Jakob Meckes is a 2025 Canada Student Merit Award winner. He achieved this award for obtaining the highest standing of his class in the fourth and final year of his degree. Here is a brief biography of the winner.
Jakob began his undergraduate journey with a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology at the University of Alberta in 2019. Based on his passion for the physical sciences, however, he transferred to a BSc with Honours in Chemistry in 2022. Throughout his undergraduate degree, he completed several research projects, receiving two NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Awards. Under the supervision of Professor Rik Tykwinski, his first project focused on the synthesis and study of [4]cumulenes, resulting in a publication in the Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry. Additionally, he visited the Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) in Erlangen, Germany, for a summer research internship, working under the supervision of Professor Norbert Jux. For his honours thesis, Jakob was co-supervised by Professors Rik Tykwinski, Vladimir Michaelis, and Alex Brown. In this project he synthesised verdazyl-containing biradical compounds, applied them in dynamic nuclear polarisation (DNP) experiments, and performed some preliminary computational studies. This work resulted in a US provisional patent and a first-author publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. During the last few months of his undergraduate degree, Jakob also worked as a teaching assistant in organic chemistry, before graduating with First Class Honours and receiving the Gold Medal in Chemistry in June 2025.
Starting in September 2025, Jakob is working towards a PhD in Chemistry at the University of British Columbia with funding from the NSERC CGS-M programme and is working under the supervision of Professor Jolene Reid. Here, he is combining his interest in both experimental and theoretical organic chemistry, by studying and optimising reactions involving asymmetric catalysis, using machine learning and other computational methods, while also being able to verify results synthetically.
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