Professor Guillet was highly respected and sought after by students and senior scientists alike, both in Canada and abroad. Over the years he supervised 28 PhD theses, 26 masters degrees and 50 post-doctoral fellows and research associates. Some arrived as part of exchange student programs with Dutch, German and Russian institutions. Some of the exchange programs were also for professors, especially those from the Soviet Union/Russia. Guillet’s students or post-doctoral fellows now hold academic positions in Canadian, American, British, Japanese, Polish and Singaporean universities and positions in industry in many countries. The emphasis in this series is on their activities at the University of Toronto, but there is also correspondence and associated material in files, especially at the post-doctoral level, of their earlier and subsequent academic and research work.
The series begins with a file contain student registers and lists of students (1963-1993), followed by correspondence from students wishing to study under Professor Guillet and relating to fourth-year undergraduate students and summer research assistants. There is also correspondence with students regarding their theses reports (1973-1996), applications from students in China (1983-1990), and letters of reference for students and administrative and academic colleagues (1985-2002).
The remaining files are grouped into the following categories: ‘undergraduates’, ‘exchange students’, ‘Masters students’, ‘PhD students’ and ‘post-doctoral fellows, research associates and visiting (including exchange) professors’. There is a also a final category of ‘demonstrators’, ‘research assistants’ and ‘research associates’. There are some files of general correspondence and files on individuals within each section are arranged alphabetically. Where students took both masters and doctoral degrees, the files are with the higher degree. Many of the students and fellows left their lab books with Professor Guillet. Those of only one student, Guojun Liu (now a senior professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario), as a doctoral candidate have been retained as a sampling (his masters notebooks were not kept). A few lab books relating to specific projects have also been retained; these are filed in Series 5 and 7. Files on individuals are arranged alphabetically within each section.
The undergraduate files consist mostly of the final project reports, with some notes, progress reports and covering correspondence. The earliest exchange proposals were with Russia in the late 1960s; there is a file of correspondence, primarily with notes on research projects at the University of Toronto (1969-1990), notebooks, and then files on research projects of the Moscow Institute of Fine Chemical Technology. There are individual files for the Dutch exchange students and some for the German, along with a file of covering correspondence for the latter. The masters student files may contain correspondence, research notes and progress reports. Many of the doctoral student files also contain programs for oral examinations and thesis defence, and appraisals of theses. A few also contain drafts of papers co-authored with Professor Guillet.
The correspondence in the graduate and post-doctoral files address a wide variety of issues, including those relating to of bringing students and post-doctoral fellows to the University of Toronto, research generally, and the specific problems associated with individual research projects. There are also some letters of reference. In addition to correspondence, the files on post-doctoral fellows contain research notes and reports. Some have research proposals, drafts of papers co-authored with Professor Guillet, and evaluations of the programs under which they came to the University of Toronto (for example, the special program for Chinese scholars). In addition to the usual material, the research notebook of one of Professor Guillet’s first post-doctoral fellows, Mitsura Koike from Japan (1964-1966), has been retained.