Celebrating our achievements
We are celebrating the monthly achievements of our faculty, staff, trainees and students. This month, we’d like to congratulate Jane Rylett, PhD; along with Joan Binnendyk; Dr. Timothy Doherty; Kevin Dueck; Martin Duennwald, PhD; Vidushi Khatri; Jay Loftus; Gary Shaw, PhD; Priya Sivarajah; and Matthew Woods on their achievements.
Joan Binnendyk, educational developer in the Postgraduate Medical Education office, was chosen as a top five nominee out of 35 paper abstracts for the International Conference on Residency Education (ICRE) What Works paper session. Her abstract will be presented at ICRE in Toronto on Saturday, October 25. The What Works track provides a unique opportunity to hear how other medical educators are successfully integrating CanMEDS in their residency programs.
Dr. Timothy Doherty, chair/chief, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, was selected to receive the Distinguished Researcher Award by the American Association of Neuromuscular & Electrodiagnostic Medicine. The Distinguished Researcher Award honours an AANEM member who has made continuous significant contributions to clinical neurophysiology research.
Kevin Dueck and Priya Sivarajah, Medicine Class of 2016, had articles featured in the September 2014 edition of Scrub-In. Vidushi Khatri, Medicine Class of 2015, also had a research highlight in the magazine.
Jay Loftus, instructional designer, Strategic Technology Commons, successfully defended his dissertation on July 29. The title of his dissertation is "The Cerebral Hemodynamics of Cognitive Load: Learning Anatomy with Static and Dynamic Digital Images." It explores how the novice learner brain matches blood flow to the task at hand and how persons with differing spatial ability have different response depending on how complicated the picture gets.
Gary Shaw, PhD, in collaboration with Jane Rylett, PhD, and Martin Duennwald, PhD, received more than $1 million in Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funding for the next five years to study how mutations in an enzyme called parkin cause early-onset Parkinson’s Disease. They are hoping to identify new proteins that might control parkin’s activity and determine atomic-level structures of parkin with these activating proteins. The hope is that this research will pave the way for the development of therapeutics in the near future. Read the full story here.
Matthew Woods, a PhD candidate, Microbiology and Immunology, received the prestigious IAS/ANRS Young Investigator Award at this year’s International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia. The $2,000 award is jointly funded by the International Aids Society (IAS) and the Agence Nationale de Recherche sur le sida et les hépatites virales (ANRS) to support young researchers who demonstrate innovation, originality, rationale and quality in the field of HIV research. His research involving a protein called HERC5, which is a newly discovered human protein that exhibits potent antiviral properties, particularly against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Read more here.
