Kathy Greaves has been part of the Department of Biology team for more than 35 years. As the Administrative Assistant, she supports the entire department, doing a job that was once – in many ways – the work of four. Throughout her long tenure, Kathy has adapted to duties ranging from hiring temporary and casual staff – including summer, co-op and work-study students – to maintaining the confidentiality of the tenure and promotion processes. She is the main contact for anyone visiting the department and she has proven to be phenomenally successful in securing private-sector financial contributions for department and student events. Kathy is also well known for her support of international visitors and post-doctoral fellows as they navigate arriving not just at a new institution, but in a new country.

A decade and a half ago, Kathy helped develop the Department of Biology Annual Report and also created the Bioweek Newsletter. She was instrumental to the restructuring of administrative support roles in the department and in the Faculty of Science by, for example, streamlining administrative forms, producing user guides and improving internal communications. She provides invaluable support to both the Biology Graduate Students Association and the undergraduate Biology Society while also connecting the biology family by leading Halloween festivities, playing Elf in the annual research lab visits by Santa and volunteering with the McMaster Children’s Party.

Paul Hoag has been the Executive Chef of Hospitality Services for seven years, earning his Certified Chef de Cuisine designation – the second highest honour for a chef – and Certified Executive Chef designation as well. He is a member of the 2020 Canadian Culinary Olympic Team and has excelled in international competitions including placing eighth in the World Gourmet Society’s Best Plate video competition and earning a team bronze medal at the 2018 Villeroy & Boch Culinary World Cup. He was also invited to help prepare the 2019 Nobel Prize Awards Banquet hosted by the Swedish royal family.

At McMaster, Paul has been responsible for the outstanding culinary offerings at reputational University events including his sustainability-themed Magna Charta Gala dinner and the Indigenous menu he created to celebrate the new Chancellor’s installation at November Convocation. He also spearheaded the multiple-award winning SMPL allergen-free dining station in the Centro dining hall.

Paul oversees the Hospitality Services Culinary Apprenticeship Program and has several employees pursuing their cooking apprenticeships under his guidance. He inaugurated McMaster’s now-annual participation in the Living Rock Ministries fundraiser Soupfest and guided the McMaster team to two awards in the first year of that competition. In 2019, Paul’s innovative Cream of Buffalo Chicken Soup took the top Soupfest prize. On campus, he has been part of the Light Up the Night party and the Hungry Games competition.

As the Marketing and Communications Strategist (Digital) for the DeGroote School of Business, Jared Lenover has a significant impact on McMaster’s digital presence at both the institutional and school specific levels. In fact, his expertise is so well established he has served as an instructor in social media with the Centre for Continuing Education.

Jared led the development of the website for DeGroote’s research enterprise, building a system that allowed the DeGroote site to pull content from four other McMaster sites, thus enhancing accuracy and reducing the site management burden on the School. He redesigned the tracking system for MBA applicants, a project that fundamentally changed the way DeGroote recruits prospective students. He also used a routine assignment of updating a single display screen to create and launch a new strategy for employing public display screens to support and enhance the DeGroote culture.

Jared is a founding member of the Faculty Web Leads Committee which addresses issues such as data privacy, web accessibility and digital security and he has an impressive track record of managing work-study students. In that latter role, he personalizes the experience to each individual student so they can get the most out of their jobs. As a result, many students now seek out placements with Jared because they have learned about the depth of his expertise and the quality of the learning experience he provides.

Khadijeh Rakie has been a valuable member of the Equity and Inclusion Office (EIO) for the past five years. As the Equity and Inclusion Educator, she creates and delivers educational programs and workshops for the entire McMaster community, provides equity consultation and organizes the HEART (Human Rights, Equity, Accessibility, Respect Toolkit) certificate program. She also supports the President’s Advisory Committee on Building an Inclusive Community; the Race, Racialization and Racism Working Group and the Interfaith Issues Working Group. Khadijeh developed the Let’s Talk About Race Series that she has facilitated for the past three years.

Khadijeh works closely with various faith- and race-based student groups including the Muslim Students Association, Black Students Association, Pride Centre and the Women and Gender Equity Network. Her contributions also include supporting students through education on equity-related topics, even when she needs to connect with students beyond regular office hours. She served as the lead on the Challenging Islamophobia on Campus Initiative and in the past couple of years, Khadijeh has volunteered as a community mentor to students in the Gender Studies and Feminist Research Master of Arts program.

In her nine years with the Registrar’s Office, Leanne Ruiz served as Manager, Student Services and as Assistant Registrar for Student Financial Aid & Scholarships (SFAS) before becoming Associate Registrar, Student Services in 2019. In that role, she built a collaborative process connecting three departments in the design of a new service model. Launched in December 2019, this new approach combined the front-line, student-facing services provided by SFAS, Student Accounts and Student Services. The result is a one-stop-shop for services that receive an average of 15,000 student contacts a month. With a first-contact resolution mission and the active promotion of self-service options, the program Leanne built has revolutionized student service while also generating benefits behind the scenes through redesigned business process, consolidated services, reimagined physical space and newly developed organizational structures.

With Leanne’s leadership, the Registrar’s Office also became one of the first in the sector to launch an on-demand, online chat service – a pilot project that was a huge success with students. Leanne also has a track record of supporting students more directly as she has personally helped many students – often those facing financial issues in conjunction with other personal struggles – manage and even thrive through difficult and delicate situations.

Beyond McMaster, Leanne was the Western Regional Representative for the Ontario Association of Financial Aid Administrators for four years and a member of the University Fees Committee for two.

Initially a part-time member of the Centre for Simulation-Based Learning (CSBL) team, Elaine Shuhaibar became a full-time Clinical Instructor in 2005. Always looking to help her students excel, Elaine founded the CSBL Peer Tutoring Program that same year. In this program, she recruits, trains and mentors upper-year Nursing students to assist junior students. Initially, the program focused on clinical skills, but based on its success it now addresses a variety of issues including anatomy study, evidence-informed decision making, writing scholarly papers and support for students whose first language is not English. Elaine was also instrumental in identifying that students needed greater access to the CSBL lab and she responded by advocating successfully to expand the lab’s hours into evenings and weekends.

More recently, Elaine developed a process and forms that enhance communication among teaching faculty, students and administrators. Students say the referral form, for example, helps them stay on track while faculty receive information about how their students are meeting their learning goals in the CSBL.

Elaine has been an active volunteer with the McMaster Student Outreach Committee (Mac SOC), providing front-line care to people in the local homeless community and successfully initiating a fundraising event for the program. Elaine has also volunteered for May@Mac and always provides a welcoming experience to potential students visiting the CSBL sites where they can participate in
simulations.

Tim Stephens has been the Undergraduate Lab Technician for the Department of Chemical Engineering since 2015, delivering hands-on learning to senior undergraduates and supervising the teaching laboratory. As a measure of his dedication, he has memorized every equation, calculation and concept in the teaching labs so he can provide instant support to students.

Tim has significantly improved laboratory equipment and facilities by designing his own hardware, spearheading grants and devising new teaching experiments. He also rewrote the complex laboratory instructions and has volunteered to assist research groups with commissioned instruments and developing standard operating procedures and safety protocols. Most recently, he assisted faculty from Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering by getting a mercury porosimetry instrument functioning and then training graduate student researchers on how to use the instrument. He implemented and delivers a TA training program that has improved performance in the lab and increased undergraduate student satisfaction. Tim also volunteers regularly for outreach activities including May@Mac and the Engineering summer camps.

A leader in lab safety, Tim plays a key role in the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board safety evaluation, serves as the Worker Certified Member of the Engineering Joint Health and Safety Committee and regularly mentors colleagues on safety-related issues. He is also the Equity and Inclusion Champion for the Undergraduate Lab Committee and serves as a mentor to the Chem-E-Car team.

An Instructional Assistant in the Department of Kinesiology since 2004, Adrienne Tearle has a direct influence on the teaching and learning experience of more than 1,400 students and three dozen teaching assistants annually. Adrienne was instrumental in the financial, physical and human resources planning and management involved in a recent spring/summer pilot offering of Anatomy and Physiology, a project that saw her take a lead role in creating lab experiences and a novel approach to staffing the lab. The successful pilot will be the launching pad for continuing the initiative in 2020.

Adrienne’s work in coordinating the senior thesis course KINESIOL 4RR6 introduced new activities to enhance science communication skills, facilitated an annual undergraduate student research day in Kinesiology and supported student attendance at the National Undergraduate Research Conference.

Adrienne has revised and refined numerous practices over the years including the recent migration from a web-based platform to a lab-based platform (ADI LT Lab Station) for all physiology experiments. She also partnered with a major publishing company to produce a professional quality lab manual for students that launched in late 2019. An active volunteer at Mac, Adrienne is a regular contributor to recruitment events like Fall Preview and May@Mac and she is always ready to step forward to serve, for example, on the ad hoc Undergraduate Course Mapping Committee and the associated hiring and lab improvements committees.

Celeste Licorish joined McMaster in 2019 as the University’s first Access Program Manager, leading the development of pathways for under-represented students to access postsecondary opportunities at McMaster. She has already established close partnerships with the Hamilton school boards and local community organizations while inaugurating a new access-oriented scholarship. These elements were part of the access strategy Celeste launched in June 2019 just four months after her first day. The quality of her work and working relationships was reflected in the fact that every person she invited from both campus and the community attended the launch.

Celeste has enhanced the credibility of McMaster’s commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion. She has already established a track record of building strong relationships and of listening to the concerns of marginalized high school students and the community groups that support them. Additionally, she is connecting high school students directly to the McMaster experience through linkages with, for example, the Socrates Project and the Wilson Leaders Program. Celeste is also a founding member of an equity sub-committee recently created within the Office of Community Engagement.

Celeste founded a new community of practice to link recruiters from post-secondary institutions in Ontario and to share strategies for shifting the broader post-secondary system on issues related to access. She has also worked with McMaster’s recruiters to create and organize specific access tours for marginalized youth.

Elizabeth Encarnacao and Sandra Di Marcantonio-Amos are the day shift staff at the Reactor Cafe on the ground floor of Thode Library. Together, they keep the cafe in meticulous working order, but the real impact of the two-person team is in their positive attitudes and their ability to connect to every customer – whether faculty, staff, student or visitor – with genuine warmth. In the words of one student, “No matter how stressful school gets, I know that I can go to the Reactor Cafe and buy a coffee and immediately feel a million times better because of the friendly, cheerful, encouraging conversation.”

When the Reactor Café was remodeled, Sandra and Liz decorated the serving counter with hand-painted figures and a sign celebrating the diversity of the McMaster community. In addition, Liz and Sandra regularly decorate the cafe for seasonal occasions and frequently run fun competitions like challenging their customers to guess the number of hearts in a jar for Valentine’s Day.

Because this duo’s greatest impact comes from the personal connections they make, their greatest achievements are revealed in their customers’ comments. One said, “Liz and Sandra are incredibly caring and go out of their way to make students feel welcome.” Another added, “Liz and Sandra make the Reactor Cafe a welcoming and fun spot for students. … They share their good moods with everyone.”

McMaster’s new Course Repeat regulation was developed by the Committee on Academic Structures for Student Success to help McMaster students overcome the punitive aspects of a poor grade. The simple goal was to allow students who retake courses to replace their old marks with the retake marks. This replacement influences each student’s Grade Point Average which is an important factor in academic standing and progression, program entry and graduation approval. While the goal was simple, the process of achieving it was not, so in April 2018, nearly two dozen Mac staff began working on the Course Repeat Policy Implementation Team.

The implementation of the Course Repeat regulation needed to be a completely innovative solution. There was no template to follow and the team could not identify another institution that had done something similar. McMaster’s solution was entirely conceptualized, designed and implemented from internal resources and delivered by team members adding the project work to their existing portfolios.

The team also displayed a strong commitment to its outreach efforts to keep stakeholders engaged and to update training materials for academic advisors. As a result of the team’s work, more than 650 McMaster students who have repeated a course under the new Course Repeat policy have been able to enhance their GPAs free from the drag effect of the previous mark.

Hospitality Services operates two residential dining halls including the busiest, Centro, which serves 4,000 students daily. With the increasing number of students with food allergies and sensitivities, the SMPL team worked to create an environment where students can be comfortable dining regardless of their dietary concerns. The result is SMPL, a stand-alone food station in Centro where all offerings are prepared without the top ten food allergens in Canada. That focus extends to staff training, cleaning procedures, ordering and sourcing practices, all to maintain the integrity of the station. The SMPL team also ensures that everything from the food covers to the prep space support the SMPL goals. The 28-day SMPL menu rotation is made from scratch with a variety that appeals even to those without allergies.

Originally projected to generate 5% of Centro sales in its first year, SMPL is approaching double that and it’s achieving those results while winning awards. In 2019, the SMPL team won the Canadian College and University Food Service Association Shine Award and was the only Canadian school recognized by the American National Association of College and University Food Services when SMPL took home honours in the Residential Dining Concepts category at the Loyal E. Horton Dining Awards. The SMPL team also made important contributions to the content of Managing Food Allergies and Anaphylaxis: A Guide for Post-Secondary Institutions.