Alumni Digest

New Beginnings

The Third Space

Arriving in Canada with two suitcases and a backpack, Benji Jacob built an art collective, a research career and, this spring, a valedictorian's send-off.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Alumni News

Benji Jacob had lived in three countries by the time he arrived at the University of Toronto Mississauga with two suitcases and a backpack, alone, at 22. He had planned to study neuroscience.

The plan changed. He switched into psychology, and the switch stuck — he graduates this year as a psychology specialist with a double minor in biology and biomedical communication.

It's my little baby. It's my third space,Benji Jacob

That third space is Studio X, the campus art collective he founded in 2022 to build installations across UTM. Alongside it, he became senior project co-ordinator for the longitudinal study Giving Voice, in Dr. Joanne Chung's lab.

Scholar to Scholar

He arrived at UTM on a Lester B. Pearson Scholarship and later became a Laidlaw Scholar, using the Laidlaw research year to study identity development among queer people of colour. He also served as president of the Psychology Association of Undergraduate Students at Erindale, picking up several leadership awards along the way.

He graduates as UTM's 2026 valedictorian with a PhD in social personality psychology in his sights — still, by his own account, building his third space.

Reported from 'Freedom to explore who I am': Valedictorian finds growth, direction at UTM, by Kate Martin (U of T Alumni News, June 5, 2026).

Open as its own page →

The Study Method

102 Per Cent

Hafsa Murtaza expected the usual first-year dip — instead she scored 102 per cent on her first art history midterm and never looked back.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Alumni News

Hafsa Murtaza arrived at UTM bracing for the usual first-year dip in grades. Instead, in an intro art history course with more than 300 students, she scored 102 per cent on her first midterm, helped along by bonus marks.

She kept it up for four years, crediting handwritten notes, colour coding and drawing out artworks to remember them. She also recommends office hours, and took the UTM Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy's 'Writing for University' course.

It meant that all my work was worth itHafsa Murtaza

In fourth year she was president of the visual studies student society and a research assistant at the same time — all while commuting to campus and de-stressing through embroidery.

The Medal

She graduated in June 2026 from the art and art history program at 22, and UTM principal Alex Gillespie presented her with the 2026 Governor General's Silver Medal, awarded to U of T's most academically outstanding humanities graduate.

She is heading on to a master's degree — still, by her own account, treating every course the way she treated that first art history midterm.

Reported from 'All my work was worth it': Medal-winning UTM grad shares tips for success, by Megan Easton (U of T Alumni News, September 17, 2026).

Open as its own page →

Problem Solver

Lean Into It

Robert Chung taught himself to code from an old Visual Basic book, then rode that curiosity to the ICPC World Finals and U of T's top graduating student honour.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Alumni News

Robert Chung grew up in Scarborough, hooked on coding by an old Visual Basic book his dad gave him. A middle-school mentor at Woburn Collegiate Institute, who had represented Canada internationally, pointed him further down that road.

At UTSC he double-majored in mathematics and computer science, competing through ICPC regionals and North American championships to reach the World Finals in Baku, Azerbaijan. At Professor Nick Cheng's encouragement, he also became a teaching assistant for CSCB36.

When something feels hard, don’t shy away – lean into it,Robert Chung

First-Year Influences

He credits mathematics professors Parker Glynn-Adey and Kathleen Smith as early influences, and spent the pandemic taking up competitive speed typing, ranking among the top typists on competitive platforms worldwide.

He graduated with both the Governor General's Silver Medal and the John Black Aird Scholarship, awarded to U of T's top graduating student — but he missed his own June convocation, having already started as a quantitative trading intern in New York City.

Reported from Top graduating student Robert Chung finds joy in solving hard problems, by Don Campbell (U of T Alumni News, September 16, 2026).

Open as its own page →

The Memory Lab

Where Memory Lives

A U of T-trained neuroscientist's lab was first to find and erase a single memory. Now she is chasing PTSD and Alzheimer's.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Alumni News

On March 9, 2009, Sheena Josselyn was wheeled in for an emergency C-section. Between contractions, she told the anesthetist she had a paper coming out — the study that would make her lab, at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, the first to find and erase a single, specific memory.

Josselyn earned her PhD at U of T in 1996, then spent her postdoctoral years at Yale studying how memory is distributed across the brain. In 2003 she founded her own lab at SickKids, working alongside her husband and fellow researcher, Paul Frankland.

Actually, I have a paper coming out.Sheena Josselyn

The lab used optogenetics — a technique built on light-sensitive proteins first found in algae — to switch individual neurons on and off, isolating one fear memory and deleting it while leaving every other memory untouched. The 2009 paper landed the same week her daughter was born.

Twenty-five years into studying how memory functions, Josselyn has turned that precision toward the diseases that distort it. A 2025 paper in Cell traced oversized PTSD engrams to a cortisol-triggered cascade in the brain and found a way to reverse it — work she pursues partly because she watched her own mother's memory dissolve into dementia.

In 2025 Josselyn was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, and won both the Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize and the Margolese National Brain Disorders Prize. In the SickKids lab today, PhD candidate Sofiya Zbaranska carries the work forward, studying how the brain stores social memory.

Reported from U of T professor and alum found where memories live: can it help people with Alzheimer's and PTSD?, by Adina Bresge (U of T Alumni News, May 21, 2026).

Open as its own page →

The Championship Goal

The Goal That Made History

A theatre student turned team captain scored the goal that won the Varsity Blues their first women's soccer title.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Alumni News

The youngest of seven kids from Mississauga, Hannah Chown had a soccer ball at her feet almost before she could walk — her father began coaching her at age three. In 2020, mid-pandemic, she arrived at U of T to study English and theatre.

In 2025, as team captain, Chown scored the lone goal in a 1-0 win over the University of Guelph Gryphons, off a corner from teammate Emilija Lucic — the goal that won the Varsity Blues women's soccer program its first-ever championship.

teaching will always be there for meHannah Chown

Soccer was never her only stage. As an undergraduate she acted in Hedda Gabler at Factory Theatre, and she receives her master's degree in teaching from OISE on June 11 — the same day the FIFA World Cup 2026 kicks off.

Named the Varsity Blues' 2025-26 T-Holders Athlete of the Year, an OUA All-Star, OUA Most Valuable Player and winner of the OUA Community Service Award, Chown now plays semi-professionally for the Simcoe County Rovers FC. She also coaches girls' soccer, citing a 2020 statistic that one in three girls leaves the sport by late adolescence — and is weighing whether it's her moment to chase a professional career.

Reported from OISE grad made history on U of T soccer pitch. Is a pro career next?, by Mariam Matti (U of T Alumni News, June 2, 2026).

Open as its own page →

From Data to Dicing

A Recipe for Reinvention

A Rotman analytics grad kept her data job at Unilever — and still found time to win MasterChef Canada.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Alumni News

By day, Veronica Wu is a senior data engineering manager at Unilever. In December 2025, she also became the winner of Season 8 of MasterChef Canada, beating out a field that began with 15 home cooks — including fellow finalist and U of T Dentistry alum Liz Worndl.

Wu moved from China to Canada in 2014 to study financial modelling, with a minor in linguistics, at Western University. She had seriously considered leaving school for culinary training, but her parents encouraged her to stay the course.

I think people are interested in the story behind a plate of foodVeronica Wu

She completed Rotman's Master of Management Analytics in 2019 — marking the end of the program by baking her cohort a two-tiered matcha and chocolate cake — and joined Unilever as a data scientist that same year.

Her winning signature dish was braised pork belly with potato purée and pickled radish. Wu is now weighing staging, further culinary training and possibly opening a Chinese or Chinese-fusion restaurant, all while keeping her data job at Unilever.

Reported from From data to dicing: MasterChef Canada winner and alum Veronica Wu cooks up a mindset shift, by Meaghan MacSween (U of T Alumni News, March 10, 2026).

Open as its own page →

Hart House

The Medicine of Belonging

Four years into leading Hart House's Youth Access programs, Alphonse Daniel watches former mentees become mentors, and calls community itself a kind of medicine.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Alumni News

Every year, Alphonse Daniel takes a group selfie with Hart House's Youth Advisory Council — a small ritual that, four years in, has become a record of who has come through the program and where they've gone.

Daniel earned an Honours BSc in Population Health, Health Humanities and Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough before joining Hart House as Program Associate, Community Access & Outreach. He now co-leads Youth Access programming for high school students while pursuing a Master of Social Work at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.

In today’s society, I don't think there's a type of medicine more important than that.Alphonse Daniel

The Youth Access and Community Access programs Daniel runs, funded by the Hart House Innovation Fund, span leadership workshops for high schoolers and events and Work Readiness Programs for the wider community, including direct youth subsidies. A poetry workshop designed two years ago by work-study student Janelle moved its Youth Advisory Council participants to tears.

The results are showing up back inside Hart House itself. Former co-op student Sean Chen, whom Daniel has mentored for three years, now volunteers more than 60 hours at Kids Help Phone. Teya, once a member of the Youth Advisory Council, is now Co-Chair of the Hart House Finance Committee and a Rotman School of Management student. Others, including Christopher, who came through the Native Youth Resource Centre, and Omar, now work at Hart House themselves.

Daniel's manager, Danielle Dinunzio, has watched the same pattern repeat: young people arrive as participants and, in time, become the ones running the room. For Daniel, that circularity is the point — proof that community, once built, keeps building itself.

Reported from U of T alum Alphonse Daniel finds meaning and community through Hart House's Youth Access program, by Megan Wykes (U of T Alumni News, January 30, 2026).

Open as its own page →

Trinity College

Breaking the Story, Breaking the Barrier

Kate Zernike followed her mother to Trinity and found journalism there — decades and a Pulitzer later, she's telling the world how far women in science still have to go.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Alumni News

Kate Zernike arrived at Trinity College's St. Hilda's residence in early September 1986, coming from Connecticut to study English and history — and to follow her mother, Barbara (Backus) Zernike, a proud Trinity alumna of the class of 1954.

She found her calling at The Newspaper, working as an editor and staying on as one of three editors for a year after graduating, before completing a master's at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism in 1992.

At The Boston Globe in 1999, Zernike broke the front-page story of MIT's own admission that it had discriminated against women faculty — a story she initially thought was confined to one field.

I thought it was a problem just in physics,Kate Zernike

She joined The New York Times in 2000, was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting on al-Qaeda, and co-wrote Osama bin Laden's 4,000-word obituary in November 2001 — nearly a decade before it ran in May 2011. During a six-week leave, she wrote her first book, Boiling Mad, on the rise of the Tea Party. Her grandfather, Frits Zernike, won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the phase-contrast microscope.

Her book The Exceptions, published in February 2023, returned to that MIT story through the career of molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins, the subject of the landmark 1999 report. Zernike returns to Trinity on May 27 for an Anne Steacy Science Conversations talk.

Reported from Award-winning journalist, author and U of T alum Kate Zernike on breaking barriers for women, by Jennifer Matthews (U of T Alumni News, April 16, 2026).

Open as its own page →

Victoria University

Grown Up at Vic

Journalist Steve Paikin, who called Varsity Blues games on U of T Radio as a student, returns to Victoria University as its next Chancellor.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Alumni News

As a student at Victoria College, Steve Paikin found his footing in journalism as sports editor of The Newspaper and by calling Varsity Blues hockey and football games on U of T Radio.

That footing carried him through a career hosting The Agenda with Steve Paikin on TVO for 19 seasons, until the series ended in June 2025. He still hosts The Paikin Podcast, co-hosts #onpoli on TVO and appears weekday mornings on Citytv's Paikin on Politics, and has moderated nine federal and Ontario leaders' debates.

To the extent that I’ve grown up, I did a lot of it at Vic.Steve Paikin

Paikin has written 13 books, including biographies of Bill Davis, John Robarts and John Turner, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Member of the Order of Ontario. In 2025 he received the King Charles III Coronation Medal and the Public Policy Forum's lifetime achievement award for journalism.

Now he returns to Victoria University for a three-year term as Chancellor beginning July 1, 2026, succeeding food activist Nick Saul. He presides at Convocation, confers degrees, sits ex officio on the Board of Regents and chairs the Victoria University Senate, with a formal installation to follow in the fall.

Victoria University president Dr. Rhonda N. McEwen and Board of Regents chair Keith Thomas welcomed the appointment. For Paikin, a former chancellor of Laurentian University who also holds honorary doctorates from McMaster, York and Toronto Metropolitan University, it is, in a sense, a homecoming to the college where he grew up.

Reported from Award-winning journalist and alum Steve Paikin appointed Chancellor of Victoria University, by Not stated (originally published by Victoria University) (U of T Alumni News, March 24, 2026).

Open as its own page →

Founders

A drone, a seed pod and 68,345 trees

Cameron Jones saw a wildfire strip his childhood landscape. His reforestation company, built with U of T support, has planted tens of thousands of trees in northern Quebec.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Alumni News

Cameron Jones (LLM 2025) was a child when lightning started a wildfire near his family’s home on the edge of Okanagan Mountain Park in British Columbia. In August 2003 the fire spread across 250 square kilometres and destroyed 239 homes. More than twenty years later, he says, the land is still barren.

That memory sent Cameron and his brother Bryce toward a question about forests. Most replanting still relies on shovels, bags and seedlings. In 2019 the brothers and Angelique Ahlström founded Flash Forest, a company that fires seed pods into the ground from drones and helicopters, reaching land that crews can barely get to.

Built in a greenhouse at UTM

The pods took shape with help from U of T’s iCUBE accelerator. The team worked in the greenhouses at U of T Mississauga to refine each one, which carries nutrients and a way to hold water so the seedling can survive its first two years. Imaging, machine learning and automation then guide the planting.

This spring U of T Facilities & Services partnered with Flash Forest to plant 68,345 trees in the Assinica Wildlife Reserve in northern Quebec. The land had burned in the summer of 2023.

It feels positive to engage with the technologyJimmy Lord, director of the Assinica Wildlife Reserve

The Oujé-Bougoumou Cree First Nation was a partner in the project. Jones says the community helped with species selection and site access, and that its members collected millions of local seeds.

The project is supported by the Carbon Reduction Fund run by the U of T Sustainability Office, which finances emissions-cutting projects to offset the university’s travel. Over the next 100 years the new trees are projected to capture 33,000 tonnes of CO2.

Reported from U of T plants more than 68,000 trees with help of alumni-founded startup (U of T Alumni News, October 2, 2026).

Open as its own page →

Honours

The chemist who took the metal out

Doug Stephan found frustrated Lewis pairs in 2006, a way to run chemical reactions without rare metals. The Royal Society has now given him its Davy Medal.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T News

Doug Stephan, a University Professor in the department of chemistry in the Faculty of Arts & Science, has won the 2026 Davy Medal from the Royal Society in the U.K. The medal goes each year to an outstanding chemist and was first awarded in 1877.

It honours a discovery from 2006, the idea of “frustrated Lewis pairs,” or FLPs. For a century, Stephan explains, chemists leaned on rare, precious metals such as rhodium, platinum or palladium to speed up reactions. FLPs let them use common elements such as phosphorus, boron or nitrogen instead.

Why the metal matters

Stephan estimates that over 90 per cent of chemical products rely on a production process with at least one catalytic step. In drug making, he says, roughly 40 per cent of syntheses involve at least one hydrogenation, and 70 per cent of production cost can go to purifying away traces of toxic metals.

His everyday example is natural peanut butter. Adding hydrogen to the oil is what turns it into the semi-solid kind in the familiar brands.

I don’t think you do science for the awardsDoug Stephan

FLPs are not used commercially yet. Stephan says discoveries like this take decades to reach products, and he does not expect another 20 years. He points to Dow Chemical in Michigan, which is developing FLP reagents for silicon compounds used in sealants, lubricants and medical tubing.

He calls the medal the icing on the cake, and says the best part is seeing other chemists take the concept in directions he never thought of. Stephan became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013.

Reported from U of T chemist Doug Stephan awarded 2026 Davy Medal by the U.K.’s Royal Society (U of T News, August 27, 2026).

Open as its own page →

Honours

Five engineers, one evening at Hart House

U of T Engineering honoured five alumni on October 1: a biotech co-founder, a groundwater expert, a chip founder, a patent lawyer and a power electronics pioneer.

Alumni Digest desk · from U of T Engineering News

On October 1, U of T Engineering held an evening reception at Hart House to honour five alumni with the 2026 Engineering Alumni Network Impact Awards. The awards recognize graduates whose work improves society, and the winners span industries, disciplines and generations.

Serena Mandla (EngSci 1T7, BME MASc 1T9) took the Rising Star Award. She is chief scientific officer of Quthero Inc., a company spun out of her graduate research on regenerative biomaterials for wound healing, and in 2022 she co-founded Noa Therapeutics, which raised an oversubscribed pre-seed round in 2023.

Magdalena M. Krol (CivE PhD 1T1) received the Research & Innovation Award. An associate professor of civil engineering at York University, she founded the Innovative Water Technology and Energy Research Laboratory and studies groundwater contamination, land remediation and the safe storage of used nuclear fuel.

Founders and a mentor

Tony Pialis (ElecE 0T0, MEng 0T2) won the Industry Award. He co-founded Snowbush Microelectronics, founded V Semiconductor and built Alphawave Semi, which Qualcomm acquired in 2025. He is now executive vice president and general manager of Qualcomm’s Data Center business.

Isi Caulder (EngSci 8T9, ECE MASc 9T1, JD 9T5) received the Citizenship Award. An intellectual property lawyer and patent agent, she has mentored student founders at the Entrepreneurship Hatchery since 2014 and helped establish the Engineering Science alumni pub nights.

Praveen Jain (ECE MASc 8T4, PhD 8T7) received the Distinguished Alumni Award, the top honour of the network. A professor at Queen’s University, he founded CHiL Semiconductor and SPARQ Systems. He has published over 660 technical papers, holds 122 patents and has mentored more than 100 graduate students and researchers.

Reported from U of T Engineering alumni recognized for excellence in biotech, environmental engineering, IP strategy and more (U of T Engineering News, October 2, 2026).

Open as its own page →