2024 brought changes to the staff here at the Department of Chemistry, including the addition of a number of new faces in the Business and Academic offices as well as in Chemistry IT Services and the labs. Among the new arrivals who support our undergraduate students are our Lab Technician Dr. Charlie Kivi, and Undergraduate Course Administrator Giuseppe Bellissimo, both of whom kindly shared a little about themselves and the journey that brought them to the University of Toronto.
Charlie Kivi
I completed my HBSc at the University of Ottawa (2011) and came to the University of Toronto for my PhD. I studied under Professor Datong Song researching Metal-Organic Frameworks of Pyrazolate Derivatives. During my PhD I developed a keen interest in both science outreach, becoming the co-organizer of the Science Rendezvous Chemistry Pavilion, and science education, particularly lab instruction.
After defending in 2017, I joined Phycus Biotechnologies, a local startup, as a Process Chemist developing the company's product purification technology. Around the same time, I started sessional teaching. First at the University of Toronto and later also at Trent and Lakehead Universities. I transitioned to a consulting/part time role at Phycus in 2022 to accept a 1-year contract as an Engineering Outreach Coordinator at Ontario Tech University so I could be closer to my family. After completing my contract, I focused on sessional teaching and jumped at this opportunity to join the University of Toronto community full time in my current role as a Laboratory Technician with a focus on Curriculum Development and Lab Renewal.
At present, I have been investigating how to remove halogenated solvents from our undergraduate courses. I am also actively updating different experiments for our first, second, and third year labs to make them more interesting for students and better aligned with the curriculum. I am hoping that as more instructors become aware of my role that I can not only help them improve their courses, but also assist them through the delivery of in-class chemistry demonstrations. I am also still occasionally teaching, so odds are good you'll meet me in some capacity if you're an undergraduate in our department.
The best thing about my role is I get to interact with our excellent staff, instructors, and students on a daily basis. There are some wonderful people here!
Giuseppe Bellissimo
I started my time at the University of Toronto in 2023 working for the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and then moved on to the Department of Chemistry in time for the Fall 2024 term. As Undergraduate Course Administrator, I help the teaching teams of some of the largest courses in the Department of Chemistry with enrolment, student communications, data entry, exam organization, Quercus administration and records management.
Here at the Department of Chemistry, you might run into me if you take one of the courses I help administrate on the St. George campus, like CHM135H, CHM136H, CHM220H, CHM223H or CHM247H. You might be surprised by the sheer size of some of these courses; in particular, CHM135H and CHM136 have nearly 2000 students each, so they operate on a massive scale with multiple lecturers, dozens of TAs, and support from many different staff and faculty members across the Department of Chemistry. Scanning test papers alone for this many students can easily take up a whole day!
I've been working on-and-off in post-secondary education in some capacity since 2014, in fields like student aid administration, human resources, exam invigilation, program coordination and even budgeting. I have always found universities to be exciting, dynamic and supportive places to work, and the University of Toronto is no exception!