Meet the Lab Series

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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