36 BCBusiness march 2018 adam BlasBerg
"We've had huge gains in durability since
I've started, and I think I played a role in
that," she says of Ballard, which has 630
employees and contractors worldwide
and sells its products everywhere from
the U.S. to China. Besides leading the com-
pany's research, she works with its univer-
sity partners, "trying to foster and grow
the academic fuel cell activities in Canada,
but more focused on B.C. in terms of sup-
porting fuel cell commercialization."
The Vancouver Island native, who
was raised not to believe in gender-
based roles, says there's still a percep-
tion that women must work harder to
succeed equally in traditionally male
careers. "Because of that, sometimes
the promotion path can be a bit slower,"
says Knights, who gives many keynote
speeches on fuel cell technoloy and is
an industry reviewer for the U.S. Depart-
ment of Enery's Annual Merit Review
of hydrogen and fuel cell projects. "A
woman may be more likely to drop into
an alternate career path where they can
succeed more easily." —N.R.
hOW CAn We GeT mORe WOmen inTO sTem?
Besides creating female role models through men-
toring, it's crucial to raise awareness of the benefits
that women bring, knights says. studies show that
companies with more female executives do bet-
ter financially, she observes. "teams with women
tend to be more innovative, more creative and
high-performing."
BiOTeChnOLOGy
JuLiA Levy
Co-founder, QLT
At 83, Julia Levy is a towering ‹gure in
B.C.'s business and scienti‹c communi-
ties. In 1981 the microbiologist founded
what was later called
QLT Inc. with four
male colleagues, after one of them told
her that the Vancouver biotechnoloy
company needed the antibody technol-
oy she had developed at her
UBC lab.
Over the next two decades, with Levy
as chief scienti‹c o¤cer and then presi-
dent and
CEO, QLT developed Visudyne,
a novel drug for age-related macular
degeneration, and took it to market. At
its peak, the company was treating some
500,000 patients a year and posting
more than US$600 million in revenue.
"We were lucky," says the plain-
spoken Levy in her apartment overlook-
ing Stanley Park. "We had the ‹rst treat-
ment ever for this ocular condition. We'd
already struggled; we'd been in existence
for 20 years before we had that success,
and we made plenty of mistakes in the
early years. But if you're going to prog-
ress, you learn from those mistakes."
Levy, who came to Vancouver from
Singapore during the Second World War,
says she decided early on not to be a kept
woman. Her example was her mother,
who had to work because Levy's father
LASTING LEGACy
As a scientist and CEO,
microbiologist Julia Levy
blazed a trail for B.C.
women in biotech
