Tim LougheedThe University of Ottawa’s Excellence in Education prizes recognize educators of exceptional quality, who provide outstanding teaching while maintaining a solid research program. Profiles of each of the seven prize winners in 2006 will appear in the Gazette
over the coming months.
As a specialist in the complexities of organic chemistry, William Ogilvie could be a science student’s worst nightmare.
“If you really want to mess students up, you could draw a chemical structure one way, then just flip it over,” he says, describing a simple classroom procedure an instructor might casually perform. “The structure hasn’t changed, but to them it looks like something completely different.”
In this way, students regularly get lost in the subtleties of organic chemistry, which is notorious within this field’s curriculum. Fortunately, this associate professor in the Department of Chemistry works hard to wake his students from potential nightmares.
“If you’re systematic, it doesn’t have to be that difficult,” says Ogilvie. “I try to give students tools so that they can recognize the patterns.”
Such sensitivity to the way in which people learn and understand chemical principles have earned him one of this year’s Excellence in Education prizes.
Ogilvie is one of the key instructors in the University’s increasingly popular Biopharmaceutical Science (BPS) Program, where he has helped develop new courses, reorganize laboratories and rewrite lab manuals.
Students appreciate the open-ended nature of BPS, he explains, which allows them to explore a range of topics before having to specialize.
“With the success of the program, classes have been getting larger and larger,” he says. Above all, he adds, it is imperative to demonstrate the importance of this work to society in general.
“Chemists don’t get in the news very much,” he observes, noting that such obscurity belies how crucial chemical progress is to our quality of life. “The impression is that medical doctors discover all the drugs, but really it’s chemists that design and develop them. Doctors just figure out how to use them.”
For this reason, Ogilvie regards it vital to impress upon his students the significance of his science. “At the end of the day,” he concludes, “we’re here to educate the next generation.”
