Lessons in Chemistry
May 26, 2026
UVic researcher and associate professor David Leitch is inventing new chemistry to create drugs and medicines more efficiently and with less waste.
David Leitch is a tall, energetic man with an easy smile and the horn-rimmed glasses of a classic movie scientist. He’s a gamer, a musician, a dad and a chemist—but at his core, he’s also something else important. He learned from great teachers and that, in part, lead him to decide to be one.
As a researcher and Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University Victoria, Leitch leads ground-breaking work in chemical synthesis that aims to revolutionize how molecules are made and lead to breakthroughs in the production of life-saving drugs and medicines.
As an educator, he’s training future scientists. And like many of his students likely will, he credits a handful of teachers and mentors—two UVic grads in particular—for activating his interest in chemistry.
Chemical reaction
Leitch’s journey began in the mid-Island fishing and logging town of Port Alberni. His father had studied chemistry in university and worked at the local pulp and paper mill doing various chemistry-related jobs before shifting to an occupational health and safety role. However, it was a grade 12 class, taught by UVic chemistry grad Brent Clark, BSc ’91, that firmly set Leitch down a scientific path.
“He was really excellent, super enthusiastic and steered quite a few of us into chemistry,” Leitch says. “[In fact], there are four tenured Canadian faculty in chemistry that were within a two-year span of each other from Alberni District Secondary School, and I think it was all because of that high-school teacher.”
After graduating, Leitch headed for the mainland where he played in an indie rock band called the Hotel Lobbyists, sharing stages with the likes of the Pack A.D. and Japandroids. At the same time, he also earned a Bachelor of Science and PhD from the University of British Columbia, where another UVic grad proved pivotal in his scientific development—Dr. Laurel Schafer, PhD ’99.
Leitch did his undergraduate research in inorganic chemistry and later his PhD under the direction of Schafer, a UVic alum award recipient and the current head of UBC’s Department of Chemistry. The crux of his studies focused on molecular structure—how chemical bonds are formed, their composition and how that influences how they react.
Striving to cut chemical waste
After UBC, Leitch criss-crossed the continent working for the pharmaceutical industry in the field of chemical synthesis—investigating new molecules and ways of making those molecular structures more efficiently and with less waste.
“A good analogy is we’re constructing a building—that’s molecular architecture,” Leitch says.
What goes into constructing a building isn’t just the finished product, he explains. It’s also all the unseen things that go into the construction—the labour, the tools, the fuel for those tools. But in chemical synthesis, most of those tools can’t be re-used or reclaimed. “It’s not like we can say, ‘Well, we’re done using the crane for the day, we’re going to send it back.’ This stuff all becomes chemical waste.”
Leitch says the amount of waste in the pharmaceutical industry is particularly high.
“It’s like 500 to one even at the best of times. For every kilo of a drug, there is 500 kilos or more of waste. And one of the reasons is that these are incredibly complex molecular structures.”
The processes to create these molecular structures, he adds, require a significant amount of water and other chemicals—all byproducts that become waste.
New chemistry, more sustainable medicine
In 2019, Leitch returned to Vancouver Island with his wife and son to teach and lead research teams at the University of Victoria.
He describes his team as “chemical cartographers, striving to map and understand chemical reaction space in the realm of organic synthesis and catalysis.”
A current focus of his research is how to get better efficiency out of precious metal additives, known as catalysts—key components of the overall building process that are not incorporated in the final structure. “These are like the little bit of cayenne pepper that you put in a recipe, and if you don’t put it in it’s just not the same,” Leitch says.
“In our case, we put in small amounts of these things that contain metals like palladium, platinum, iridium—super rare, incredibly expensive precious metals that are critical to make the chemical reactions that we want to do actually happen.”
One of truisms of chemical synthesis, Leitch says, is that the more chemical steps you have, the more reactions are needed, and the more waste it creates.
“One of the things that we need to really move the needle, especially on some of these pharmaceutical processes, is we need to invent new chemistry. New chemical reactions, new ways of putting atoms together to make those desired molecules at the end. And we need to develop new tools, like catalysts… Developing new chemistry means we can reduce the number of steps by doing more complicated bond forming processes.”
Leitch says the potential real-world impacts of his research is more sustainable and economic production of medicines. In a nutshell: it could bring down the price of medicines, and the production of these medicines will have less negative impact on the environment.
Global impact
Since coming to UVic, wherever Leitch’s research has gone, accolades have followed. In 2025, he received a prestigious Dorothy Killam Fellowship for exploring a new approach to platinum group metal catalysts to develop medicine without depleting non-renewable resources. The award is given to leading researchers “whose ground-breaking, best-in-class research stands to have significant impact on a national or global scale.”
The same year, he was recognized with a REACH Award for Early Career Excellence in Research, the Keith Fagnou Award from the Canadian Society of Chemistry and the Faculty of Science Excellence in Research Award. In 2023, he received a Cottrell Scholar Award and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Leitch is also one of only a handful of Canadians to hold funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In addition to a curious and analytical mind, a collaborative approach is essential to his work and success, Leitch says.
Training the next generation
When he’s not poring over data or deep in the molecular weeds of creating new chemistry, Leitch likes to dust off his guitar and jam with his teenage son, who’s “getting really good,” he says. He also likes to play old video games from the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) era such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario and the Mega Man series.
“I tend to get a little motion sick with a lot of the modern over-the-shoulder sort of games. So, there’s a nostalgia and a Zen to it.”
Chemistry, however, is never far from his mind.
“From a purely selfish perspective, I like puzzles and I like figuring out things that are mysterious and unclear,” he says. “My group and I spend a lot of time looking at lots of scientific data and trying to puzzle out what could be going on. The best results are the ones where ‘this did something weird and I don’t understand why.’ I love that kind of stuff.”
Although much of his work concerns efficiency and economy, reducing steps and minimizing waste, there is one byproduct of Leitch’s research that he whole-heartedly welcomes—a new generation of scientists.
“What really brought me back into academia is that I really like teaching, and I like training researchers how to be scientists,” he says. “We publish papers, we get awards, we give talks, but really the main research output that we put out are trained scientists. Seeing folks develop from pretty green, first-year graduate students or undergraduates who maybe don't even know what a research lab is to being able to design their own studies and research questions by the end is the most rewarding part.”
—Michael Kissinger, BEd ’94
This article appears in the UVic Torch alumni magazine.
For more Torch stories, go to the UVic Torch alumni magazine page.