Haidy Giratallah, Pharmacology and Toxicology
Student’s Name: Haidy Giratallah
Year of Study: 4th
Graduate Department: Pharmacology & Toxicology
Country of Residence: Canada
Why Faculty of Medicine: I have always dreamt about helping patients but not as their treating doctor but rather through research and discovery. The faculty of medicine is a perfect incubator for becoming a researcher and remain patient centered. Specifically, faculty of Medicine at UofT, provides enormous amount of support for students like me from academic and professional development resources to mental well-being and a wide variety of extracurricular activities.
Why this Department: Towards precision medicine, I had a great interest in studying individual variability in responding to a drug or a foreign substance. Before joining, I expected a PharmTox department would be only focused on animal research and preclinical side of such work. However, PharmTox at UofT is an extremely diverse department which is what mostly caught my interest. You get exposure to the whole pipeline of drug discovery and development process from computational to bench to clinic. I appreciate the collaborative environment where all work together towards the bigger more complete picture.
Current Research Experience: My current research aims to utilize a genetic score for a drug metabolizing enzyme called CYP2A6 to identify disease risk associated with being a faster metabolizer. I run associations on a phenome-wide level in large biobanks data such as the UK biobank. After screening thousands of clinical phenotypes, I further look at the top associations and run causal pathway analyses (such as Mendelian Randomization and mediation) to understand potential pathways leading to increased disease risk. Additionally, I study other sources of variation in CYP2A6 such as allele specific expression at the mRNA level that may alter the enzyme activity or rate of metabolism.
Future Education Plans and/or Career Goals: My goal is to create more bridges between science and technology. To utilize technology to empower and accelerate research. Of course, this comes with a constant pursuit of knowledge. I hope to continue a career in research, do postdoctoral work that gives me more breadth, and eventually start my own lab to expand my research and be able to contribute back to the scientific community and the world.