Suzanne Bowness

Preventing the next pandemic: U of T’s EPIC consortium

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 20:09:39 +0000

Preventing the next pandemic: U of T’s EPIC consortium

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 11/24/2021 - 15:09

Cutline

Lab manager Betty Poon wears protective gear while working in U of T's Combined Containment Level 3 facility, which is equipped to safely study pathogens that cause infectious disease (photo by Lisa Lightbourn)

Topic

COVID-19

Groundbreakers

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Sunnybrook Health Sciences

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Hospital for Sick Children

Mount Sinai Hospital

Research & Innovation

St. Michael's Hospital

University Health Network

The ��Ƶ’s Combined Containment Level 3 (C-CL3) unit, equipped to safely study pathogens that cause infectious disease, was among the first labs in Canada to enable researchers to work with SaRS-CoV-2 samples.

While similar facilities elsewhere had closed after the 2003 SARS outbreak, the U of T lab remained open – supporting a vast research community including academic, hospital and industrial research needs – and was able to make a significant contribution to understanding and addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, the 20-year-old lab is also the heart of the Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium (EPIC) – a new U of T Institutional Strategic Initiative (ISI) that will unite top university, hospital and global experts in infectious diseases, as well as other fields.

The goal? Prepare for future pandemics.

Scott Gray-Owen, a professor of molecular genetics in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and academic director of the C-CL3 facility, is eager to bring together everyone from cancer researchers to policy-makers – along with the next generation of student researchers – to study the lessons of COVID-19.

“As the Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium comes together, we want [researchers] to be thinking about infection broadly – from molecular biology to aerosol transmission, to clinical intervention, harnessing immune responses and manufacturing,” he says.

EPIC’s hospital partners include the Hospital for Sick Children, Unity Health Toronto, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, University Health Network and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health.

Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium (EPIC)

Combat infectious diseases
Prevent future pandemics
Advocate for science-based policies
Train future infectious disease leaders

Indigenous Research Network deepens and extends Indigenous research at U of T and beyond

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 20:46:34 +0000

Indigenous Research Network deepens and extends Indigenous research at U of T and beyond

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 11/19/2021 - 15:46

Cutline

Mikaela Gabriel, a post-doctoral researcher and member of the Indigenous Research Network, explores how traditional knowledge and Elder connections can support Indigenous Peoples’ mental health across life transitions (photo by Nick Macchione)

Suzanne Bowness

Topic

Our Community

Groundbreakers

Indigenous Research Network

Waakebiness-Bryce Institute for Indigenous Health

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Indigenous

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Research & Innovation

With a PhD in clinical and counselling psychology from the ��Ƶ and a position as post-doctoral researcher at the Waakebiness-Bryce Institute for Indigenous Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Mikaela Gabriel has found her place in academia.

But as a student, she recalls feeling lost as she looked for ways to undertake Indigenous research.

“I thought it was going to be a lot of heavy lifting, and I didn’t know what to do,” recalls Gabriel, whose background is Italian and Mi'kmaq (Crow Clan).

Associate Professor Suzanne Stewart (photo courtesy of Suzanne Stewart)

Then she met Associate Professor Suzanne Stewart, director of the Waakebiness-Bryce Institute and her academic adviser, who, along with others in the field, helped Gabriel navigate the research world.

“Gloriously, I was able to find out that a lot of people have been putting a lot of work in over time,” Gabriel says. “Being with people who are working really hard and being able to take my own undergrad dreams and turn them into this beautiful garden – it was so important for me.”

Now, the newly launched Indigenous Research Network (IRN) will formalize those connections, making it easier to find information and share resources – not only for students like Gabriel but for established researchers, partners and communities.

The network is one of U of T’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives (ISI), designed to address complex global challenges by harnessing the university’s top-quality academic talent across many fields of expertise. Each initiative brings together flexible, multidisciplinary teams of researchers and students from across faculties and campuses, as well as partners from industry, government and the community.

In the case of the IRN, an Indigenous Research Circle leads an interconnected, collaborative and tri-campus network of researchers. At the same time, Stewart, who is also
U of T’s provostial academic adviser on Indigenous research, works to improve and increase capacity and support for Indigenous research at the university.

The IRN is the culmination of two years of careful consultation.

In a process that started in spring 2020, Stewart and her colleagues connected with other Indigenous academic research networks to gather and review evidence-informed best practices. They also consulted with 34 U of T faculty and staff from a range of departments and disciplines, and seven Elders from the Indigenous Advisory Council.

The consultations resulted in three overarching themes for the network: community circle, mentorship, and accountability. In practice, that includes providing researcher supports, community supports and hosting events that so far include weekly talking circles and drop-in socials, monthly spiritual ceremonies and a monthly series with a featured researcher.

“Creating the IRN wasn’t something off the cuff, but Indigenous evidence-based,” says Stewart, a member of the Yellowknife Dene First Nation, director of the Waakebiness-Bryce Institute for Indigenous Health and the IRN’s director.

Assistant Professor Jeffrey Ansloos (photo courtesy of Jeffrey Ansloos)

Professor Christine Allen, U of T’s associate vice-president and vice-provost, strategic initiatives, says the IRN is an important step in the university’s efforts to answer the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action.

“We hope that growth and future initiatives of the IRN will deepen partnerships with Indigenous communities and help to create a strong, respectful and culturally-aware foundation for Indigenous research and researchers at the university,” said Allen, speaking at the IRN’s virtual launch this fall.

“It's also vital that we learn from our mistakes, particularly with respect to the cultural harm that academic research on Indigenous communities has inflicted in the past. The IRN is a critical part of that learning as it will bring an Indigenous lens to these activities on our campuses and will work to reform and extinguish harmful and outdated research practices.”

Stewart and her colleagues are already moving ahead with important projects for the IRN.

The first project is to develop a Research Ethics Framework Initiative to help provide autonomy to Indigenous scholars.

“It’s wonderful,” says Stewart. “Much research has already harmed Indigenous communities and land, so it’s our goal to protect autonomy and self-determination. What we are doing now is part of the start of decolonization of research ethics.”

Led by an Indigenous Research Circle that includes an Elder, Indigenous and non-Indigenous students as well as the academic adviser on Indigenous research, the framework is a community-informed vision for research service programs and policy that’s based on consulting with 67 individuals – including eight Elders and 28 faculty and staff focused on Indigenous research – to determine the ethical research needs of the community. Monthly workshops launched this fall.

Equal care has been taken with another IRN initiative: the U of T Connaught Community Partnerships Research Program – Indigenous stream. The program supports an internal research funding stream based on Indigenous worldviews, principles and community needs. It allows U of T to connect Indigenous community organizations with university researchers who act as a resource to support their work.

The consultation process included reaching out to 700 different Indigenous organizations across Canada. In its inaugural year, nine Indigenous organizations were chosen to receive Connaught funding through the Indigenous stream.

Sarah Clark (photo by Beth Brown)

Sarah Clark is executive director of the Arctic Children & Youth Foundation, a Nunavut-based charity that helps children and youth who disclose abuse. She was looking for a partner to help the organization dig deep into a problem: The charity provides counselling services to caregivers or guardians (90 percent of whom are Inuit) of children, but clients weren’t using the support. Clark and her colleagues wanted to understand how to better support these caregivers, and by extension, the children. After connecting with the Indigenous Research Network, they began working with Assistant Professor Jeffrey Ansloos, Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Indigenous Health and Social Action on Suicide at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, whose work focuses on mental health and social policy in Indigenous communities.

Ansloos and his students are now helping the Arctic Children & Youth Foundation design a study and work with focus groups to better understand the community.

“The students working under Jeffrey have been amazing,” says Clark, adding that she deliberately wanted to connect with an academic partner so the research could be used as a framework for other communities. “The research that has come out so far has been really helpful to us. And we're all very excited to learn about that population and how we can support them.”

Clark calls the IRN’s work “very valuable” since there are so many avenues for Indigenous research in Nunavut. She’s particularly excited about the network’s potential to connect and share upcoming projects and results.

“Just having the support and learning from what other people are doing in their community is fantastic,” she says.

As for Gabriel, she is now a member of the IRN, too. Her research explores how traditional knowledge and Elder connections can support Indigenous Peoples’ mental health across life transitions such as homelessness to changes in employment.

She says she appreciates having a dedicated research network alongside the more common Indigenous research centres on many university campuses.

“Those Indigenous centres are crucial and invaluable, but different from an Indigenous Research Network that prioritizes Indigenous research itself,” she says. “If I had something like this when I was an undergrad … it's beyond my wildest dreams to have a network of Indigenous researchers and students and community members and Elders all talking about knowledge and how to help the community, and how to do it in a safe, good way.

“That's a beautiful thing.”

Alumni of U of T's museum studies program on the importance of internships

noreen.rasbach — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 04:00:00 +0000

Alumni of U of T's museum studies program on the importance of internships

noreen.rasbach Thu, 09/26/2019 - 00:00

Cutline

Alumna Louise Skidmore's work at the Imperial War Museums has taken her to Afghanistan. She continues to use contacts she met in her internship (photo by Richard Ash/IWM)

Topic

Faculty of Information

Global

Internships

Museum Studies

As the head of contemporary conflict at the Imperial War Museums in London, England, Louise Skidmore has a job description that sounds more like a daring foreign correspondent than a curator toiling away in the backrooms of a museum. Her work has taken her to Afghanistan to collect artifacts and stories from the height of wartime.

Although she had already worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario and gained professional museum experience before completing her museum studies degree at the ��Ƶ, Skidmore’s four-month internship at the International Center of Photography in New York City remains a program highlight for her. It’s also a contact she continues to use in her work – for example, when she recently put her curators in touch with her old bosses for a project on photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya in 2011.

Skidmore’s time in New York was made possible in part by the Vivian and David Campbell Family Foundation Summer Training Fellowship, established in 1998. She is one of dozens of museum studies students to benefit from the Campbell fellowships and the similar Rebanks Family Fellowship, which subsidizes internships at smaller-sized museums, galleries and historic sites. The success of these awards convinced the museum studies program’s 50^th-anniversary committee to make increasing support of paid internships one of their goals for this year’s celebrations.

“While museum studies internships offer students important opportunities to test out what they learn in the classroom, most of them are unpaid, which adds to the financial challenge many students already face,” said the program’s director, Associate Professor Cara Krmpotich. “This is why we wanted to put paid internships at the centre of our 50^th-anniversary fundraising efforts. With the Campbell and Rebanks fellowships, the results are very clear.”

As the Faculty of Information, home to museum studies since 2006, has reconnected with the program’s 800-plus alumni over the past year, many of them raised the importance of their internships. Megan Richardson, the director of the Virtual Museum of Canada, a federally funded investment program managed by the Canadian Museum of History, gained entry to the Ottawa museum world through her museum studies internship at the National Gallery of Canada in 1989 after her first year in the program.

Based on that experience, she focused her final year’s major research paper on ways to create new interpretive materials for children to use at the gallery. “When I finished my degree, they hired me to develop a series of self-guides for teenagers. It was directly related to what I had researched,” she says. “I was basically hired to put my money where my mouth was.”

Class of 2019 alumna Erica Chi credits her internship with landing her a full-time job as an art administrator at the TD Bank Corporate Art Collection, one of Canada’s largest company collections, known for its Gallery of Inuit Art in the bank’s south tower in downtown Toronto as well as its works by artists like Lawren Harris and Jean-Paul Riopelle.

Chi had interned at U of T’s Art Museum, where her work focused on its “Art on Campus” initiative, arranging art loans to different university departments and buildings. At TD, she works under a senior curator on a variety of tasks, including art moves across the enterprise and co-operating with partner organizations on exhibits.

Unlike a public gallery where five to 10 per cent of the art is on display with the majority in storage, Chi says a corporate collection intentionally inverts that ratio. “Having art in your work environment or in client-facing areas, it becomes a conversation point and can help build relationships. It both enhances the setting and your experience of going to work,” she says.

In fact it was the late David Campbell’s love of art that led to his donation to the museum studies program in the first place. As collectors and philanthropists, he and his wife Vivian Campbell were particularly interested in the training of future generations of museum and art gallery curators, educators and administrators.

David Campbell participated in a series of casual lunches with students to learn more about them and to answer questions about the role of private collectors. A relationship developed that eventually led to the creation of the fellowships, which now fund five students per year.

As alumni like Skidmore make clear, the Campbells’ generous donation ended up doing just what its benefactors intended.

With a file from Ann Brocklehurst

Meet the U of T Faculty of Medicine alumnus who keeps the Raptors in the game

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 10 May 2019 15:17:22 +0000

Meet the U of T Faculty of Medicine alumnus who keeps the Raptors in the game

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 05/10/2019 - 11:17

Cutline

"My role is to look out for the players’ health and I pride myself on trying to ensure the highest quality of care," says Dr. Howard Petroff about his work with the Raptors

Topic

Howard Petroff, an alumnus of the ��Ƶ’s Faculty of Medicine, is a family medicine practitioner, a lecturer in the department of family and community medicine, and serves as assistant medical director for the Toronto Raptors basketball team.

Writer Suzanne Bowness asked him about his experiences in family and emergency medicine, his work with the Raptors and the challenges of working with high-performance athletes.

“It’s a demanding and challenging life that these individuals face – and not just the players, but the coaches, too,” says Petroff.

“It sounds glamorous, but it’s a lot of work.”

You’re a full-time practitioner in family medicine and for years were a part-time emergency medicine doctor. What do you like about each and how does working in one inform the other?

In family medicine, I enjoy the relationships that you develop over time. Some patients who I saw as infants are now having children, so I’m seeing the whole circle. Building those long-term relationships is really rewarding, seeing them when they’re celebrating milestones and helping them when they’re going through difficult times.

Emergency medicine is a different experience. You have to really enjoy the fast pace and helping to deal with acute problems. I also enjoyed the camaraderie in the emergency department. I was fortunate to work in a hospital where the emerg was very well-supported, my ER colleagues were excellent clinicians and where the director was an excellent leader.

I was able to bring my family medicine perspective to that of my colleagues who worked full-time in emergency – the experience of how we practise and the importance of a strong relationship between the two areas. Seeing patients in emerg helped me to recognize and deal with acute issues in my office. They came together very nicely.

You’re in your 15^th season as a doctor for the Toronto Raptors basketball team. What does that involve? Are you a fan?

It’s something that came about in a circuitous manner as I’m not a sports medicine physician. I bring the perspective of general medicine to the medical staff, looking after the primary medical care and emergency preparations. We’re a medical team of two physicians: myself and our head physician, who is an orthopedic surgeon and a sports medicine physician. And we work with a director of sports science, athletic therapists, a physiotherapist and a massage therapist. We also have a team dentist and various consultants who assist us. I co-ordinate the players’ annual physical examinations, clinical and cardiovascular testing, medical clearance for players, and consult with our specialists as needed.

You meet a lot of very interesting people from a wide variety of backgrounds. It provides you with a different perspective on professional sports and the high demands, expectations and challenges that individual players face. My role is to look out for the players’ health and I pride myself on trying to ensure the highest quality of care. I also help co-ordinate care for their family members because the majority of them are from out of country and don’t have their own personal network locally.

Before my involvement with the team, I would watch games on a casual basis but I’ve become a basketball fan. When I was first approached to help out, I didn’t know all of our players or the intricacies of the game. I definitely have learned over time. I’m at the majority of home games.

What’s it like working with high-performance athletes compared with regular patients?

With athletes, timelines are obviously more compressed due to the season, and co-ordination of care can be difficult because of challenges with scheduling and travel. But with injuries and the healing process, things still take time to resolve.

While our athletes are young and healthy, they’re not your typical 5-foot-10, 170-pound individuals. Many players are 6-foot-6 or taller, so their anatomy sometimes presents challenges. For instance, because a lot of test parameters are based on the general population, assessing things such as cardiovascular risk can be difficult. The NBA has been collecting data on player parameters, including cardiac measurements, so we now have points of comparison relevant to the physical stature of our players.

You also see the physical and emotional pressures players face because of the high-performance expectations. The physical demand of playing three times per week with practices interspersed between, the impact of an extensive travel schedule and disrupted sleep, and time apart from family and personal supports, can all affect performance. It’s a demanding and challenging life that these individuals face – and not just the players, but the coaches, too. It sounds glamorous, but it’s a lot of work.

What advice would you have for current medical students?

I think you have to remember why you went into medical school, which is really to help people. You can’t stray from that. It isn’t a 9 to 5 job. You have to be available, you have to be open to conversations, to be able to talk to people and maintain good relationships.

It's very demanding. But it’s also very rewarding when you’re invited to a milestone birthday party or when a patient says “thank you.” People may disagree with you, and you have to accept that, but try to do things with integrity and professionalism and you'll find it to be a very rewarding career.

Finally, it’s important to find mentors and role models. People who can help supervise and guide you to help you achieve your professional goals. I’ve been very fortunate to be exposed to excellent clinicians who were wonderful individuals. That really helped me.