William Navarre, PhD

Excellence in Linking Undergraduate Teaching to Research in Life Sciences

Department of Molecular Genetics

Dr. Navarre completed his doctoral research at UCLA and post-doctoral training in microbiology at the University of Washington. He joined the Department in 2007 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012. From 2012-2017 he was the Undergraduate Coordinator for the department. Dr. Navarre has taught extensively and has been a coordinator for the MGY377 (Bacteriology) course since 2010. He created the Department’s first online course MGY277, Introduction to Medical Microbiology, which has enrolled as many as 1200 students. Dr. Navarre also initiated changes to the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics undergraduate Specialist program to make it more research intensive. Students in the Specialist program are assigned faculty research mentors in their second year and participate in laboratory research throughout their studies. Many of these Specialist students have continued in research at the graduate level. Dr. Navarre has been happily married to his wife, Lara, for almost 20 years and is a proud father of 13-year old twins, Kira and Landon.

Reflection
Since coming to Toronto it has been my great privilege to mentor outstanding scientists at all stages of their careers. As a recent transplant from the United States I am enormously proud of Canada and am honored to have become a citizen of this great country in 2014. I look forward to many more years of service - training both Canadian and international students in the methods of evidence-based scientific inquiry.