Continuing the legacy of a research chair launched nearly 30 years ago, the Faculty of Science has recruited and appointed Professor Cora Young as the new Guy Warwick Rogers Chair in Chemistry starting this July. The Rogers Chair was created as an endowment fund with a donation from Mary Rogers in 1988, in memory of her late husband, Guy Warwick Rogers, to support faculty research in the Department of Chemistry.
“The Department of Chemistry at York University has led atmospheric chemistry research in Canada for over thirty years and has had a major impact on the field,” says Young. “I am excited to become a part of this legacy by bringing my research program to York and taking up the Guy Warwick Rogers Chair in Chemistry.”
Cora Young
Young, who has held a faculty position at Memorial University of Newfoundland since 2012, conducts research on environmental chemistry, using state-of-the-science analytical techniques to characterize chemicals, their sources, and their fates in the environment. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto, where she focused on the atmospheric chemistry of polyfluorinated compounds and their role as long-lived greenhouse gases and sources of persistent compounds to the environment. She then went on to complete a postdoctoral position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States and the University of Colorado, where she measured reactive atmospheric trace gases and determined their impact on the oxidative potential of the atmosphere. Young has received the Colorado Governor’s Award for High‐Impact Research and has previously held awards from NSERC at the undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral level.
“We are delighted to recruit a scientist of Professor Young’s caliber as the next holder of the Rogers Chair,” says the Dean of the Faculty of Science Ray Jayawardhana. “Her wide-ranging research program will strengthen our Chemistry department further, and will be of great interest to our graduate and undergraduate students.”