The Academic Travel Fund at U of T Scarborough, designed to facilitate student research projects abroad, continues to offer undergrads a chance to travel great distances to pursue their academic passion.
“These opportunities allow students to drill more deeply into areas of academic and research interest, and to share their work with others in Canada, or around the world. It is an amazing opportunity,” said Desmond Pouyat, Dean of Student Affairs.
In recent years, the fund has covered expenses for research conducted in Sweden, Mexico, the Canadian arctic, and other locations across the globe. Six recipients shared with us what the travel fund allowed them accomplish.
As one of two youth network delegates chosen to represent Canada at World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden, Linda Huyen Bui led presentations on sustainable development goals, drawing on experience gained through working in Sri Lanka.
“As a selected Canadian representative for the World Youth Parliament for Water (WYPW)… I had the opportunity to coordinate the network’s booth at the Young Professionals Booth, lead roundtable discussions during Young Professionals Day, be interviewed by a French journalist, and speak on a panel at the conference,” said Bui.
Amina Patel
Amina Patel represented the University of Toronto at the HOSA International Leadership Conference in Orlando, and won a gold medal in the life sciences category for her work in dentistry.
“As an aspiring dentist, the competition gave me extensive experience through being practically evaluated at a dental school in Florida,” said Patel.
Sarthak Sinha has made a name for himself at the American Burn Association by giving podium presentations and having a number of his research abstracts presented at their 48th and 50th annual meetings in Las Vegas and Chicago.
“I delivered a talk to an audience of burn clinicians and scientists which provided a direct forum to disseminate our research progress. Our presented findings have since been published in the Journal of Burn Care and Research, the official journal of the American Burn Association,” said Sinha.
“At the meeting, I also learned about the different societal enablers of burn injuries, which subsequently inspired my interest to complete a project examining burns resulting from illegal cannabis production.”
Maleeha Khan
As a Human Biology and Neuroscience double-major and Psychology minor, mental health initiatives are close to Maleeha Khan’s heart. The funding she received helped her study the suicide epidemic that has plagued Nunavut in recent years.
“In October 2017, I had the opportunity to be part of Arctic Youth Ambassador Summit in Iqaluit. I was attracted to this opportunity because of the recent suicide epidemic in Nunavut,” said Khan.
“The Canadian average suicide rate is around 11 per 100,000 people, but Nunavut’s rate is 117. This opportunity gave me the chance to learn more about the mental health issues from the locals in Iqaluit which has helped to spread awareness about this suicide epidemic in the south.”
Fergus Horrobin is a Physical and Mathematical Science student who is currently writing code to better model particle disk interactions, and hopes to publish his paper on planetary science this year. He recently attended the Numerical Simulations of Planet-Disc Interactions (NumPDI) conference.
“The NumPDI conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico [brings] together specialists in the field of numerical simulation of planet disk interaction. [It’s] an excellent opportunity to meet some of the people who have worked on the most important aspects of how planets interact with a protoplanetary disk.”
Nazanin Ijad spent her summer working in a research lab at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Her research with Dr. Gelareh Zadeh was presented to the Society of Neuro-Oncology in San Francisco in November.
“The project was centered on gaining a better understanding of the biology of malignant brain tumours and how they respond to different types of therapy. This was done by compiling an elaborate database that will be used to annotate molecular profiling of patient tumor samples,” said Ijad.
“The more we understand about the molecular profiling and genetics of the tumor, the better we can predict how patients respond to treatment and their prognosis overall.”
She hopes to further investigate her findings through graduate studies within the Institute of Medical Science program at U of T.