People

William Wiley Navarre, Ph.D.
Professor and Associate Chair
(Mentorship and Equity)

William Navarre was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate. He obtained his Ph.D. in the lab of Olaf Schneewind at UCLA studying the anchoring of surface proteins in Gram-positive bacteria. He was a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow and did post-doctoral work with Arturo Zychlinsky at New York University prior to joining the lab of Ferric Fang at the University of Washington in Seattle. With Ferric he studied mechanisms of bacterial resistance to immune effectors. He joined the Department of Molecular Genetics as an Assistant Professor in September of 2007 and was a CIHR New Investigator. He was proud to become a Canadian citizen in 2014.

He maintains an active role in teaching and is the coordinator for MGY377H1, the main bacteriology course on campus. He created the online microbiology course MGY277H1 (Introduction to Medical Microbiology) and the second-year undergraduate research course MGY280H1. He was awarded an Excellence in Undergraduate Life Sciences Teaching Award in 2017. Over the course of his career at UofT he has taught microbiology to over 6,000 students from virtually every corner of the globe (we’ll ignore the obvious flaw in this common metaphor – the fact that the world is a sphere and, as such, has no ‘corners’).

Dr. Navarre has worked to make a high-quality education in life science accessible to students from all backgrounds regardless of income, social position, or stage of life. He has focused on improving mentorship standards within his own department and within the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. He has served on numerous equity committees and has been the departmental equity representative since 2018.