Six students bring home $50,000 Vanier scholarships

Congratulations go out to Marianne DeGorter, one of six students from The University of Western Ontario who have received one of the newest and most prestigious scholarships in Canada - the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Marianne is a PhD student in Pharmacology, working with Drs. Richard Kim and Rommel Tirona. The scholarship recipients were announced in Ottawa on Thursday at an official recognition ceremony led by Minister of State Gary Goodyear.

The Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships program is designed to attract and retain world-class doctoral students by supporting those who demonstrate a high standard of scholarly achievement in graduate studies in the social sciences and humanities, natural sciences and engineering, and health; as well as leadership skills. Each student is eligible to receive up to $50,000 per year for three years.

Marianne came to Western in 2007, funded by a Canada Graduate Scholarship from NSERC. Her undergraduate studies included biomedical computing, and a multidisciplinary program in computer and life sciences. She also was recipient of a Queen's Chancellor's Scholarship and a Canada Millennium Excellence Award.

Her research focus is on personalized medicine, an emerging field that seeks to address interindividual variability in drug response by considering an individual's genetic makeup when choosing appropriate drugs and their dosages. DeGorter is involved in work to create new models to understand variability in drug response.