Congratulation to graduate students Anna Koudrina, Emma Wistaff & Tristan Smythe for winning three University wide scholarships!
| PhD candidate Anna Koudrina from Dr. M. DeRosa lab wins Koningstein Scholarship. In collaboration with Dr. E. Tsai at the Ottawa Hospital/OHRI, Anna uses aptamers in the development of targeted contrast agents for applications in MRI and CT imaging. These novel conjugates allow for early diagnosis and more precise treatment, while lowering toxicity of the conventionally used contrast media. Anna’s primary focus centers around conditions that involve clotting of blood. |  |
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MSc Candidate Emma Wistaff from Jeff Smith’s lab & OHRI lab wins Irene Ethel Cockburn Bursary. Emma is investigating a potential drug candidate for use in viral oncolytic therapies for the treatment of various cancer types. Emma is primarily focused on analyzing the binding location of the drug candidate within cells and the break down of the drug into metabolites over time using proteomics and metabolomics by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and chemometrics. |
| PhD candidate Tristan Smythe from Robert Letchers Lab wins the CUASA Scholarship. Tristan’s work is focused on the environmental fate of a recently discovered class of highly brominated flame retardant chemicals, and focusing on their uptake, distribution, and metabolism within herring gulls – an avian biomonitoring species for contaminant burdens within the Great Lakes area. This work involves the development of analytical techniques (i.e. GC-ECNI-MS and UPLC-TQS-MS/MS) to detect and quantify them in both biotic and abiotic matrices, as well as the development and use of in vitro bioassays to characterize the structure-specific metabolism-kinetics of various structural-isomers using a herring gull liver microsomal system. |  |