The Cecil Yip Doctoral Research Award gives financial support to doctoral-stream students working under the Donnelly Centre, of which many of the faculty and students are also MoGen members. This year, five out of the nine awardees were MoGen graduate students, with faculty members Drs. Jason Moffat and Igor Stagljar serving part of the committee that selects the recipients. The winners and their awarded projects are listed here:
Supervised by Dr. Jason Moffat,Adrian Granda Farias is determining cancer cell genes that allow immune system evasion.
Supervised by Dr. Tim Hughes, Shamira Tabrejee collaborated with Dr. Jack Greenblatt to discover how chromatin remodelling influences and may predict gene expression.
Supervised by Dr. Tim Hughes,Sara Pour is using deep machine learning to study gene terminal ends.
Supervised by Dr. Benjamin Blencowe, Steven Dupas is learning how microexons impact neurological development and disorders with CRISPR gene editing.
In addition, Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. candidate and fellow awardee Heta Lad is joining forces with MoGen faculty Drs. Gary Bader and Montenegro-Burke to test if blood factors play a part in skeletal muscle weakness and wasting in ICU patients by testing their sera on dish-grown human muscles.
