Derek H. Page to receive TAPPI Gunnar Nicholson Gold Medal.

The 2005 TAPPI Gunnar Nicholson Gold Medal will be awarded to Dr. Derek H. Page at the TAPPI Annual Meeting and Awards Ceremony in Tampa, Florida on February 23, 2005. The Gunnar Nicholson Gold Medal Award is the highest honor that the Association can bestow upon an individual. It is granted to those who have made preeminent scientific and engineering achievements of proven commercial benefit to the world's pulp, paper, board and forest product industries.

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A native of Sheffield, England, Page received his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees in physics from Gonville & Caius College in Cambridge, England. Following a two-year spell in industry, he joined the British Paper and Board Industry Research Association, (now PIRA), in 1955 and began his research into the structure and properties of paper. Page immigrated to Canada in 1964 to join the Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada, (PAPRICAN). He served as Director of the Materials Science Division and then Director of Research, Physical Sciences. Upon his retirement from PAPRICAN in 1993, Page took a part-time position at IPST with the title of Distinguished Professor of Physics and retired from this position in 2003. He is currently a consultant to the industry and Scientific Editor of the Journal of Pulp and Paper Science, which, with the support of PAPTAC, he founded in 1983.

During his career, Page has made an unparalleled contribution to the pulp and paper industry. Since 1955 he has led multidisciplinary teams working on the physics of paper properties, pioneering the use of tools such as microscopy and image analysis as recorded in his over 100 scientific articles. His work has always been characterized by a search for mechanisms that relate fiber and paper structure to properties, a search for quantitative relationships arising from those mechanisms and finally the practical application of what has been found. As a consequence his basic scientific work has had widespread application in the industry. He is probably best know for the "Page Equation" for the tensile strength of paper which has been used in many industrial applications to correct for inadequate strength properties. His pioneering work on fiber curl, its measurement, its mechanism of creation and removal, has been applied to solving problems ranging from chemical pulp refining, to TMP storage, to tissue production.

Page has served the TAPPI membership in many capacities, most notably as a founding member, in 1963, and, since then, as a continuing member of the TAPPI Paper Physics Committee. He served as its chairman and helped organize many of the early conferences on Paper Physics and for several years taught the TAPPI Paper Physics and Papermaking Practices Short Course.

Page has received numerous honors and awards throughout his career. He received the 1972 TAPPI Research and Development Division Award and the 1995 TAPPI Paper and Board Manufacture Division Technical Award, making him one of a very few individuals to receive two different TAPPI Division Technical Awards. In recognition of his outstanding service to the industry, Page was named a TAPPI Fellow in 1976. In 1999 he was awarded the John S. Bates Memorial Gold Medal, the highest honor granted by the Pulp and Paper Technical Association of Canada (PAPTAC). In 2003 he was elected to the prestigious Paper Industry Hall of Fame. In 2004 he was awarded the Silver Jubilee Medal by the British Technical Association, (PITA).