In compiling our list of U of T’s young achievers – alumni under the age of 40 who have attained considerable success in their respective (and often multidisciplinary) fields – we were not only impressed with what they have achieved, but how they achieved it.

How did these high flyers get there from here?

Mars researcher at NASA! Celebrity comedian in China! Fitness guru to Hollywood stars!

Such careers are hardly obvious options for young people entering university. Indeed, some careers didn’t even exist until these young alumni created them. So how did they prepare themselves for the unknowable? How did they find and navigate a path to a “there” that was not yet there?

Mark Rowswell, born in Ottawa and now a TV celebrity in China, had no idea what he would do when he arrived at U of T. After learning some Chinese from an employer at a summer job, he enrolled in Chinese studies and found his passion.

Darlene Lim says she never could have imagined working at NASA. Her marks during her first two years at U of T were hardly spectacular. Then she took a course in limnology (the study of fresh-water lakes) and got hooked – a path that has led her to study ancient lakes on Earth as analogues to ancient crater lakes on Mars.

Ray Hsu, poet and PhD candidate, says he was a slacker – until he realized that many of the authors he was studying in a Canadian literature course were University of Toronto alumni, and that he, too, could be a writer.

Hana Zalzal says that everything she has done – earning an MBA, founding a multimillion-dollar cosmetics business – has been easy compared to completing her U of T engineering degree.

A common theme emerges in the profiles of these young achievers: by taking courses or getting involved in extracurricular activities that caught their interest, they found what moved them. By completing undergraduate or graduate degrees, they learned what it takes to succeed.

Passion and confidence: you can’t take a course in either, yet somehow our trailblazing young alumni graduated with both.

One of Panthaky’s aims has been to broaden opportunities for women and South Asian actors. She graduated from the University of Toronto at Mississauga with a theatre and drama studies degree in 1992, only to find a world greatly resistant to the idea of colour-blind casting. “There was nothing out there,” she sighs. In those days actors were pigeonholed in specifically ethnic storylines, instead of playing a character whose race and culture were immaterial to the story. But things are getting better, says Panthaky, thanks in part to companies such as the Maya South Asian Theatre Company, which she started with several other enterprising actors of South Asian descent. They’re currently planning a classical piece, titled Four Chapters, by Rabindranath Tagore (known as “the Indian Shakespeare”), “but we’ve also talked about taking a Noël Coward play and casting it completely with South Asian actors, which in itself would have an impact.”

Panthaky works for social equality offstage, too, and has been involved in the Department of Canadian Heritage’s March 21 Campaign to stop racism, among other initiatives. But art, not politics, is where her heart lies. “I personally am not a very political person – my art is my art, and I don’t usually mesh the two,” she says.

Since first playing a small role on Degrassi High, Panthaky has been a frequent fixture on television, radio and stage, and performed in a five-month run of The Vagina Monologues at Toronto’s New Yorker Theatre. But while guest spots on hit shows like Monk, Blue Murder and DaVinci’s Inquest may sound glamorous, they do mean a certain amount of sitting around. “A lot of the time when you’re on set,” she says, “it’s just hurry up and wait.” Which is clearly not this particular actor’s style.

He’s making up for lost time now. Palmer heads the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, a seven-member troupe devoted to blurring the boundaries between adults’ and children’s theatre. Their brilliantly received shows have included The Unlikely Birth of Istvan, described by the Globe and Mail as a “surrealist fairy tale about good and evil.”

Featuring both a graphic puppet birth and a puppet strangulation, Istvan is definitely not children’s fare. But “part of the virtue or the wonder of a puppet show is that it makes adults childlike,” says Palmer, who has performed extensively for kids and is also the author of the “Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children” fairy tale series. “We’re not interested in shocking people, but in making something beautiful.”

The Old Trouts came together just before 2000, when an apocalypse-conscious Palmer decided to round up a band of childhood friends to hole up on his grandfather’s ranch and create the ultimate puppet show. The Trouts spent a year in a coal-heated shack, escaping just “before we lost our minds,” says Palmer. “We were living as far away as we could from the cowboys, because we were irritating to them, I think.” A bunkhouse full of ranch hands (as well as local Hutterites) proved to be their first receptive audience, making the Trouts confident that they could enchant art lovers from all walks of life.

“The thing about puppets is they’re a combination of different media that people generally accept as being art: sculpture, drama, music, painting,” says the 31-year-old philosophy graduate. “You put all those things in puppetry, and there’s no particular reason it shouldn’t be art as well – or at least not relegated to church basements and children’s birthday parties.”

Yes, things turned out rather well for this graduate of Chinese studies at U of T. After he landed at Beijing University as a foreign-exchange student in 1988, Rowswell responded to an open invitation for foreign talent to appear on a TV variety show. He performed a traditional form of Chinese comic dialogue known as xiangsheng (“crosstalk”), a highly scripted and polished skit of wordplays (think Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First”). 


Dashan evolved into a cross-cultural ambassador, frequently appearing as a host of TV variety and educational programs, and even as celebrity pitchman. Speaking of his persona, Rowswell says, “It’s a guy who’s western on the outside and Chinese on the inside.” Rowswell now lives part time in “near anonymity” in Thornhill, Ontario, with his wife, Lin, and their two children.

For Camilla Gibb (BA UC 1991), the journey makes perfect sense. “Anthropology informs everything I do as a writer. You’re an observer in both, of what people do and why they do things. The language you use to speak about those things is different.”

Gibb’s prose can be both gut-wrenching and gut-bustingly hilarious – in the same sentence. The New York Times referred to her sentences as “prickly unsentimental assaults.” 


“I was struggling in an academic language, which I felt to be restrictive,” admits Gibb. “I had to find my native tongue – and that tongue is fiction.”

Her first novel, Mouthing the Words (Pedlar Press, 1999), won the City of Toronto Book Award. She followed up with The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life (Doubleday 2002). For her novel Sweetness in the Belly, to be published in spring 2005, she returns to the settings of her doctoral and post-doc fieldwork: the experiences of Muslim women in Ethiopia and refugees in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. The research led to “a very dry and dispassionate thesis,” says Gibb, but it also fuelled her imagination. “I wanted to tell intense and passionate stories of how people feel, but I needed some distance to grow as a writer before re-conceiving it as fiction.”

What caused the slacker to straighten out? Hsu (BA 2001 Victoria, MA 2002) credits the banners featuring prominent alumni on St. George Street, as well as Professor George Elliott Clarke’s course on modern Canadian literature – many of the writers on the syllabus are U of T grads. “I thought, well, that’s interesting – it means that the next generation of Canadian poets must be somewhere around here,” he says. “I could walk right past them and not even know it.” So Hsu began participating in literary activities, including the influential Hart House poetry workshop, the Algonquin Square Table. He says that his achievements were “born out of anxiety that I might be missing something.”

Now 26, Hsu volunteers part-time as an editor at Junction Books, a small press in Toronto, and has written a chapbook titled Gordian Chants. Numerous literary journals, including Blood & Aphorisms and The Fiddlehead, have published his poems, and Nightwood Editions will publish his first full-length book of poetry this fall. His work, which he describes as “riding the line between traditional and experimental,” has also been set to music and adapted for a short film.

Gould Keil stayed four years and wrote the book Vodka, Tears and Lenin’s Angel: A Journalist on the Road in the Former Soviet Union, which chronicled her adventures abroad as she rubbed elbows with politicians, the nouveau riche and the suddenly homeless. Gould Keil also wrote political commentaries on Russia for several newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the alternative newsweekly the Village Voice and the Toronto Star. Her determination to see events firsthand led her to Chechnya in 1995, when Russian troops were attempting to recapture the region. “It was fundamental for me as a journalist to cover that if I was going to write about the country,” she says.

Since returning to New York, Gould Keil has worked on staff at the Village Voice, made another overseas foray as a correspondent in the Balkans for several publications and been a producer and news reporter for CNN. Now she’s writing political and lifestyle features for the New York Post, working on a second book about her experiences abroad and trying out a new role – as mother to Braden Lewis, who Jennifer and husband Braden Keil welcomed in December 2003.

After graduating with a double major in English and philosophy, Pontisso (BA 1991 St. Michael’s) spotted a posting at U of T’s Career Centre for the job that had earlier struck him as so outlandish. But this time he knew he had found his calling. “I dragged my friend over, pointed to the ad and said, ‘Look, that’s me.’”

When Pontisso started working at Oxford’s Toronto office in 1993, he joined the team that produced the first Canadian Oxford Dictionary (the second edition is due out this summer). It was a perfect fit, he says, because his childhood love of books had evolved into a fascination with Canadian words and turns of phrase. Since then he has also co-edited the Oxford Canadian Spelling reference book. “For some people, using ‘center’ or ‘color’ is simply un-Canadian,” he says, though his own views on language and national identity are far less doctrinaire.

In fact, Pontisso has little patience for rigid grammarians. Yet when new acquaintances discover what he does for a living, many expect him to point out their linguistic faults. Another occupational hazard is that he is expected to be a Scrabble master, and he’s anything but. “Maybe it’s that I try too hard to find big, exciting words, but I’ve definitely lost more games than I’ve won,” he laughs. “When people beat me they get the biggest thrill, and I hear about it over and over again.

The down-to-earth Perrin admits that the life of a romance novelist isn’t all pink chiffon and suitors with strong jawlines. “There are women who’ve written romances who have never been married, or are divorced like myself,” she says. “I think you just have to enjoy that type of fiction, the same way John Grisham writes thrillers without having a crazy secret life that the police would be interested in knowing about.”



Perrin has also written mystery and children’s stories, as well as mainstream literary fiction. In her latest release, The Delta Sisters (St. Martin’s Press, 2004), three generations of women become enmeshed in secrets and lies following an unsolved murder. Most of Perrin’s readers live south of the border, and in the last few years she’s had particular success writing books with African-American characters. She credits such best-selling writers as Terry McMillan (Waiting to Exhale) with this new boom. “Some saw it as a fad,” she says. “But now everyone is publishing fiction geared toward the African-American woman and they realize it’s here to stay.”

“It’s a bit overwhelming,” admits McAdam, 33. After six months of trying unsuccessfully to sell the manuscript in Sydney, Australia, where he and his wife lived before their recent move to Montreal, he was simply happy to get his book published – let alone in the UK, Canada and the United States.



After completing his undergraduate degree in English at McGill University in Montreal, McAdam arrived at U of T and earned a master of arts in English. He was determined to be a professor, but the course load “put me off academic work for awhile,” he says. “It was so rigorous.”

He left academia for a year to work on a novel, which ended up in his bottom drawer. Then, while completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge in England, he started Some Great Thing. The story follows the lives of a plasterer and a city planner in the developing city of Ottawa in the 1970s. “I realized it was becoming a story about two people who didn’t know where they were,” says McAdam, who, as the son of a Canadian diplomat, was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Denmark, England and Canada. “They were trying to find place, build place in their mind. Ottawa emerged as a place that was appropriately blank.”

While pursuing her PhD in geology at U of T, the 32-year-old researcher spent summers at the NASA Haughton-Mars Project on Canada’s Devon Island, some 1,000 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. Lim’s work – studying the evolution of lakes – could serve as an analogue to determining whether ancient craters on the red planet may have once been lakes.



Lim also served for two summers at The Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station as one of six crew members in the world’s first Mars simulation base, sleeping and living in a 21-foot-high cylinder and venturing outside in spacesuits. “We got to indulge ourselves in what it would be like to be on a Mars mission,” says Lim. 


Now Lim is stationed at the NASA Ames Research Center in California as a post-doctoral research associate, where she continues her study of polar lakes. She has also become a tireless advocate of human missions to Mars, speaking at schools and to organizations such as the Canadian Space Society.



”The quest to search for life on Mars is part of a much bigger quest that we’ve been involved in since the dawn of human consciousness – to find out if we are alone in the solar system, to define ourselves in that darkness of space,” says Lim.