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Every year, �������ϲʿ����ֳ� awards four students from both the graduate and undergraduate communities admission to the highly prestigious Tricolour Society and receipt of the Agnes Benidickson Tricolour Award. This award marks "the highest tribute that can be paid to a student for valuable and distinguished service to the University in non-athletic, extra-curricular activites." This year, Queen's graduate students Morgan Lehtinen and Max Moloney are the winners of the Tricolour Award - huge congratulations goes out to them! Only students with high involvement and ongoing devotion to bettering the Queen's (and Kingston) communities outside of sports or academics can be nominated for this award, so both Morgan and Max are models for stellar contributions to �������ϲʿ����ֳ� through their extra-curricular activities. 

Morgan Lehtinen is an accomplished doctoral candidate and member of the Queen’s Department of Chemistry since 2012. She also did her undergraduate degree at Queen’s University (ArtSci ’16); when she finishes her studies in 2022, she’ll have completed a total of 10 years as a loyal student of Queen’s. Morgan is in her fourth and final year of her PhD studies on Polymer Materials under the supervision of Doctor Guojun Liu. She says, “I feel like this closes a door to a great chapter of my life that’s been in the works for awhile now.” Morgan explains that she experienced an intuitive feeling while on a Queen's campus tour that made the university stand out to her as the top choice for her[ML1]  studies[ML2] . She admires the high caliber academics here, the history of Queen’s, the community amongst Queen's Alumni, and the respect and attachment she developed for the Chemistry Department and her supervisor while completing her undergraduate work here.

Morgan’s research focuses on creating new green filtration technologies to separate oil and water emulsions in order to protect the environment and improve current industrial processes. The applications to her research are vast: they include wastewater management, further developments in the metal manufacturing industry, natural product extraction, oil remediation and more. She has received recognition for the impact of her work at conferences across Canada and the U.S, as well as representing Canada in the Young Persons's World Lecture Competition in London, UK where she placed 3rd globally.  Her work doesn’t stop there – it extends into the Queen’s and Kingston communities as well. Morgan is passionate about helping other students access professional development and mentorship resources, make connections with local community and industry partners, and develop various skills including entrepreneurial ones (which she does as Program Coordinator for Dunin Deshpande Queen’s Innovation Centre’s Konnect Program). For example, Morgan works in the Kingston community to develop and connect industry partners with Queen’s students and faculty by co-founding Bonds for Success, Eastern Ontario’s only chemical sciences specific mentorship program and network, as well as launched the Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC) Kingston Local Section as their Student Chair. Morgan has been involved with student government both inside and outside the Chemistry Department (wherein she was President in 2019/2020) to implement new ways for students to access resources that will help them succeed based on their own definition of what success means for them. To do so, she created the Graduate Student Ambassador program in the Chemistry department and, upon its success, she mentored other Graduate Student across the Faculty of Arts and Science.

Morgan is the founder and CEO of her own company Micellotech, a clean tech start up that recovers valuable resources by recycling industrial wastewater to tackle global water scarcity through the integration of circular filtration processes. Morgan’s goals and aspirations as a soon-to-be Queen’s Alumni are to stay working within the entrepreneurial and commercialization spaces of the Chemical Industry. Her greater vision is to support a collaborative approach between academia, industry and government to reimagine the commercialization pathways of promising early-stage chemical innovations through scale-up and move many of them out of what’s called “Death Valley” (where technologies get stuck due to lack of funding) out to market where they can perform their essential work in reversing climate change and saving the environment. Morgan aims to work at solving this problem throughout her career.

Max Moloney is in his second year of studies in the Master’s program of Queen's Translational Medicine. He plans to graduate with his Master’s degree in early June 2022. As a devoted alumni, Max also completed his undergraduate studies at Queen’s in the Class of 2020 in Life Sciences. He works under the supervision of Doctor Dianne Lougheed (Queen’s Vice Dean of Medicine) in the Asthma Research Unit performing important work in finding algorithms that can detect asthma from patient medical records.

Max originally chose to do graduate studies at Queen’s because of how unique their graduate program is for translational medicine. The program here allows for student involvement in clinical research that promotes work with different physicians and more hands-on experience. Max is also grateful for the way the Department of Medicine fostered early academic connection between him and his current supervisor based on his research project goals. The added security and community he found in the Translational Medicine Unit is what led him to Queen’s, along with the strength of the program.

Max also excels in extra-curricular activities; he does a lot of admirable work in the Queen's and Kingston communities. He has been involved with the AMS Foodbank since 2019, beginning as a volunteer and quickly moving up to coordinator positions and now works as their head manager. In fact, those at the Food Bank were the ones who nominated him for the Agnes Benidickson Tricolour Award. Max continues his passion for tackling food insecurity through his management role at Good Times Diner and his work with the Food Collective at the Division of Student Affairs. Max has also been involved in supporting student mental health at Queen’s through the Jack.org program for six years, working his way up to be their co-president. He was also a member of the Queen's Varsity football team for four years and is currently an Infantry Officer for the Canadian Armed Forces.

Max says that he hopes that news of his award win and his Spotlight feature this week not only highlights him, but the fact that there’s important work and community involvement being done by all Queen’s students across the SGS beyond just their research.

To learn more about graduate programs within and go to their websites.