Congratulations to our 2024-2025 IMPACTT Mentorship Cohort!

We are very pleased to announce our 2024-2025 IMPACTT mentorship cohort. Thank you to everyone who applied, and congratulations to our new mentees! Thank you as well to our new an returning mentors.

Mentorship Pairings

Mentee: Dr. Ann Gregory, Assistant Professor, University of Calgary

Mentor: Dr. Irah King, Associate Professor, McGill University

Mentee: Dr. Elsa Rousseau, Assistant Professor, Université Laval

Mentor: Dr. Fiona Brinkman, Distinguished Professor, Simon Fraser University

Mentee: Dr. Lauren Davey, Assistant Professor, University of Victoria

Mentor: Dr. Kathy McCoy, Professor, University of Calgary

Mentee: Dr. Maryam Kebbe, Assistant Professor, University of New Brunswick

Mentor: Dr. Marie-Claire Arrieta, Associate Professor, University of Calgary

Meet our Mentees

Dr. Ann Gregory is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary in the Department of Biological Sciences. She is a viral ecologist interested in linking viral genotypes and phenotypes to ecosystems processes. She began her research career studying viral community structure and function across the global oceans and has since expanded her work to study viral communities across human body sites. In December 2018, Dr. Gregory earned her PhD from Ohio State University, followed by a EMBO postdoctoral fellowship at KU Leuven. After completing her fellowship, she delved into the biotech industry, serving as a computational biologist at the gene therapy company, Aera Therapeutics. As of January 2024, Dr. Gregory returned to academia, founding her own research lab at the University of Calgary. Her fledgling lab is dedicated to studying the human virome.
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Dr. Elsa Rousseau is an Assistant Professor at Université Laval since July 2021, in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, as well as a member of the Nutrition, Health and Society Research Center (Centre NUTRISS). She was hired thanks to a Junior 1 research scholarship in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Health from the FRQS. Her background lies in bioinformatics and modeling. She holds a PhD and a first postdoctoral fellowship in virus evolution and epidemiological modeling. She completed a second postdoctoral fellowship in bioinformatics and machine learning to characterize the gut microbiome of Nunavik Inuit. Her research program as a professor focuses on the development of artificial intelligence approaches to shed light on the interrelationships between microbiota, bacteriophages and nutrition, and their impact on cardiometabolic health. She is particularly interested in the development of machine learning tools for the prediction of bacteria and phage biomarkers of host nutrition and health, based on omics data. She is also focusing on the development of computational tools to predict the bacterial hosts of phages, based on various information.
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Dr. Lauren Davey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at the University of Victoria. She earned her PhD from Dalhousie University under the supervision of Drs. Song Lee and Scott Halperin, focusing on disulfide bond formation and protein production in oral Streptococci. She then transitioned to studying the gut microbiota during her postdoctoral work with Dr. Raphael Valdivia at the Duke Microbiome Center, where she worked on Akkermansia genetics. Her lab is dedicated to developing genetic tools for Akkermansia and exploring its colonization and interaction with the host, with the ultimate goal of contributing to the advancement of microbiome-based therapeutics.
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Dr. Maryam Kebbe received her Doctorate in Medical Sciences from the University of Alberta’s Department of Pediatrics. She completed postdoctoral training in the Medical Sciences Division at the University of Oxford first, followed by the Reproductive Endocrinology and Women’s Health Laboratory at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana. Dr. Kebbe joined the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of New Brunswick as an Assistant Professor in January 2023. She directs the Prenatal and Postnatal Exposures on Adiposity Development in infantS (PEADS) Laboratory. Her research interests are on the interplay between nutrition (including human milk), physical activity, and the infant gut microbiome; specifically, how these factors may prevent obesity programming in infancy through childhood. Currently, Dr. Kebbe is leading randomized controlled trials as well as observational, epidemiology, and qualitative studies on human milk, solid food introduction, pregnancy and postpartum physical activity, and/or the infant and toddler gut microbiome. In her current track record, Dr. Kebbe has published >45 peer-reviewed publications and 1 book chapter on human milk feeding, delivered >130 presentations, and been involved in >40 media communications or knowledge translation activities. Outside of academia, Dr. Kebbe enjoys travelling, outdoor activities, and playing the piano.
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