How a family’s love of chemistry led to the Dr. Manohar & Raminder Sood Graduate Fellowship
Aug 29, 2024
The Sood family, including Christian (right of centre) and father Manohar (left of centre) with chair Mark Lautens (centre) at the Department of Chemistry awards reception. Photo courtesy of the Department of Chemistry.
For alum Christian Sood (BSc 1991, PhD 1996) and his family, chemistry is foundational. Appreciation for the subject and for his time at U of T inspired Sood and his family to create the Dr. Manohar & Raminder Sood Graduate Fellowship, named in honour of his parents.
“My dad has a PhD in chemistry and my mother had a BA in education, so we grew up with chemistry and learning all around us,” says Sood.
“Because chemistry has played a central role in our lives, both professionally and personally, we wanted to give back to the institutions we relied upon to get our basic skill set.”
The endowment for the Sood Graduate Fellowship came from the Reena Group, a family company started by Sood’s parents in the mid-1980s. It began as a food company that also produced karaya gum washers for use by colostomy patients.
Since then, it has branched into pharmaceuticals and a variety of other areas doing analytical chemistry testing, regulatory affairs consulting and contract manufacturing of natural health products.
“We’re a medium sized Canadian business with deep roots here. We get very excited at, not only our achievements, but our ability to impact somebody else,” Sood says.
The Reena Group’s endowment will enable an annual award to one graduate student in the Department of Chemistry specializing in organic chemistry.
Organic chemistry special to the Sood family
“Organic chemistry just has a special place in all our hearts because of its applications and because of our personal interest and love for the subject,” Sood says. “Traditional pharmaceuticals evolved from natural products. So, for us, organic chemistry is foundational.”
Last year was the first time the Sood Graduate Fellowship was awarded. The inaugural recipient is Shrey Desai, a fifth-year doctoral student in the Taylor Group — an organic chemistry research group at the Department of Chemistry.
Shrey Desai is the inaugural recipient of the Dr. Manohar & Raminder Sood Graduate Fellowship.
Desai works with Professor Mark Taylor investigating transformations catalyzed by organoboron compounds, an important area of innovation for constructing complex organic molecules, such as drugs and agrochemicals.
“Receiving this fellowship is an incredible honour for me,” Desai says. “I also believe it to be a recognition of the efforts of my supervisor, Professor Mark Taylor, and my colleagues in the Taylor group, who have been instrumental in my advancement as a researcher.”
Shrey Desai is the inaugural recipient of the Dr. Manohar & Raminder Sood Graduate Fellowship.
“These moments of recognition push students to continue high quality research and publish innovative and sometimes ground-breaking discoveries.”
Desai, who is currently doing an internship with Pfizer, says the Sood Graduate Fellowship will give him the financial freedom to focus on his thesis.
“This is a great motivator for students such as me who are driven by the pursuit of novel ideas in chemistry and advancement of the field,” Desai says.
Enabling learning a privilege
“Our ability to enable the learning experience for somebody is a privilege,” Sood says. “We’re lucky to be able to do this and, in a way, satisfy an inner need of our own. It’s something that warms us from within.”
Sood, his wife, his father Manohar and other members of his family attended a 2024 awards reception in celebration of all the donors and student recipients in the department.
The reception was also a chance for Sood to reconnect in person with Mark Lautens, the chair of the Department of Chemistry. When the two first met 30 years ago, Sood was an undergraduate student and Lautens a freshly tenured professor.
“He was always a delightful person when he was an undergrad and I was fortunate he came and worked in the lab,” Lautens says.
“He had such an impact on my undergraduate training that I say to this day, whatever chemistry I know is because he taught it to me,” Sood says.
Lautens says he was surprised to hear Sood had such fond memories of working in his lab, remembering himself as a somewhat strict taskmaster during his early years as a professor.
“I didn’t know he held chemistry with such a special feeling — or me for that matter,” Lautens says.
Our ability to enable the learning experience for somebody is a privilege.
“He was tough,” Sood says. “But that driving factor earned us a publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and I was only a fourth-year student at the time. I wear that as one of my best achievements in my professional career.”
Our ability to enable the learning experience for somebody is a privilege.
The need to improve graduate funding
It was Lautens who first reached out to Sood in 2020 during the lockdown, and they discussed the possibility of creating the graduate fellowship. Lautens spoke of the need to improve graduate funding, both as a means of supporting students and recruiting top students to the department.
“There’s no doubt we get the best applicants, but it is important we then offer an outstanding learning environment and research facilities. Equally essential is providing a research stipend that lets them live in Toronto,” Lautens says.
The award was an easy yes for Sood and his family, whose appreciation for chemistry and education are deep seeded in their values.
“The wonderment is no different than when you see a beautiful Renoir or Monet painting or read a verse from a Rumi poem,” Sood says. “It speaks to you in a certain way. Chemistry, like beautiful art or eloquent language, does the same thing for me and my family — it wasn’t just a subject to earn a degree in; it became a part of our lives.”
