- Awards and Distinctions
The Prix Planète are presented to INRS professors who have made outstanding contributions to the development and sharing of scientific knowledge.
The 2025 Award for Excellence in Partnership, Promotion, and Development recognizes Geneviève Bordeleau’s commitment to a project that has generated mutual benefits for both scientists and the community.
A Québec–Madagascar initiative
The project entitled “Rano Madagasikara”: improving the resilience of Malagasy communities to the degradation of drinking water resources and arable land during cyclone season (INRS–INSTN Madagascar collaboration) has earned special recognition for Professor Geneviève Bordeleau, an associate professor at the Eau Terre Environnement Research Centreand expert in isotope geochemistry.
Only 26% of the population in Madagascar has access to drinking water, and waterborne diseases are the second leading cause of infant mortality in the country. With climate change making cyclones more frequent and causing soil degradation, the massive transport and deposition of sediments in waterways and the contamination of flood-prone drinking water sources are real public health issues.
Over a three-year period, Geneviève Bordeleau and her team assessed the impact of flooding on drinking water quality in wells and on land erosion in Madagascar and then made recommendations to better protect resources and public health. The project has achieved many very ambitious goals in terms of raising awareness and involving more than 285 direct beneficiaries, including local and regional water management authorities. In the long term, this achievement will empower the Madagascar communities targeted by the project to implement better water resource management practices.
The INRS 2025 Prix Planète selection committee highlighted the concrete impact of this research partnership between Professor Bordeleau’s team (Emma Mamifarananahary, research officer, Saeid Homayouni, professor, and Voary Rajoelina and Silvère Tsaravola, students) and the National Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology of Madagascar. The user community’s extensive involvement and the numerous knowledge transfer and training initiatives throughout the project were praised, as was the intensive training in advanced techniques provided to a group of 26 university students and environmental professionals in Madagascar.
“How do we adapt science to make it truly useful on emerging issues? That’s what I want to achieve with my team—provide answers to real-life problems, as we have done in Madagascar. We adapted our scientific methodologies to a country that did not have the same conditions as here, but which could greatly benefit from our field of research.”
Geneviève Bordeleau, Associate Professor at the INRS Centre Eau Terre Environnement and Canada Research Chair in Groundwater Protection in a Changing World
Recognizing faculty members’ contributions to the economic, social, and cultural development of society
The Prix Planète celebrates individual or collaborative contributions by faculty members to pursuing the three main pillars of INRS’s mission: fundamental and applied research, graduate training and education, and knowledge and technology transfer.
The Achievement in Partnership, Promotion, and Development Award recognizes one or more major achievements that demonstrate the researcher’s commitment to the community, have contributed to addressing a significant challenge facing society, and have generated mutual benefits for both scientists and partners or the user community. This award comes with a $5,000 research grant.
