Summer Honour Roll at Unity Health
Every month, staff, researchers, physicians, learners and teams across Unity Health Toronto celebrate important honours, achievements and awards. Congratulations to all who’ve been recognized this summer!
Fourteen investigators at Unity Health received grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for their research projects, totaling more than $7 million in federal funding. CIHR released the funding as part of their Spring 2023 Project Grant competition, which funds projects with the greatest potential to advance health care, health systems and health outcomes. Congratulations to Drs. Ahmed Bayoumi, Gillian Booth, Charles de Mestral, Tara Gomes, Boris Hinz, Benita Hosseini, Karim Ladha, Gaspard Montandon, Andrew Pinto, Fahad Razak, Amol Verma, Areti Angeliki Veroniki, Darren Yuen, Haibo Zhang, and their teams.
The St. Michael’s laboratory won the Innovation Award in Laboratory Medicine from the Canadian Society of Clinical Chemistry. This award is sponsored by Roche Diagnostics and is presented to a team that has made ground-breaking innovative advances in clinical laboratory medicine. The lab team was recognized for their role in establishing Toronto’s drug checking pilot program, with Dr. Dan Beriault and Dr. Sarah Delaney receiving special mention. Well done!
Congratulations to InventoRR MD and MIMOSA Diagnostics, who were among six companies who were awarded funding from the Ontario Centre of Innovation. The funding will help accelerate the development of their health solutions. The companies were started by clinicians and scientists at Unity Health Toronto with a goal of commercializing and translating their research innovations to patient care.
Dr. Petal Abdol, geriatric psychiatrist at Providence Healthcare, was awarded the Social Responsibility Award in Postgraduate Medical Education from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine. The award recognizes her commitment to social responsibility, demonstrated through her efforts to develop education programs and training to support the university’s EDI mission. As a researcher, she is investigating discrimination and microaggressions directed towards internationally-trained health professionals. She is also a strong advocate for seniors and takes great pride in teaching residents how to provide psychosocial support to patients. Congratulations!
Congratulations to Drs. Dani Diestro, David Gomez and Julian Spears, physicians at St. Michael’s Hospital, who are part of a team that’s been awarded funding from the Brain Aneurysm Foundation to advance their aneurysm research. The Brain Aneurysm Foundation awarded grants to 17 different research projects, totaling $635,000 in funding.
PhD student Oliver Gatalo was awarded a doctoral award by the U of T Institute for Pandemics for his PhD project titled “Limiting biases in measures of vaccine effectiveness from real-world data during evolving outbreaks: a systematic review and simulation study of mpox.” Galato is supervised by Dr. Sharmistha Mishra, infectious disease physician and researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital. Well done!
Dr. Benita Hosseini, research scientist at the Upstream Lab, and her research team have been awarded the Catalyst and Research Development Grant from the University of Toronto’s Institute for Pandemics. Their project, titled “Innovative Strategies for Early Detection of Acute Respiratory Infections,” aims to reshape infectious disease surveillance systems to enhance pandemic preparedness.
Dr. Vitor Mendes, neurosurgeon and scientist at St. Michael’s, has been elected to the board of directors of the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery. The organization is a scientific and educational association dedicated to advancing the specialty of neurointerventional surgery. Congrats!
Dr. Barathi Rajasri Sreenivasan, physician at Providence Healthcare, was recognized for excellence in individual teaching performance by the University of Toronto’s faculty of medicine. Rajasri Sreenivasan was awarded the W.T. Aikins Award – named after the first dean of the faculty of medicine after its reorganization in 1887. Well done!
