Toronto, ON, Mar 15 -- Richard `Dick' Bond, University Professor, Director of the CIAR Cosmology & Gravity Program, and Director of CITA from 1996 to 2006, has won Canada's top Science and Engineering Prize, the 2007 Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal. Named for Canadian Nobel laureate Gerhard Herzberg, the annual prize is widely recognized as the country's most prestigious science award. Dick Bond will be honoured by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) next Monday, March 19 in Ottawa. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2005, and is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and of Canada. With more than 12,000 citations, Bond is Canada's most highly cited astronomer.

``We are very proud of Dick's achievements'', says Norm Murray, CITA Director. ``The citation acknowledged not just Dick's own work, but his work on building and promoting science, astronomy and cosmology in particular, across Canada throughout his career.'' Bond promoted CITA's mandate for a pan-Canadian approach to world-class science, attracting postdoctoral students from across Canada and the world.

For more than 25 years, Bond's research has provided important insights into the deep questions science poses about the origin, history and nature of the universe. By listening to the cosmic ``music'' encoded in the cosmic microwave background radiation (the oldest light in the Universe that is detectable by current telescopes), he has found ways to learn details of the events just after the Big Bang that gave the universe its current structure.

``When I entered the subject in the early 1980s, I thought it was a bit flaky because it wasn't very precise. What has happened throughout my career is that we've seen cosmology through to this remarkably high precision field. We're going right out to the edge of the universe and determining things to an enormous degree of accuracy,'' says Prof. Bond.

At the time in the early 1980s, there were many who doubted it would ever be possible to record these very tiny 14 billion-year-old cosmic birthing sounds. But in 2000, the Boomerang Mission changed naysayers into CMB enthusiasts. Capping off a decade of increasingly technically sophisticated detections, the 10-day Boomerang balloon experiment flown over Antarctica, of which Prof. Bond was the lead theoretician, captured an exquisite acoustic ``snap shot'' of our Universe's first light.

Through a combination of theoretical and experimental work, Bond has explored the origin of large-scale structure in the universe, with special attention to dark matter - a major component of the universe that cannot be observed directly but can be detected by its gravitational effect. Over the years he has helped develop cosmology into an increasingly precise science for mapping the size, shape and age of the universe.

Lev Kofman, Associate Director of CITA, was very pleased that Bond was honored for his work. ``I am very happy for Dick, for CITA, and for Canadian cosmology'', said Kofman. ``This is a great recognition for the achievement of all of them and there could not have been a better person.''

About the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. The Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) is a world-class, nationally supported, research center for studies in theoretical astrophysics and related subjects hosted by the University of Toronto. The primary missions of CITA are to foster interaction within the Canadian theoretical astrophysics community and to serve as an international center of excellence for theoretical studies in astrophysics. CITA receives research support from a collaborative special project grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), as well as the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR). More information about CITA and the work of its researchers is available at http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/