Schwarcz started his teaching career at
Dawson College before moving to
Vanier College serving as chair of the Department of Chemistry at both colleges. He then returned to
McGill University in 1980 where he teaches in courses in the Department of Chemistry and Faculty of Medicine with an emphasis on alternative medicine. In 1999 Schwarcz became the founding director of the McGill University
Office for Science and Society (OSS) with
Ariel Fenster and
David N. Harpp. The OSS "...is a unique venture dedicated to the promotion of critical thinking and the presentation of scientific information to the public, educators and students in an accurate and responsible fashion." As director, he takes on health fads and the celebrities who promote them. He has used his knowledge of
magic to show how supernatural feats can be done by ordinary means. Even as a university student, Schwarcz found chemistry to be a dry subject, so he established a series of courses designed to bring chemistry to the general student, and later to the public through a series of lectures. The lectures include magic and spontaneity to keep the audience interested. "A good lecturer is also an actor. A lecture should seem spontaneous, even if it's been given many times before... You capture the audience's attention. Then, without their realizing it, you pump a little scientific information into their brains. Before they know it, they've learned something." In 2010, 2012, and 2016–2017, Schwarcz was nominated by McGill as one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty Speakers. Schwarcz began his media career in 1980 after meeting
Montreal Gazette reporter
Ted Blackman at the
Man and His World exhibition when he was demonstrating how to make polyurethane from two liquids. Blackman reported on the demonstration and made a significant error. Schwarcz wrote to the
Gazette, pointing out the error, and Blackman printed a retraction. Radio station
CJAD picked up the story and called Schwarcz to talk about it on air. The following week another scientific issue arose and he was called on again; this led to regular collaborations and to his own weekly radio show (
The Dr. Joe Show), which also ran on Toronto's
CFRB for about two years. Schwarcz has appeared hundreds of times on Canadian television and radio, including his single-season show about common foods called
Science to Go on the Canadian Discovery Channel. He writes a weekly column for the
Montreal Gazette called
The Right Chemistry and a monthly column in the Canadian Chemical News. He is one of the spokespersons for
ScienceUpFirst, a science communication initiative aiming at reducing the impact of COVID misinformation online. In 1999 Schwarcz was awarded the
Grady-Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public. At the time, he was the first non-American to win the award. He was the joint winner of the 2014
Center for Skeptical Inquiry Robert P Balles Prize for skeptical thinking for his book
Is This a Fact? Schwarcz has honorary doctorates from
Athabasca University (2002),
Cape Breton University (2011), and
Simon Fraser University (2019). ==Personal life==