Students make strong showing at “junior Nobel Prize”

Four Ryerson students were recognized at the Undergraduate Awards (external link, opens in new window) , the world’s largest academic awards program.

The “junior Nobel Prize,” which took place in Dublin, Ireland November 8-11, brings together promising students from around the world. The Awards received a record 5,514 undergraduate papers submitted by 244 institutions in 121 countries.

Ryerson chemistry graduate Mohammad Chaudhry was named Region Winner (highest-performing paper in the US/Canada region) in the Chemical & Pharmaceutical Sciences category for his paper Simultaneous Point and Axial Chirality Generation through Intramolecular Buchwald Hartwig Cross-Coupling reaction. Two other Ryerson grads—Cameron MacDonald (Literature: English), Edith Nataprawira (Art History, Film & Theatre), and student Amanda Jekums (Social Sciences: Social Policy) were named High Commended Entrants.

“It’s really nice to be recognized,” said Jekums, a fourth-year Nutrition and Food (opens in new window)  student. “There aren’t many of these kinds of events at an undergraduate level, so it was nice to be able to meet other people from around the world doing this kind of work.”

Jekums researched her paper in summer 2015 when she travelled to Brazil to investigate the country’s food security initiatives. “Their government has mandated that students must receive up to 70 per cent of their food through school meal programs, so this has brought a lot of students out of hunger. At the same time, the government has a policy that 30 per cent of that food has to come from small family farmers. So they’ve created these policies that work together to bring these marginalized populations out of poverty.”

The four-day Undergraduate Awards offered a variety of networking and research opportunities. “On the first day, everybody got to present their papers to everyone else, and it was really neat to see all of what was happening around the world,” said Jekums. “The following day, we had speakers come from all different disciplines and did workshops in groups. The last day, the attendees broke into groups and tried to solve the big problems to fix the world.”

The Office of the Registrar (opens in new window)  at Ryerson partnered with the Undergraduate Awards to make possible the students’ submissions. “Ryerson’s brightest and most innovative undergraduate students have the opportunity to compete for world-wide acknowledgement of their best coursework and projects,” said Charmaine Hack, university registrar.

“I’m very proud of Amanda, Cameron, Edith and Mohammad, not only for being chosen among the best and brightest undergrads in the world, but for representing Ryerson with such professionalism at the Global Summit in Ireland. Their tremendous accomplishments have helped to put Ryerson student achievement on the international map.”