Top row (left to right): Elect Adenuga, Atinuke Boboe, Abdulkadir Duble. Second row (left to right): Kaden Hill, Makuach Joack, Jezreel Sol-Edeigba
May 12, 2025
By Sunitha Chari
The University of Toronto’s Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium (EPIC) has announced the recipients of the 2025 EPIC Inspire Summer Studentships.
The studentships offer paid summer research placements to Black and Indigenous undergraduate students to engage in infectious disease research under the mentorship of EPIC faculty.
To increase equity and inclusion in summer research opportunities, EPIC is proud to be part of U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s approach to harmonize summer studentship compensation and is investing $50,000 to support the awardees in 16-week research placements.
Beyond an immersive research experience, the 2025 Inspire program offers one-on-one mentorship with a Black or Indigenous graduate student or postdoctoral fellow and monthly events to bring students and mentors together and provide professional development opportunities.
We are also happy to acknowledge support from the PRECISE program in expanding the impact of the Inspire program by awarding an additional placement and bringing the total for the 2025 EPIC Inspire Summer Studentships to 6 placements.
Meet the recipients of the 2025 Inspire Summer Studentships:
Elect Adenuga is a third-year undergraduate student in the human biology and neuroscience program in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T Scarborough. Adenuga applied to the program driven by her passion to understand the impact of infectious diseases on underrepresented communities. Working jointly with Victor Ferreira and Victoria Hall at the University Health Network, she will study the effectiveness of RSV vaccines in people with weakened immune systems, such as organ transplant recipients.
Atinuke Boboe is a second-year undergraduate student in the human biology and population health program in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T Scarborough. Boboe will join this year’s Inspire cohort with support from PRECISE, a multi-disciplinary, multi-institution initiative aimed at improving Canada’s readiness to respond to future pandemics. Working in the laboratory of Anne-Claude Gingras at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute/ Sinai Health, she will develop mass spectrometry-based methods to measure the levels of inflammatory proteins in the blood in response to viral infections.
Abdulkadir Duble is a third-year undergraduate student completing a major in neuroscience and a minor in immunology and physiology in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T. Duble developed a deep appreciation for infectious disease research after witnessing the pivotal role science played in developing treatments and guiding public health strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. As an Inspire trainee, he will work with Julien Muffat at the Hospital for Sick Children on a project focused on understanding how brain inflammation caused by herpes infections leads to the development of neurological diseases later in life.
Kaden Hill is a third-year undergraduate student in the neuroscience program in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T Mississauga. Eager to combine his neuroscience training with infectious disease research, Hill’s interest lies in exploring the complex relationships between infections and certain neurological symptoms. He will work on a project led by Tatsuya Tsukahara at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute/Sinai Health investigating the mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 infections impair the ability of smell-sensing neurons in the nose to respond to odors.
Makuach Joack is a fourth-year undergraduate student in the biochemistry and immunology program in Temerty Medicine at U of T. Joack applied to the Inspire Summer Studentships program to deepen his understanding of the molecular mechanisms by which pathogens cause disease. This summer, he will work with Alan Cochrane, in the department of molecular genetics at Temerty Medicine, on a project examining how certain enzymes help coronaviruses and influenza viruses multiply inside the human body.
Jezreel Sol-Edeigba is a third-year undergraduate student completing a major in the biology for health sciences program and a minor in biomedical communications and education studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T Mississauga. His interest in infectious disease research stems from his childhood in Nigeria, where he witnessed how lack of resources impacts communities’ ability to respond to infectious disease outbreaks. He will work with Shaun Morris at the Hospital for Sick Children to review existing research and identify biomarkers for congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) in pregnant women and children to inform testing methods for cCMV that can be readily deployed to low-resource settings.
“We are thrilled by the response that we’ve had to this exciting program, and congratulate the recipients on their success at being placed with these leading research groups,” says Scott Gray-Owen, a professor of molecular genetics at Temerty Medicine and EPIC’s academic director. “The academic and personal experiences that this cohort brings will help our research community develop new opportunities to confront infectious diseases in a manner that will benefit the entire population.”
Learn more about the recipients of the 2025 Inspire Summer Studentships on our funding results page.