Since 1990
Faculty
This past decade and more has seen quite a change in the Department. We finally got Ken Storey as an official member of the Department in 1991, and he was joined in 1992 by Wayne Wang. Other new additions to the Department are Bob Burk – who had been on staff as a lecturer – then David Miller as holder of an NSERC Research Chair, Sundararajan who also holds an NSERC Industrial Chair, and then Sean Barry. A bit later we added Anatoli Ianoul, then Maria DeRosa and most recently Jeff Manthorpe. Maria is unique in being the first woman member of the Faculty. Bob Burk and Maria are the first Ph.D. graduates of this Department to join the Faculty. (Bryan Hollebone was the first Honours graduate to join the Faculty)
This same period saw several retirements – first Don Wiles and then Chakrabarti, both of whom have continued to be active in their retirement; John ApSimon hadn’t been very close to the Department recently, and retired as Vice President (Research). Stan Tsai and Bob Wightman retired, but both have continued for a year or two since then. Don Wigfield retired and left for British Columbia. Peeter Kruus retired but kept on for only a few months before he died from a severe cancer. Ron Shigeishi retired. Bryan Hollebone left in 2006.
Pam Wolff has been taken on as Lecturer, doing mostly the Q-year courses and Environmental Science courses.
Ted Edwards (Dr.E.O Edwards) was a prominent organic chemist at NRC when John ApSimon came from Wales as a Post Doc with Ted. Not long afterward, John ApSimon came to Carleton. A few decades later, Ted retired and came to work in John’s lab on the fourth floor of Steacie. Quietly helping any student who came by, Ted displayed a dignity and quiet enthusiasm that made him come to be loved by all. He finally left in 2006 and died in early 2007. A Scholarship has been established in his memory.
Ron Shigeishi became Chairman in 1987 and was succeeded by Jim Wright in 1994. Gerry Buchanan became Chairman in 1997 and stayed until 2006. He was succeeded by Bob Burk in July 2006.
Faculty Retirements: Wiles retired in 1990, Barradas in 1993 Hollebone in 2005, Shigeishi in 2005, Wightman in 2006 and Buchanan in 2008.
Staff
Karl retired in about 1995, Wayne retired in 2005, Lothar in 200X.
In Stores there have been major changes.Karl was replaced by Robert Kehl who had no understanding of chemistry and no sense of history. Many important things were thrown out. It was then decided that this should be the Stores for the College of Natural Sciences, so everything was here – leaving little room for Chemicals. Robert was replaced by Tanya Rudd, who left on maternity leave occasionally, to be replaced by S Chandrabose, Barb Gauthier, Kim Lao and others.
During Buchanan’s tenure, Chris White (PhD with Crutchley) was appointed as Departmental Administrator. He was very good. He left after a year or so to become the University Safety Officer, and then left to go to the University of Guelph as Safety Officer. He was replaced by Peter Mosher (MSc with Crutchley). Peter is low key and very good somewhat reminiscent of Bob Jones.
Department Research
The Department’s research has been very active on the part of several individuals. Jim Wright’s Computational Chemistry has apparently taken off and has become quite popular. Buchanan, Lai, Chak, Buist and Crutchley have been steady, Bob Burk’s CAEC lab has had a number of excellent students. Wayne Wang’s lab has grown to be a strong presence in the Department. David Miller has assembled a very active group of students, and Sundararajan’s small group seems very active.
Buchanan’s interests evolved into more biochemical/biomedical areas coinciding with the arrival of PhD student Gerald McManus from Bishops University in 1996: We looked at some sucrose polyesters which were being used as calorie free fat substitutes by Proctor and Gamble. We examined the interactions of these materials with biological membranes using deuterium labeled compounds and solid state 2H NMR. Since these compounds pass unchanged through the human gastrointestinal tract, we felt they would be good candidates as imaging agents in the exciting new area of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), provided that we could put in some contrasting nucleus to the normal 1H used in conventional MRI. The nucleus was 19F and with the excellent synthetic expertise of Majid Rastegar and Rufus Smits, we were able to synthesize a series of highly fluorinated sucrose polyesters such as sucrose octaoleate-F104. In 2007, with the collaboration of Igor Moudrakouski at NRC, we obtained some beautiful 19F MRI images of vesicles of sucrose octaoleate-F104, with a timescale of a few seconds. These results clearly demonstrated the potential of these compounds for use in functional imaging and I am presently pursuing their commercial application.
MORE
The recent group of younger scientists, Sean Barry, Anatoli Ianoul and Maria de Rosa in Nanotech and Jeff Manthorpe in Organic Chemistry will set the tone in Departmental research before long. The Department was honoured recently when Maria was named winner of the Polanyi award for promising young researchers.
Sponsored Laboratories
The Centre for Analytical and Environmental Chemistry was created in 1991 with the help of Varian Canada, who donated or supplied at reduced costs, various pieces of analytical equipment. These included GC. GC/MS, and HPLC systems. Although the Centre ceased to exist in 2006, Varian continues to sponsor the Varian lecture and the Varian Scholarship.
Wang’s Lab MORE
Research Equipment
Chakrabarti’s Analytical laboratory has added considerably to the Department’s list of expensive equipment: a high-resolution and high-sensitivity digital camera for photographing high-speed sequences of atom-formation and atom-dissipation processes, a Class-1000 clean-room facility and a Microwave Digestion Facility; equipment for determining the TOC & DOC of natural waters; late versions of graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrophotometers and several other important units most of which are of use specifically for speciation in natural waters.
Major NMR spectrometers
1991: Bruker AMX-400 (University purchase)
2003: Bruker AC 300 (NSERC Grant to ZY Wang et al)
2008: Bruker 400 MHz upgrade (NSERC Grant to J. Manthorpe et al)
MORE
Courses
There has been a strong emphasis on environmental components of the teaching, and this has led to the development of environmental courses. Peeter Kruus was the strongest proponent of this move, to be followed by Bob Burk and others. New courses were added: 65-480 Atmospheric Chemistry and 65-280 Environmental Chemistry are prominent among these.
Program Developments
In about 2004 the computer experts decided to change the courses, to make them all half courses and to change their numbers. Some feel that this was a stupid thing to let an American computer program tell us how to organize our courses.
The addition of Biochemistry and Biotechnology a few years ago has led to a major shift in the apparent interests of the students, while Geochemistry fails to attract many.
At one stage in about 1998 it was decided to abandon some of the Departmental independence and create a College of Natural Science. This would, it was claimed, save resources that were being duplicated. Don Wigfield became the Director of this College, and then Bob Burk followed. While this College did function, it didn’t save as much as was hoped. The new President David Atkinson dissolved the College and reinstated the Departments as they had been. This meant that we now have regained the services of Marilyn Stock, and added Chantelle Gravelle.
The Institute
The Ottawa-Carleton Institute continued with shared seminars and exchanged courses. Research collaboration has not been strong.
Fundamental Directions
It hasalways bothered me that e have almost never seen two faculty members as co-authors on a paper. This, I believe, stems from Jim Holmes’ philosohpy of having a broad coverage of the field of Chemistry, rather than focusing on a few specialties. To Jim, the broad undergraduate program was paramount and, while other departments may have built up strengths in special areas, our department seems to have maintained the practice of broad coverage. This left gaps between one professor and another such that research collaboration ws difficult and was not encouraged. Cooper Langford may have attempted to bridge some of these gaps, but his approach stepped on some toes and the attempt was at best sporadic. With such a small department it wold have been difficult to focus on some areas without becooming very thin in others, but I now suspect that the practice of broad coverage has become so ingrained that it is not likely to be reversed in the near future. In a way, it is a good thing that each member of the faculty can go in his own direction without constraint but, at the same time, a degree of closer mutual assistance might be better for everyone. We see that in some other departments specialty factions ccan build up and lead to serious difficulties later.
The Future
I can see that the Department will remain small and not outstanding until we are able to get a Chairman who is able to act as Head, and who has the backing of the Dean. When this is achieved, the Department Head will be able to lead the Department in selected directions and build up collective strengths that we now lack. This will anger some whose per projects are not supported, but it may build strength and reputation beyond what any one individual is likely to achieve. Through all this, however, I see that undergraduate excellence can andmust be maintained.
NOTE: It seems, in the last very few years, that this new trend is being approached and perhaps achieved. See Chapter 8 for more.
Books Published
The Chemistry of Art and Artifacts, Donald R. Wiles
Interscience, 1993
An Introduction to Computational Biochemistry. C.S.Tsai
Wiley-Liss, 2002
The Chemistry of Nuclear Fuel Waste Disposal. Donald R. Wiles
Presses Polytechnic, 2003
Note added by Ron Shigeishi:
[T]he most excruciating period for me and the department came in late 1996 and the spring of 1997 when van Loon and the administration undertook to assess the academic merit and financial viability of departments under the aegis of the Senate Academic Planning Committee with the view to academic restructuring i.e. cutting programs that scored badly. Just prior to this in 1996 all science departments underwent an external review of their research and graduate programs at the request of the Dean of Graduate Studies, John ApSimon. The result for Chemistry which came out in November 1996 was a very poor assessment.
It was unfortunate that the report was sent to van Loon by Jim Wright without any attempt at gathering statistics for a rebuttal because it really established a very negative view of Chemistry in the minds of senior administration. In January 1997 we had to submit a report to SPAC outlining our academic merit in the overall exercise to determine which if any programs were redundant. Jim Wright wrote a draft outlining that Chemistry was a central science and that chemistry courses were vital to other programs. I completely disagreed with this approach and tried to show the department that we needed a hard nosed report based on statistics that we were academically sound – he eventually agreed.
When everyone finally realized that our programs were seriously at risk the entire department became mobilized. Wright, Buchanan, Wigfield, Crutchley.myself and others spent a lot of effort gathering statistics to show our academic respectability and Jim and I wrote the report which tried to counteract the negative impression from the external review. I’m not sure how well this report was received but in March departments were required to appear before SAPC [all the senior administration] to present their academic and financial status and future plans. For chemistry, financial plans were extremely important since Chemistry had a very negative income to cost ratio compared to most other departments. By early March we received definite signals that Chemistry was at serious risk.
We had numerous special departmental meetings about the best way to avoid program cuts and Buchanan, Wright and I went into overdrive in making our case. We went over again and again all the statistics to verify our academic merit, both at the undergraduate and graduate level and proposed new programs and initiatives to increase enrollment.
But I think the most crucial point was that Jim outlined how the department was going to save money via staff and faculty reductions [Wightman would retire] possible lab cuts, other cost cutting measures and possible revenue enhancing proposals. We then each wrote up sections that we would present to SPAC. By then, however, it was known that Buchanan was to be the next Chairman so instead of all three of us making parts of the presentation I thought it was more appropriate for Jim and Gerry to do it and I would be there as back up. The presentations took place in the week of March 17 1997. After the first day, the Dean of Science, Peter Watson, reported to us that the senior administration was really put off by departments that simply stated that they had academic merit and that things were fine. On Tuesday, March 18 we made our case in Senate Chambers before SPAC. We were hugely relieved by the congratulations we received for our realistic presentation and later we received official notice from SAPC that our plans were accepted and that “the Joint Committte was impressed by your presentation and plans and will recommend to the Dean of Science that this format be used by the other units in the Faculty of Science”.
In December 1997 we did see how serious the exercise was. In that historic Senate meeting of Friday December 5 1997 when Senate members had to prove their identity to enter the chambers, Physics was the first of 8 programs cut by Senate.