UWindsor students captured a number of awards at the 2024 Canadian Society for Chemistry conference in Winnipeg.

Two undergraduates won prizes for their research posters: Jonathan Houser in the Bio-organic and Medicinal Chemistry Division and Liz Sylvestre in the Organic Chemistry Division.

This coincided seamlessly with professor John Trant’s talk at the conference on getting undergraduate students involved in research. The Trant team lab comprises around 80 post-graduate and undergraduate researchers.

“This makes us, to my knowledge, the home of the largest number of concurrent undergraduate researchers of any group in Canada,” Dr. Trant said. “Despite this, we don’t do undergraduate research; instead, our undergraduates do research. This distinction is essential.

“In an increasingly globalized competitive environment, it is essential that we provide value-added education. Centering research does this, and it can be scaled to provide students with an unmatched educational opportunity.”

Four graduate students excelled as well:

• Pavel Shelyganov received the Inorganic Division Graduate Student Poster Award
• Azam Mohammadzadeh won a Bio-organic and Medicinal Chemistry Division graduate poster prize
• Will Hosie won a Materials Chemistry Division oral presentation prize
• Samra Khan won the Entrepreneurship Hack-a-thon

A PhD candidate, Khan says the Hack-a-thon was a great experience where she could see first-hand the power of teamwork and leadership, and how entrepreneurship is at core of science and advancement.

“It was a like being in real-world think tank, where small groups of chemists were challenged with addressing a real-world problem and pitching solutions,” says Khan.

“Our team decided to concentrate on a specific aspect of the global issue: the microbial contamination of water after treatment plants, which affects 20 per cent of Indigenous communities in northern Manitoba.”

She says the problem was outside her field of medicinal chemistry cancer research, but entrepreneurship brings creative solutions and solving problems is chemistry’s second nature — “so they really go nicely together!”