parts of the cell, or catalyze chemical reactions, but they could not do both.
York University professor Edward Jones-Imhotep has won the 2018 Sidney Edelstein Book Award, the Society for the History of Technology’s most prestigious book prize. The award recognizes distinguished titles that are accessible to both specialists and non-specialists alike.
The Hillman Prize for Professional Ethics is granted to a law student or recent graduate of HLS who has written an original paper on a topic related to the law school experience or the legal profession, including the delivery of legal services, diversity and gender-related issues in the practice of law, the effect of globalization and other social trends upon lawyers and the legal profession, the changing nature of the law profession itself, etc. The winner of the prize will be announced in the fall of each year. The committee reserves the right to divide the prize between two or more entries if the quality of the works is judged to be of equal, high merit.