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Is modern-day academia true to the “ivory tower” cliché? A new generation of leaders push against such conventional wisdom by emphasizing the bridges that universities and their doctoral programs can build across resources and expertise. Through their academic work, Bailey Gerrits, a 2015 Trudeau scholar, and Ashley Whillans actively counter the premise that research universities are solely responsible for knowledge-creation and diffusion.

“I’m sure that other scholars feel the same way I do, about their own mentor,” says Andrea Marston. “But I really feel that mine’s the best.”

Andrea Marston was awarded a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation scholarship in April 2014. Her scholarship application, written in the fall of 2013, states her career goals unequivocally: “My aim is to work as a university professor in a Canadian institution in order to relate community reactions to resource extraction in Latin America to those in Canada.” By the time the Foundation assigned Andrea a mentor, though, she had become curious about non-academic opportunities as well. And Jean Lebel responded whole-heartedly.

Until recently, Canadian judges’ apprehension of prison administrators’ work was characterized by a “hands-off” doctrine. This allowed government officials to downplay the persistence of solitary confinement and segregation in prisons. By ruling against Correctional Service Canada on 17 January 2018, the British Columbia Supreme Court relegated decades of conventional practice to the past. “The decision is a tour de force on the history of the penitentiary and the practice and effects of solitary confinement, in Canada and internationally,” commented Lisa Kerr in an opinion piece published in The Globe and Mail. Lisa Kerr is a 2012 Trudeau scholar and an assistant professor of law at Queen’s University.