2026 WICTO Symposium: Connecting Through Chemistry
On February 7, 2026, WICTO hosted our fourth annual WICTO Symposium: Connecting Through Chemistry in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology at the University of Toronto St. George campus. More than 120 undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows from chemistry and STEM departments across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) participated in this event! The symposium was designed to provide accessible professional development opportunities to students through a day of workshops, learning about equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), sharing research, and networking. To foster a broader sense of community, the symposium brought together students from many institutions in the GTA, including the University of Toronto (UofT) from all three campuses (UTSG, UTSC, and UTM), York University (YorkU), Trent University, Ontario Tech University, and McMaster University.
The Symposium started with a plenary lecture by Dr Kalaichelvi Saravanamuttu and Dr Rodrigo Narro Pérez. Dr Saravanamuttu is the Associate Dean of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Indigeneity for McMaster University’s Faculty of Science and leads efforts to integrate anti-racist and equity-centered practices into policy, curriculum, and community engagement. Dr Pérez is a scholar and educator at McMaster University deeply committed to advancing equity, diversity, and anti-racism within academic science and beyond. He has been actively involved in initiatives that make the connections between science, race, and inclusion visible, including serving as a convener for the Race, Racialization and Racism Working Group and community roles such as board membership with Hamilton’s Anti-Racism Resource Centre. In their talk, Dr Saravanamuttu and Dr Pérez shared the Anti-Racism, Inclusion and Equity (ARIE) in Science Certificate employed for undergraduate students at McMaster. This certificate provides students with skills, knowledge, and opportunities to actively engage with these topics within the context of science fields and its disciplines.
Following the morning plenary lecture, Dr Alisha Szozda, a postdoctoral fellow from Carleton University, delivered a professional development workshop on “EDI Tools for Transforming Chemistry Research and STEM Practices,” which offered practical tools to support chemists in learning how to incorporate EDI into their chemistry research and other professional STEM activities. During this workshop, attendees participated in a hands-on activity with SOCKit, a system-mapping tool, to learn how to engage in systems thinking by considering the environmental justice implications of their chemistry research. The workshop concluded with practical resources that support evidence-based STEM practices and broader systemic change, drawing on expertise from the EDIT-STEM initiative at Carleton University, a multidisciplinary research collaboration focused on addressing EDI challenges in STEM.
Our Symposium subsequently featured a career panel focused on industry professionals consisting of Dr Jolie Lam, Research Scientist at Skin Creative at BIC, Dr Nana-Owusua Kwamena, Director of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Dr Vera Kovacevic, Editor-In-Chief of Xtalks, and Cindy Ma, Medical Editor in various healthcare agencies and pharmaceutical organizations. Each panelist gave a brief introduction about themselves, their educational background, and their current career. Symposium attendees had the opportunity to ask panelists questions about their careers, work/life balance, advice for students, and more. Lunch was served directly after the career panel, which allowed attendees to mingle and network with the panelists in a casual and informal setting.
Proceeding the lunch break was our second professional development workshop “Making Visually Effective Presentations” created by Sofia Michailovich and delivered by Christine Hood from the Tran group at UofT. This workshop guides participants on how to improve delivering presentations by optimizing figures and utilising colours and shapes effectively on slides.
The afternoon session also included a talk by Dr Krystal Nunes on Pedagogy Research Group, where she discussed experiencing failures and setbacks in academia, such as the development of evidence-based classroom interventions and assessments to support student resilience and productive engagement with failure. During her discussion, she draws on her experience and observations on teaching first-year undergraduate students as an Assistant Professor at the Toronto Metropolitan University and concludes with a workshop series tailored to support science students, such as Normalizing Failure in Science, Cognitive Reframing and Attribution, Emotional Regulation and more.
Our programming concluded with a teaching panel featuring teaching stream professors and educators in universities and high schools: Dr Kylie Luksha from UofT, Jennifer Howell from Elmwood School, Aya Sakaya from UofT, Dr Jessical D’eon from UofT, and David Armstrong from UTM. Each panelist described their career pathways to reach their current teaching position. Attendees were then able to ask questions about their teaching philosophies, challenges in teaching, advice to aspiring educators, and more.
Our attendees then relocated to the Davenport Atrium in Lash Miller Chemical Laboratories for our poster session, which featured fifteen graduate students across the GTA showcasing their current research in all fields of chemistry, including chemistry education. All posters were also evaluated by a panel of judges for the Canadian Journal of Chemistry’s Best Student Presentation Award. Two poster presenters were selected: Olivia Driessen and Sushrut Lamsal from UofT. Two presenters were also awarded the People’s Choice Poster Presentation Award, based on votes submitted by attendees: Farnaz Rezaei from YorkU and Kira Boutilier-Young from UofT. Congratulations to all winners!
WICTO would like to thank all of our fantastic partners and sponsors for supporting and funding this event. We are grateful to the University of Toronto Department of Chemistry and Grad Office, Accelerated Consortium, Canadian Journal of Chemistry, Canadian Society for Molecular Biosciences (CSMB), Working Towards Inclusivity in Chemistry at York University (WICYU), Ontario Tech-Trent Working for Inclusivity in Chemistry (OTT-WIC), and Inwit. We would also like to thank all of our attendees, flash talk judges, speakers, workshop presenters, and alumni who took part in this event. We are blown away by the positive feedback that we received and we look forward to connecting the Toronto chemistry community through this symposium for years to come!
Blog post written by Jenny Oh