Beyond $1 billion in philanthropic giving: Naomi Azrieli and the Azrieli Foundation’s latest gift helps Canada’s great emerging scientists
Lifestyles Magazine/Meaningful Influence exclusive cover subject Naomi Azrieli has always been more interested in what’s about to happen than in what’s already been done.
For her, the most exciting point in a scientist’s life isn’t the prize at the end.
It’s the start, when an idea is new, the lab is small, and the future could still go a number of ways.
So it fits that her family’s foundation has just made a $5.3 million gift to endow and name the Azrieli Gairdner Early Career Investigator Awards.
It is the first Gairdner award focused specifically on emerging researchers based in Canada.
The gift joins two old commitments to excellence.
Since 1957, the Gairdner Foundation has honored discoveries that change how we understand and treat disease.
Of the 443 Canada Gairdner Awards given to scientists from more than 40 countries, 105 recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.
The new awards bring young investigators into that circle while they are still building their careers.
They will present their work alongside internationally renowned scientists and meet leaders who can shape what comes next.
The endowment means the support will last, and it’s meant to help Canada develop its scientific talent and keep it at home.
“We believe supporting early-career researchers is one of the most important ways to strengthen the Canadian research ecosystem,” says Dr. Azrieli, who chairs the Azrieli Foundation.
“There could be no better partner than the Gairdner Foundation, whose longstanding commitment to excellence in science makes this initiative especially meaningful.” Dr. Morag Park, the Gairdner’s President and Scientific Director, puts it from the scientists’ side.
Building an independent research career is hard, she notes, and “recognition and access to opportunities at this stage make a lasting difference.”
To understand why this matters to the Azrieli family, start with Naomi’s father.
David J. Azrieli was 17 when war came to Poland.
He escaped east and made a long, dangerous journey that eventually brought him to what would become Israel.
He lost his parents, his sister, and most of his brothers along the way.
He later settled in Canada and became an architect and developer whose buildings changed city skylines.
He and his wife, Stephanie, decided early that most of what they built would go back to the world.
More than 35 years ago, he founded the Azrieli Foundation around the causes closest to him: education, Israel, the Jewish people and remembering the Holocaust.
Naomi took the helm in 2005.
One of her first moves was to honor her father’s story directly.
Since then, the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program has published more than 130 survivor accounts and given away more than a million books to Canadian classrooms.
She also brought rigor and focus.
She narrowed the foundation’s priorities and built real expertise in each one, and she made it a hands-on partner rather than just a source of cheques.
Under her leadership, it has grown into Canada’s largest non-corporate public foundation. Its cumulative giving has passed $1 billion, with more than $150 million a year going out in each of the last two years.
It is now the country’s third-largest funder of neuroscience.
The neuroscience work comes from a personal place.
“Several members of my family have neurodevelopmental conditions, and that motivated us to look for ways to make a difference,” she has said.
She and her sisters, Sharon and Danna, saw how underfunded the field was and how much good the right investment could do.
That conviction led to the Azrieli Accelerator at the University of Calgary, the Azrieli Centre for Autism Research at the Montreal Neurological Institute, adult neurodevelopmental care at CAMH, and the Azrieli Institute for Brain and Neural Sciences at the Weizmann Institute.
Naomi also chairs Brain Canada.
Meanwhile, Sharon, a soprano, created the Azrieli Music Prizes, now among the world’s most generous awards for composition.
Through it all, Naomi has kept coming back to people at the beginning of their careers.
Her family’s foundation runs the Azrieli Fellows Program, one of Israel’s most prestigious fellowships for rising academic leaders.
It also co-created the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars Program and the Future Leaders in Canadian Brain Research program.
The Gairdner awards fit that pattern: find people early, believe in them, and give them a seat at the table before the world catches up.
This year she handed day-to-day leadership to a new CEO and moved into an expanded role as Chair, focused on long-term vision and the partnerships she has spent two decades building.
“All philanthropy begins from the heart,” she likes to say.
For a family whose story began with survival and loss, that heart has always looked forward.
With this latest gift, it now backs the young Canadians whose best work may still be ahead of them.