Congratulations to our 2022-2023 IMPACTT Mentorship Cohort!

We are very pleased to announce our 2022-2023 IMPACTT mentorship cohort. Thank you to everyone who applied, and congratulations to our new mentees!

Mentorship Pairings

Mentor: Dr. Morgan Langille, Associate Professor, Dalhousie University

Mentee: Dr. Caitlin Simopoulos, Postdoctoral Associate, University of Ottawa

Mentor: Dr. Celia Greenwood, Professor, McGill University

Mentee: Dr. Andréanne Morin, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Chicago

Mentor: Dr. Anita Kozyrskyj, Professor, University of Alberta

Mentee: Dr. Merilee (Meredith) Brockway, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Manitoba

Mentor: Dr. William Hsiao, Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University

Mentee: Dr. Kevin McGregor, Assistant Professor, York University

Meet our Mentees

Dr. Caitlin Simopoulos (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Associate in the lab of Dr. Daniel Figeys, co-supervised by Dr. Mathieu Lavallée-Adam, in the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ottawa. Her research interests are currently focused on the development and application of bioinformatics tools for metaproteomic microbiome data analysis. She also uses computational strategies to understand the complex effects of drugs on the human gut microbiome with future applications in precision medicine. It was during her graduate studies where she developed a passion for using machine learning and advanced statistical techniques for applications in systems biology. In 2019, Dr. Simopoulos obtained her PhD at McMaster University where she focused on understanding the transcriptome of the extremophile plant, Eutrema salsugineum. At McMaster, she developed a machine learning tool to predict long non-protein coding RNAs and explored the connections of these gene products to the plant’s stress responses. While not actively researching, she also aspires to make science accessible to everyone through science communication and outreach.
Dr. Merilee (Meredith) Brockway​ is a PhD prepared nurse with expertise in maternal-child health, infant feeding, and patient engagement. She completed her PhD in Nursing at the University of Calgary, examining maternal breastfeeding self-efficacy and infant feeding outcomes in moderate and late preterm infants. Merilee is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Manitoba in Dr. Meghan Azad’s lab, exploring clinical applications of donor human milk for preterm infants. Specifically, her proposed research will explore the hypothesis that in the absence of mother’s own milk, the use of donor milk matched to maternal secretor status will result in significantly more favourable microbiome diversity. Merilee is building a program of research looking at using human milk as a clinical intervention to mitigate early life perturbations to the infant microbiome. When Merilee is not researching breastfeeding and human milk, she enjoys skiing and hiking with her family.
Dr. Andréanne Morin obtained her PhD in Human Genetics from McGill University in 2017. She worked under the supervision of Dr. Tomi Pastinen and Dr. Catherine Laprise at the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Center. Her project aimed to understand the genetics of complex traits like asthma and allergies. Since 2018, she has been pursuing her postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Dr. Carole Ober at the University of Chicago. Her project aims to integrate genetic, epigenetic, transcriptomic, and microbiota data, mainly from the nasal epithelium, to understand the development of asthma and allergic diseases in children.
Dr. Kevin McGregor received a PhD in Biostatistics from McGill University under the supervision of Dr. Celia Greenwood and Dr. Aurélie Labbe. In 2021, he started his current position as an Assistant Professor at York University’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. His research has focused on various topics on statistical methods in genomics and compositional data. In the past, he has done work on novel Bayesian methods to model community structure in the human microbiome by means of network and diversity estimation. He has also done work in methods for adjusting for cell-type heterogeneity in DNA methylation studies.

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