IBBME Alumni and Awards Banquet 2011: An evening of celebration and expansion

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IBBME Alumni and Awards Banquet 2011: An evening of celebration and expansion

Annual dinner highlighted by alumni visits, announcement of scholarship for international biomedical engineering PhD students

November 3, 2011

IBBME Director Paul Santerre announced the very recent creation of the Wildcat Graduate Scholarship Award for International PhD students at the third annual IBBME Alumni and Awards Banquet on October 26. This award, made possible by at $200,000 donation from an anonymous donor and subsequent $400,000 matching from the University, will be allocated for the first time in 2012. Santerre made the announcement to over two hundred students, faculty, and staff who were joined by dozens of IBBME alumni gathered together to celebrate the 2010-11 achievements of this world renown Institute and its cross-disciplinary community.

The new PhD scholarship award will allow IBBME to better support exceptional international doctoral students. International students bring with them a diverse perspective and an international network that can further promote IBBME’s reputation, and the opportunity to build bridges with other research labs around the world, thereby leading to international collaborations for addressing some of the most complex medical challenges surrounding human health and healthcare today.

"It’s a timely award for the Institute, as we are in a period of rapid expansion," noted Santerre. "Our Clinical Engineering PhD concentration was launched this fall, and as we gear up for our 50th anniversary celebrations in 2012, we have quite a few new initiatives to celebrate the growth of the Institute." The plans for the 50th anniversary celebrations as announced by Santerre include a feature series on IBBME inventors and entrepreneurs on the Institute website, a technology transfer forum at the annual Scientific Day in May 2012, the Golden Anniversary fundraising campaign to raise $1M for graduate scholarships, and an IBBME-hosted international symposium on neural technologies on October 10, 2012.

IBBME alumni were also highlighted at the event. Cindy Yip (PhD 2010) spoke to the IBBME community for the keynote address. In a talk entitled "Engineering your Career Pathway," Yip spoke of her experience transitioning from being a doctoral student at IBBME to a player in the biomedical industry in her current role as project manager at Luminex Corporation.

The words of alum Sonia Bot (MASc 1987) who was visiting from Ottawa, summed up the excitement of the evening. "At last evening's event, it made me very proud to be a part of the IBBME. I felt the buzz, energy, and momentum of this unique, world-class Institute."

Santerre also handed out IBBME’s annual awards for its top students. Notably, PhD Candidate Leo Chou received two awards: The Anna Jamieson Award, awarded for exception student service, and the Sally and Paul Wang Distinguished Graduate Scholarship, awarded for outstanding academic and extracurricular leadership.

The other awards announced were:

• The Poul B Madsen Award: Elaine Lu , MHSc.
• The Norman F Moody Award: Soroor Sharifpoor, PhD, and Emily Walker , PhD candidate (co-recipients)
• The Institute for Technology in Healthcare Graduate Fellowship: Tahir Wasim, MHSc candidate
• The Institute for Technology in Healthcare Thesis Award: Jennifer Howcroft, MHSc
• IBBME Best Paper Awards (in each of the Institute’s four theme categories):

Biomaterials, Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine: Robart Babona-Pilipos, PhD Candidate: Adult subependymal neural precursors, but not differentiated cells, undergo rapid cathodal migration in the presence of direct current electric fields, published in PLoS One

Nanotechnology, Molecular Imaging and Systems Biology: Jonathan Lovell, PhD Candidate: Porphysome nanovesicles generated by porphyrin bilayers for use as multimodal biophotonic contrast agents, published in Nature Materials.

Neural, Sensory Systems, Rehabilitation Engineering: Andrew Myrden , MASc Candidate: A brain-computer interface based on bilateral transcranial Doppler ultrasound, published in PLoS One.

Engineering in a Clinical Setting: Hisham Alshaer, PhD Canadidate: Detection of Upper Airway Narrowing Via Classification of LPC Coefficients: Implications for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Diagnosis. Accepted in the proceedings of IEEE, International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

For a full list of student awards, please click here .

University of Toronto Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering

IBBME Alumni and Awards Banquet 2011: An evening of celebration and expansion