Chemistry students receive accolades at national conference

VIU Chemistry students Simon Maguire, Lily Eggert and Trevor Michalchuk snagged top honors during a national chemistry conference this summer.

Simon won an undergraduate poster award and Lily and Trevor received student presenter awards for their talks. They earned the awards at the Environmental Chemistry Division of the Canadian Society of Chemistry conference in Winnipeg this summer. The conference aims to bring people together to embrace learning exchange ideas, advance careers and the chemistry profession.

“Congratulations to Simon, Lily and Trevor,” says Dr. Erik Krogh, a VIU Chemistry Professor. “We are so proud of your accomplishments!”

Simon is co-supervised by Krogh and Dr. Heather Wiebe, and primarily conducts research in the VIU Molecular Modelling Lab. Simon’s poster was about 6PPDQ, a tire wear toxin that is extremely toxic to coho salmon as well as some other salmonid species. The toxin was only discovered in 2020, so Simon says not much is known about its properties, reactivity of how it behaves in the environment.

“My project used computational chemistry to understand some of these properties and reaction processes,” says Simon.

Lily’s talk discussed compounds emitted by plants in the Garry Oak restoration plot at the VIU Nanaimo campus.

“I wanted to find out how the emission rates of different species compared to each other, and how they changed between seasons because these compounds have big impacts on plant communication, temperature tolerance and immune systems,” says Lily. “I was the only undergraduate student who received one of the five Environmental Division student presentation awards from orally presenting this work at the conference, which was pretty special!”

Trevor discussed research he’s been conducting at VIU’s Mobile Mass Spectrometry lab examining malodourous compounds from wastewater facilities. Trevor is examining “how well odour control systems are working and the fate and distribution of odorous reduced sulfur compounds such as methanethiol and dimethyl sulfide in the local communities.”

Trevor a Métis VIU alum and a current graduate student at VIU is doing highly innovative community-based research mapping odour compounds and air quality on Vancouver Island.