London - The careers of 15 PhD students changed dramatically yesterday thanks to $2.7 million worth of scholarships bestowed upon them by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. And Jeremy Schmidt, a doctoral student in the Department of Geography at The University of Western Ontario, was one of those whose lives changed.

Schmidt's research focuses on recent calls of global experts who argue that the growing water crisis is rooted in a systematic failure to connect water policy and management to ethics. To this end, Schmidt conceptualizes, and makes operational, a new ethic for water by uniting three domains: political economy, environmental management and ethics. Drawing on the pragmatist ideas of Jürgen Habermas and Aldo Leopold, his research represents some of the first empirical work on ethics and water policy in Alberta; a land-locked province where climate change, evolving social values and policy reforms all affect limited water resources.

A former whitewater kayak guide and forestry firefighter, Schmidt's personal experiences with water inform his work as the national chair of the Canadian Water Resources Association's Student and Young Professionals organization.

At present, he is involved with Canadian water experts and emerging leaders in projects assessing Canadian water education and in developing a national water strategy.

Under the direction of an international advisory board, Schmidt is co-editing a new book on water and ethics. The volume compares the main ethical traditions in water policy, their expression in different global locales and their positions on issues such as legal pluralism, religion, human rights, common property, privatization, and ethics in complex systems.

The annual $60,000 bursaries, for up to four years, subsidize tuition fees and living expenses and allow the Scholars to travel for research and scholarly networking and knowledge dissemination. The Trudeau Scholarships are the most generous awards of their kind in Canada.