Danielle Vlaho

Every educational department has a handful of people that truly drive teaching excellence and innovation. Danielle is one of those people within the Department of Chemistry at McGill University.

As an academic associate, her work has been with the U1-U2 lab courses, with a focus on the organic, analytical, and integrated chemistry labs. As of fall 2018, our department had updated all the physical lab space for the undergraduate courses, but the student experience was lacking. Danielle was determined to match the student experience to the state of the art new facilities. She tested and developed countless new experiments, focusing on current techniques and relatable content. The changes were phenomenally well received by the students, lab staff, and professors.

Danielle then took our switch to remote delivery in 2020 as an opportunity to re-envision the lab component for Chem 212 (Org1) into one that focused on broader skills such as scientific literacy, written and oral communication, and collaborative prob- lem solving. She single-handedly redesigned, redeveloped, and ran a brand new online Chem 212 lab component for fall 2020. Impressive enough on its own, she was also heavily involved in designing and delivering the online lecture components for the two intro organic courses (close to 1000 students all together). She led big changes such as student-led tutorials and no exams. Danielle became the “go-to” instructor in our department to advise others as we progressed through the pandemic. She took the efficiency of running active learning initiatives in our very large courses to a new level.