Learning Through Mentorship and Skills Development for a Brighter Future with Trevor Janes, PhD - Operations Specialist
Trevor Janes completed his undergraduate studies in chemistry at the University of British Columbia and went on to obtain his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Toronto researching the coordination chemistry and reactivity of metal complexes with NN chelate ligands. In between TA’ing chemistry labs and tutorials and conducting research, Trevor gave back to the community through volunteering and writing for The Green Chemistry Initiative blog and UofT’s student newspaper, The Varsity.
After his doctorate, he completed two postdoctoral fellowships at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Luna Nanotech before entering the industry sector at LGC Standards. Trevor was our Industrial Liaison (2021-2022) and former Chair of the Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC) Toronto Section (2022-2024) leading our team in the organization of professional development related events. Trevor Janes worked as an organic chemist before transitioning to his current role as Operations Specialist at LGC Standards, below you’ll read about his passions and career journey from academia to industry.
**This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I moved from Vancouver to Toronto for several reasons. The research conducted by the Datong Song group at U of T appealed to my interest and the academic institution is renowned for its contributions to scientific research. At the time, I was in my early 20’s and wanted to experience living away from the nest and expand my horizons. This was a good opportunity to move to a place that was different with some similarities to home. I am also a big baseball fan and enjoy watching Toronto Blue Jays games.
Living in a new city gave way to freedom and the sense of building a life. During the first few months, I felt certain ingredients were missing from my life. I was committed to maintaining ties with friends back home, but in my day-to-day needed to make new friends to spend time with. I realized later that it takes energy to build new connections in a new place, and it takes investments of time to deepen those connections. It’s fun and exciting to meet new people, but I also cherish the friends I’ve known for decades. It’s about finding the right mix of new and the old. From this experience of moving away and getting a fresh start, I learned I prefer to stay in one place long term to grow my roots.
When I started out in Datong’s research group, I was paired with a graduate student mentor, Vincent Annibale, who was a veteran in the lab. Vince taught me all I needed to know about characterizing compounds by crystallography. The process started with synthesizing a compound, growing a crystal and evaluating it under a microscope. If the size and quality of the crystal were suitable for a single crystal x-ray diffraction experiment, we would proceed to mounting it on the instrument, and if not, I’d have to regrow the crystal in a different solvent.
While learning I went in with an attitude of being present, engaged, and ready to work with Vince. That type of learning environment empowered me to absorb knowledge like a sponge. It’s one thing to hear someone tell you ‘this is the way it is done’ and it’s another level of learning to apply the knowledge yourself. I learn best by doing, making a few mistakes in the beginning, getting feedback, and improving from there.
“It can be daunting the first time you’re faced with an issue and no one is around to answer questions in a new environment, but that is part of the process of learning and growing.”
To this day, I am grateful to Vince for his mentorship inside and outside of the lab.
To be quite honest, I was not aware of what career to go for till later and focused on immersing myself in my graduate research projects. I admired my professors and thought that having a whole research team sending you exciting results all the time seemed pretty sweet. I figured I’d do my best to become a professor and if that didn’t work out, well how bad could I end up with a PhD in Chemistry? I disciplined myself to gain experience and excel in essential skills such as writing, teaching, and research.
To develop writing skills, I applied for scholarships and wrote grants to get my research funded. I did this by thinking of good research ideas and with each grant I wrote, he learned to write persuasively. I also needed to publish my research work in highly regarded journals. I did this by finding out what research questions would lead to results that would make an impact in the respective field.
To gain research skills, I had to identify my weaknesses and find out how to improve my experiments and find new techniques I can add to my scientific toolkit. In inorganic chemistry, a lot of effort is spent both on synthesizing the compound of interest and towards conducting different methods of analysis of the compound of interest, such as mass spectrometry, single crystal X-ray spectroscopy, electron paramagnetic resonance, as well as computational chemistry. When opportunities came to learn these and other techniques, I committed to learning each technique with the mindset that this knowledge would be useful in the long run towards my career goals.
To gain teaching skills, I received the opportunity to be a Tutorial Teaching Assistant where I demonstrated problems and led group discussions with students. I enrolled in a TA training program. I also led a survey class on general science literacy. The teaching experiences were truly humbling because to pass along knowledge to others, you need a firm foundation of the fundamentals of the subject. From these experiences, I developed a fondness for teaching, and I hope to be able to do more of it in the future.
It helped that I saw the possibility because I knew two people who had been through the same inorganic/organometallic chemistry training and made the transition. Prior to joining my current workplace, I honed the fundamentals of being an organic chemist throughout the years during my PhD research and post-doc in organometallic labs. For most of my projects, synthesizing the ligand/substrate using organic chemistry techniques made up a large component of my work. I had to conduct organic chemistry experiments before I could get to the inorganic chemistry portion of the research project.
When I started my PhD, I thought that by having a research project in inorganic chemistry, I could avoid time-consuming, tedious column chromatography as inorganic compounds are usually unstable in columns; recrystallization, washing, and distillation are more effective purification methods. Datong Song taught me that if I aspire to be a good chemist, I need to be committed to being good at any and every synthetic technique, whether it be materials synthetic techniques, inorganic, or organic. Whatever the project needs from me, I must do. I had to run columns under argon or nitrogen with dry solvents back then and have applied these techniques in my current work in industry. I thought what Datong imparted on me was truly inspiring.
The years in grad school and in the post-doctoral fellowship developed enough skills and work experience to get my foot in the door at my current workplace. Knowing how to manage my time in the lab productively, leveraging recrystallization to purify compounds or intermediates, examining the reactivity of the metal with different organic ligands, interpreting NMR spectra, and being able to characterize organic compounds contributed to my employability.
I needed to learn what was out there outside of the realm of academia. I had put all my energy and effort into the goal I set out for myself of being a professor. Then I later realized I needed to branch out and see what else was out there and see where I fit in. When I moved back to Toronto after my post-doc overseas, I joined the Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC) Toronto Section as an industrial liaison and got to meet people with similar backgrounds and see where they are now. I did research and learned what companies were hiring people with this skillset. A big part of it was looking for opportunities that were available at the time.
For my post-doctoral fellowship, I had to move to a different country. I had to learn to integrate into the community and how to spend my spare time. As well, I wrote about the challenge of nurturing a long-distance relationship. Due to some language barriers, I encountered some challenges with administrative stuff at health clinics or at the department of motor vehicles when I had to transfer ownership of a vehicle, but everything worked out in the end.
Looking back now, I still remember going for lunch with the research group where we would talk about anything under the sun - current world events, science going on in the lab, or our plans for the future. It felt inspiring to speak with highly competent people from all over the world and learn from them. It was a privilege to be a part of that group because I got to soak up all the different perspectives and knowledge. Despite the distance, I still keep in touch with them to this day.
One of the great things about being trained in inorganic chemistry is that you don’t need to have a favourite, you have the whole periodic table at your disposal. Having a favourite might make the other elements jealous (just kidding). Right now, it is helium, because it keeps magnets cold in the NMR spectrometer. I was organizing a birthday party recently and had to fill up balloons that float up with helium. It brought so much joy to the kids and reminded me that the simple things in life do bring joy.
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