Meet the Lab Series

The following stories provide a personal look at our graduate students in the lab.

A Student on the Road Less Travelled
From stone mason to Alzheimer's researcher, Paul McKeever has followed an unconventional path.

Literacy Secrets = Understanding How Children Learn to Read
What are the best ways to promote literacy in children? As an early literacy specialist who taught parents and preschool teachers, Trelani Milburn answered that question many times.

U of T Student Lands Sandler Fellowship in U.S.
It’s been a good year for Joe Bondy-Denomy at the University of Toronto. He got married at Hart House, co-authored three science papers and finished his doctorate. Now, the Department of Molecular Genetics student has more good news: he’ll soon be a Sandler Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco.

She Does it Her Way (And it Works)
“Don’t stay in school.” Most kids never hear those words from their parents. But when Yuqing Yang announced she would do a PhD at the University of Toronto, her mother was upset.

Systems Biology Sheds Light on Early Embryo Development
As far back as she can remember, Ursula Nosi liked to figure things out. Why is the call of one bird different from another? How do the body’s organ systems function together? Why do some peppers rattle when shaken? (Seeds, it turns out — just don’t rub your eyes after touching them.)

U of T Scientists Cause Ripple in Innate Immune Research
Professor James Carlyle was unconvinced at first. His doctoral student, Oscar Aguilar, had just brought him lab data showing how ‘natural killer’ or NK cells, a key part of the immune system’s defense against pathogens and cancer, are targeted by a common virus.

PhD Student Finds Global Network of Protein Chaperones in Yeast
Kamran Rizzolo likes the big picture. Maybe it’s his global roots — he’s Venezuelan and Canadian from Italian and Iranian stock and is married to an American. Or it could be his time at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he first saw the power of combined sequencing technology development while mapping the genome of the dengue virus.

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