In loving memory of Dan Petrescu, friend and colleague.
The sudden and tragic passing of Dan Petrescu on Sunday, October 3, 2021, has shaken the McGill community, especially his colleagues at the Tomlinson Project in University-Level Science Education (TPULSE), the Office of Science Education (OSE), and the Department of Chemistry.
Dan was born in 1991 in Germany and raised in France. He left Europe for the United States in 2009 to pursue his education. Dan studied for his B.A. in Chemistry from 2009-2013 at Boston University. He then went on to obtain his M.A. in Physical and Biophysical Chemistry at Boston University from 2013-2015. From 2015 on, he was a PhD candidate under the supervision of Professors Amy Blum and Mark Andrews in the Department of Chemistry, McGill University. Dan received his doctorate posthumously.
Dan was a passionate and dedicated educator. He joined TPULSE in Fall 2016 and started working towards improving science education at McGill. Dan was involved with training graduate student teaching assistants and hundreds of Tomlinson Engagement Award for Mentoring (TEAM) Fellows. He was also working on scholarship of teaching and learning projects with Supporting Active Learning & Technological Innovation in Studies of Education (SALTISE). Dan’s creativity lead him to become a Blue (Beautiful limitless unconstrained exploration) scholar with Building 21. Dan became the lead fellow at TPULSE and helped with the integration of TPULSE with OSE. At OSE, Dan was committed to bringing inquiry guided learning approaches into chemistry labs and was working towards starting a speaker series to disseminate evidence-based teaching strategies.
The Office of Science Education dedicates the SciLearn Speaker Series to Dr. Dan Petrescu.