Clockwise from top left: trainees at the poster session, Danielle Taschereau Mamers with the illustration of the keynote address, attendees listening to the keynote talk, wordcloud from the submitted abstracts and a trainee oral presentation

July 7, 2025

By Sunitha Chari

The annual U of T Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Research Days (MID Research Days) were held on May 26^th and May 27^th.

The event — organized by the Emerging & Pandemic Infections Consortium in collaboration with the division of infectious diseases at U of T’s department of medicine, division of infectious diseases at SickKids, Institute for Pandemics and U of T’s postgraduate medical and clinical microbiology programs — drew over 650 registrations, with trainees and faculty members coming together for two days of presentations, discussions and networking.

The first day featured 20 talks from EPIC’s trainee community, including three presentations by 2025 EPIC Future Leaders Prize recipients and a round of three-minute “Flash Presentations”.

This year’s talks were selected from 81 submitted abstracts and covered a broad range of topics from discovery research focused on understanding mechanisms of viral and bacterial infections to clinical research oriented towards developing better vaccines for vulnerable patient groups such as transplant recipients and public health research focused on building research and healthcare capacities to tackle the burden of infectious threats.

Featured talks also included a presentation by Evaezi Okpokoro, a visiting researcher from the Institute for Virology in Nigeria. Supported by an EPIC Researcher Mobility Grant, he works with Darrell Tan and Sharmistha Mishra at Unity Health on a project investigating mpox transmission dynamics and building collaborative global partnerships to improve outbreak response and prevention.

The second day highlighted the research programs of two new faculty members: Sharon Sukhdeo (Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute/ Sinai Health and University Health Network) and Tin Vo (Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work) who spoke about their work on implementing infection prevention and control practices to curb the spread of antimicrobial resistant pathogens and developing equity-focused research practices to include sexually marginalized groups, respectively. Spotlight presentations were also given by Aereas Aung (Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering), Greg German (Unity Health) and Michelle Science (The Hospital for Sick Children).

The keynote address on the 27^th was given by invited guest speaker Rishi Chanderraj (University of Michigan) on the effects of specific antibiotic prescriptions on gut microbiome and health outcomes. His talk was live illustrated by Danielle Taschereau Mamers (UTM), who also made a wordcloud from the submitted abstracts to help visualize the poster presentation session (pictures below).

The event concluded with a poster and networking session, during which over 67 trainees representing seven university divisions, fourteen departments and all five of EPIC’s hospital partners, presented their work related to infectious diseases and microbiology.

The 2025 U of T MID Research Days were an enormous success thanks to the organizing committee and the generous support of our sponsoring partner, bioMérieux. A special acknowledgement is noted for the efforts of the EPIC Trainee Advisory Committee, who coordinated logistics and facilitated volunteers who helped review abstracts and judge talks and posters.

And now, congratulations to the winners of the best trainee talks and poster presentations at the 2025 U of T MID Research Days!

Oral presentation winners

Flash presentation winners

Senior poster presentation winners

Junior poster presentation winners