Chemistry Stories interviewed Karolina Słomińska this week as part of our Elements of Success series, and in this undergraduate profile we learned about her experiences at University College London (UCL), the transition from life in Poland to moving to Toronto, and bringing it all full circle by volunteering for the Chemistry Student Union.
Bio: Hi! I’m Karolina Słomińska (she/her), and I’m in my final year of study as a Chemistry Specialist at the University of Toronto’s St. George campus as a Lester B. Pearson International Scholar.
My current research is at the intersection of chemistry, computation, and materials science - I’m currently working on my CHM499 thesis with Prof. Anatole von Lilienfeld and Dr. Chris Sutton at the Acceleration Consortium, using machine learning to study pesticide properties. Before that, I spent a year abroad at University College London.
Outside chemistry, you can usually find me playing or watching tennis, searching for the best sweet pastries around Toronto, meeting up with friends, or planning my next travel or hiking adventure.
You spent two semesters at University College London last year taking undergraduate courses. What can you tell us about that experience?
I’ve always loved traveling and wanted to experience studying in another city during my degree, so I started thinking about doing a study abroad pretty early on. The decision on London was fairly simple - when I visited as a kid, I remember being amazed by how diverse the city was, full of museums, energy, and people. It was such a dynamic place and felt completely different from what I’d known growing up in Poland. When picking a university, UCL was an easy choice: it offered courses in computational chemistry I hadn’t been able to take at U of T, and being right in the middle of the city meant I could really explore London.
Outside of my courses, I joined Prof. Bob Schroeder’s group, where I worked on polymer-based electrochemical sensors for detecting metals in water - a project that blended chemistry, physics, and a bit of engineering. At first, the work was a bit outside my comfort zone, but I quickly learned to appreciate the challenge. By the end of the year, I felt confident discussing methods and results with others in the field. It was a huge period of growth for me, both technically and personally, and I couldn’t have asked for a more supportive group to learn from!
It was also really interesting to see how another university approaches chemistry. The labs were organized so differently. The organic ones, for example, lasted eight hours straight! It was a full day in the lab, but not every week, which made it a totally different pace of learning and experimenting than what I was used to.
Outside the university, what made the year so special were the people and experiences. I met amazing friends through UCL societies, explored London’s incredible theatre scene (I think I saw half the West End by the end of the year!), and travelled every chance I got! I’m so glad I got to connect my studies at U of T with my time at UCL - it made my degree feel much broader and showed me how valuable it is to see science from different perspectives.
How did you first become interested in studying chemistry?
I’ve always been the kind of person who asks why and how things happen. When I was younger, I’d constantly bombard my teachers and parents with questions - about colors, how things are made, or how we even know what we know about the world. That curiosity naturally pulled me toward learning and studying science.
In my first year, chemistry really stood out to me - a big part of that was CHM151. It was such a great course, with professors who were incredibly passionate about their fields and made the material genuinely exciting to learn. I remember thinking that chemistry had this mix of logic and creativity - it could explain the world around me, but it also gave me the tools to imagine and design completely new things.
Tell us something about chemistry that fascinates you.
It still amazes me that we can engineer function just by changing structure. You can shift a few atoms and suddenly a material behaves in a completely different way - its color changes, it becomes conductive, or it dissolves in water when it didn’t before. That idea, that we can build properties from the bottom up, is something I think about a lot. I often catch myself wondering how I’d redesign the materials around me to behave just a little differently.
What advice would you give new U of T undergraduates considering a chemistry specialty?
Be endlessly curious and try everything you can! Chemistry connects to so many fields - from medicine and materials to computation and the environment. Talk to professors, join labs early, and don’t worry about having it all figured out. You’ll probably change your mind a few times, and that’s a good thing! It’s just as important to find out what doesn’t excite you as it is to find what does. I believe that every new experience helps you understand what kind of scientist you want to become.
We’d love to share more about your journey as a scholar and student, and this includes anything you may wish to share about communities you’re part of, identities you’d like to highlight, or challenges you’ve encountered along the way.
Coming to U of T from Poland as a Lester B. Pearson International Scholar was a huge leap - exciting, but definitely overwhelming at first. I didn’t know what to expect, but I quickly found my place here thanks to so many great professors and friends who encouraged me to keep exploring.
I’ll always be grateful to Prof. Rob Batey, who took a chance on me in my second year and allowed me into his lab to work on an organic chemistry project! It was my very first research experience, and I learned so much - not just about chemistry, but about how research actually works day to day. That experience gave me the confidence to keep trying new things, and it opened the door to so many other opportunities. Since then, I’ve worked across 5 different research groups - from organic chemistry, sensors to computational chemistry - and each one has taught me something new about how chemistry connects to the world around us.
This year, I’m also serving as Academic Coordinator for the Chemistry Students’ Union, which feels like a full-circle moment. I try to create the same kind of welcoming space I found here - organizing Meet Your Profs and coffee chats where students can get to know faculty outside the classroom. It’s very rewarding to see those conversations happen and to help other students feel a real sense of community within the department.
Have you participated in a Chemistry Department poster session or presented at a conference? What was your topic?
Yes! I presented at Perspectives in Chemical Research, an event organized by the Chemistry Students’ Union. I shared my project from UCL on designing polymer-based sensors for detecting metals in water. It was so much fun - everyone came from such different areas of chemistry, and hearing how people approach problems from completely different angles was really interesting.
Chemistry had this mix of logic and creativity - it could explain the world around me, but it also gave me the tools to imagine and design completely new things. --Karolina Słomińska