Top row (from left to right): Maria Carolina Barbosa da Silva, Brittany Cooke, Erik Curtis, Mahmood Gohari, David Kormos, Mindy Lam
Bottom row (from left to right): Evaezi Okpokoro, Daniella Serrador, Angelo Sotto, Jay Xu, Galen Ayana Zewdie
August 22, 2025
By Sunitha Chari
University of Toronto’s Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium is investing $48,000 through the Researcher Mobility Awards to support 11 recipients as they undertake research training, skills development or collaborative field work outside of Toronto.
These experiences, taking the awardees across Canada and to four different countries, will support projects including developing methods and tools to monitor infectious diseases in humans and animals, tracking the emergence of antimicrobial resistance, discovering new drugs for infectious diseases, and forming global partnerships to improve disease surveillance, prevention, and management strategies.
Meet the recipients of the 2025 EPIC Researcher Mobility Awards:
Maria Carolina Barbosa da Silva is a postdoctoral fellow working with Claudia dos Santos at Unity Health. She attended the Q2 Summer School, a two-week advanced bioimaging course in Querétaro, Mexico, to apply these new techniques to her work developing treatment methods for neuroinflammatory diseases.
Brittany Cooke is a PhD student supervised by Peter Roy in the department of molecular genetics at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine. She visited collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, to evaluate the effectiveness of novel drugs for controlling mosquitoes that can carry malaria or dengue, Zika, and chikungunya viruses.
Erik Curtis is a PhD student in Martin Krkosek’s lab in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at U of T’s Faculty of Arts and Science. He is visiting Nanaimo, British Columbia, to work on a collaborative project with the Pacific Salmon Foundation, studying the types of infectious diseases Pacific salmon are exposed to during their migration to the ocean and monitoring when and where the fish are infected.
Mahmood Gohari is a postdoctoral fellow working with Venkata Duvvuri at Public Health Ontario. He attended a workshop in Edmonton offered by the Canadian Bioinformatics Hub for high-throughput sequencing of RNA libraries, to support his research improving the prediction of antimicrobial resistance in Shigella, the bacteria that cause food poisoning.
David Kormos is a postdoctoral fellow supervised by Jeffrey Siegel in the department of civil and mineral engineering at U of T’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. He will travel to Antwerp, Belgium, to work with partners at the Institute for Tropical Medicine, developing portable air cleaners for healthcare facilities in low-income settings to reduce the airborne circulation of drug-resistant tuberculosis.
Mindy Lam is a PhD student supervised by Scott Gray-Owen in the department of molecular genetics, Temerty Medicine. She will work with collaborators at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique at Laval on a project identifying different types of Neisseria that secrete a sugar metabolite and understanding how this metabolite affects bacterial growth and multiplication in preclinical infection models.
Evaezi Okpokoro, a visiting researcher from Nigeria’s Institute of Human Virology, worked with Darrell Tan at Unity Health on a project investigating mpox transmission dynamics. The research is part of the Canada-Nigeria mpox partnership aimed at fostering global collaborations to improve outbreak response and prevention. It builds on previous work led by Tan and supported by EPIC’s mpox rapid research response.
Daniella Serrador is a PhD student working with William Navarre in the department of molecular genetics at Temerty Medicine. She is visiting collaborators in London, Ontario at Western University, developing techniques to explore the nutrient needs of different Lactobacillus species that are naturally present in vaginal microbiomes.
Angelo Sotto is a PhD student supervised by Darrell Tan at Unity Health. He went to Montreal to be trained by partners at McGill University Health Centre in specialized assays that measure antibody levels for human herpesvirus 8, which he’ll employ to study transmission levels among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men.
Jay Xu is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and jointly supervised by Kuan Liu and Geoffrey Anderson. He will visit partners at Brown University in Providence to develop statistical methods to model the impact of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic on childhood and youth mental health outcomes in Ontario.
Galen Ayana Zewdie is a postdoctoral fellow working with Jude Kong at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He will visit partners at Jimma University in Jimma, Ethiopia, to develop and deploy a mobile app aimed at improving community-based infectious disease surveillance in low-income settings such as rural Ethiopia.
To know more about these awards, please visit the funding page for the 2025 EPIC Researcher Mobility Awards.