Twelve graduate students doing research in the field of health have received this year’s Friedman Award for Scholars in Health. Winners range from a variety of programs, including Chemical and Biological Engineering, Medical Genetics and Public Health.
The Friedman Award for Scholars in Health supports learning and research opportunities for graduate students or medical residents working in the broad area of health, to bring new perspectives to their education and further their career.
The award is named after two of the earliest faculty members in the UBC Faculty of Medicine. Dr. Sydney Friedman and his wife Dr. Constance Livingstone-Friedman believed that well-rounded and transformative education includes learning from different perspectives and cultures, and they wished to support such learning among UBC graduate students and medical residents.
Friedman Scholars receive funding for six or more months of study outside western Canada. Destinations for this year’s award winners include University of California, San Francisco, Maastricht University, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
| Name | TOpic | Status/Department | host institution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mark Trinder | Preventing heart attacks before they happen: the value of genetics | MDPHD student | The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard |
| Christopher Cheung | Preventing Death after Heart Attack: Understanding the Role of the Wearable Devices | Medical Resident in Cardiology | University of California, San Francisco |
| Thomas Roston | The differences between hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in children versus adults | Medical Resident in Cardiology | Boston Children's Hospital & Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School |
| Ruth Gibson | The Impacts of Unilateral Sanctions: Population Health and Crimes Against Humanity | Doctoral student in Interdisciplinary Studies | Stanford University School of Medicine |
| Paola Arguello Pascualli | Adaptability of Polygenic Risk Scores to underrepresented populations in the Americas | Master's student in Medical Genetics | Stanford University / National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity |
| Michelle Coombe | Improving Canadian emerging infectious disease surveillance using wetland mud and genetic modeling | Doctoral student in Population and Public Health | University of Edinburgh |
| Uyen Nguyen | Uncovering the cellular ensemble in mammary tissue remodeling using Seq-Well technology | Master's student in Experimental Medicine | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT |
| Evan Warner | Aberrant epigenetic patterns in prostate cancer with defective DNA repair | Doctoral student in Genome Science and Technology | Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School |
| Jessica Archibald Orozco | A Neurochemical Map of the Brain in Pain | Doctoral student in Experimental Medicine | University of Zurich, Department of Chiropractic Medicine, Balgrist Hospital Campus |
| Rebecca Metcalfe | Building Novel Tools to Support Patient Decision-making | Doctoral student in Population and Public Health | Maastricht University |
| Athanasios Kritharis | A new technological paradigm for low-cost, decentralized vaccine manufacture | Doctoral student in Chemical and Biological Engineering | Sanofi-Pasteur Toronto, Lyon, NRC Montreal |
| Palpolage Don Shehan Hiroshan Gunawardane | A Novel Microscale Soft Actuator for Medical Applications | Doctoral student in Mechanical Engineering | University of Wollongong |