EPIC announces recipients of inaugural Pandemic Response and Resiliency Awards
A smiling woman with a grey sweater and a smiling man wearing a toque and blue coat

Clockwise from top left: Archchun Ariyarajah, Baweleta Isho, Vanessa Li, Kuganya Nirmalarajah, Jacqueline Watt, Maxine Ty, Alison Simmons and Reuben Samson

July 31, 2024

By Betty Zou

Eight graduate students are being recognized for their outstanding contributions to fighting the pandemic with the Pandemic Response and Resiliency Awards from the Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium.

The new awards celebrate PhD students at the University of Toronto who demonstrated exceptional adaptability, initiative and perseverance in supporting outbreak or pandemic response efforts through either research or community engagement. By going above and beyond what is required for their degree programs, these students exhibited key qualities that will position them to be leaders in confronting future infectious threats.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw many graduate students in our community stepping up to offer their time and expertise in tackling the most urgent issues brought on by this public health emergency,” says Scott Gray-Owen, academic director of EPIC and a professor of molecular genetics at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

“For some, this meant pivoting their research work to SARS-CoV-2 while others led community-based efforts to dispel misinformation and promote vaccination. We applaud these students for their remarkable leadership and resiliency during a very challenging time.”

Each award comes with a $2,000 cash prize as well as $3,000 to enable the student to pursue research- and/or professional development-related pursuits.

Meet some of the award recipients below. For the full list of Pandemic Response and Resiliency Award recipients, please visit our website.

Boosting vaccine confidence in the South Asian community

As a PhD student at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health studying measles immunity in Ontario, Archchun Ariyarajah knows firsthand the importance of vaccinations in preventing outbreaks and epidemics. When he saw how COVID-19 was impacting the South Asian community more severely — at the time, South Asians were at a higher risk of infection and had lower vaccination rates — he wanted to help.

“Being of South Asian descent, I saw a need within my community,” he says.

Ariyarajah is co-supervised by associate professor Shelly Bolotin and professor Jeff Kwong, both at DLSPH, and it was Bolotin who connected him with Sonia Anand, a researcher at McMaster University who had experience working with this community.

Together, Ariyarajah and a graduate student on Anand’s team led South Asian Youth as Vaccine Agents of Change, a project aimed at increasing COVID-19 vaccine confidence among South Asians in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area. With funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada, Ariyarajah and his team held information sessions with South Asian youth to understand the vaccine mis- and disinformation that were circulating in their community. They then worked with marketing experts to develop a series of educational videos that addressed these concerns in a culturally and linguistically appropriate way.

“Although it can be challenging work, engaging with communities at the start of a project instills a sense of co-ownership and trust,” says Ariyarajah.

“Moving forward in my research career, I understand that building a relationship between public health experts and community members is essential to the success of any public health intervention.”

Using data advocacy and community engagement to protect public health

Alison Simmons was less than a year into her PhD at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health when the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Simmons, whose graduate research uses mathematical and statistical models to inform respiratory disease prevention, applied her skills in data visualization to independently create and maintain a COVID-19 data dashboard for her hometown in Pennsylvania, US. Her dashboard was viewed more than 30,000 times and used by local political, religious and educational leaders and the public to monitor COVID-19 risk in their community. Here in Canada, she was part of the COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group, a student-led volunteer group that provided real-time, open access epidemiological data on COVID-19, which helped to inform public health decision-making.

Her work with the data dashboards led to invitations for Simmons to collaborate with local leaders and community members to deliver public health education. In Pennsylvania, she was invited to share her knowledge about the impact of COVID-19 on vulnerable and racialized peoples at a Children’s Advisory Commission meeting and with the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Simmons and fellow PRRA recipient Archchun Ariyarajah partnered with Yellow Door, a non-profit serving elders in Montreal, as well as with the Caribbean Coalition Network of Montreal and the Jamaica Association of Montreal to hold information sessions and answer questions about the COVID-19 vaccine.

“From my experiences during the pandemic, a clear theme emerged: to achieve the greatest impact, it’s essential to actively listen to and address the needs expressed by community leaders and members,” says Simmons, who is supervised by DLSPH professor David Fisman.

“I am committed to aligning my present and future work with community needs and addressing evidence gaps to directly improve community health outcomes.”

Advancing our understanding of the immune response in COVID-19

When Baweleta Isho started her PhD in professor Jen Gommerman’s lab in the department of immunology in December 2019, she had planned to study inflammation in nervous system organs like the brain and spinal cord. Four months into the project, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and she seized an opportunity to pivot her work entirely to focus on SARS-CoV-2.

Within seven months, Isho had developed and validated a test to detect SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in human saliva and published her findings in the journal Science Immunology. The study, which has been cited over 800 times, addressed a key question around the durability of antibodies against the new coronavirus by showing that SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies can last for up to 115 days after infection.

Isho also led the creation of a biobank of saliva samples from people who had never been ill with COVID-19 to act as negative controls for their human saliva study. To do so, she personally called all the participants to obtain informed consent and established protocols to collect and store the samples in a safe and secure way. This unique biobank of samples became an increasingly valuable resource later in the pandemic as more and more people became infected.

In pivoting to tackle key research questions about the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, Isho became the first person in her lab to receive training to work in the Toronto High Containment Facility. She has since trained and mentored other students who have been authorized to work in the facility while continuing to contribute to impactful research about how the immune system responds and protects following exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

“Sharing these skills with a new generation of scientists is a privilege that I am grateful to have,” says Isho.

“Hopefully through this, I have piqued the interest of these students to continue pursuing scientific research in the future.”

Searching for protective antibodies against SARS-CoV-2

Reuben Samson was beginning his fourth year as a PhD student in molecular genetics professor Anne-Claude Gingras’ lab at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and all non-essential lab work was forced to stop.

Unable to continue his research project, he volunteered as a screener to help keep the virus out of Mount Sinai Hospital to ensure the safety of staff, patients and visitors.

His stint as a screener was short-lived though because in May 2020, he was called back to the lab to set up a test that could detect protective antibodies capable of blocking SARS-CoV-2. Building on the skills he developed in his PhD project, Samson quickly adapted the protocol shared by a collaborator, improving its sensitivity, efficiency and ease of use. Samson’s revised methods were shared widely within the scientific community and soon became the standard for neutralizing antibody testing across Canada.

Importantly, the new protocol could be customized to determine whether existing antibodies were protective against new SARS-CoV-2 variants, which made it an extremely valuable tool as new waves of infections continued to arise.

The test that Samson implemented was also used to study the immune responses of vulnerable individuals, such as transplant patients and people living in long-term care homes, and to test the effectiveness of a new made-in-Canada vaccine.

“Our Toronto-based work had an impact on all members of society but highlighted that those with pre-existing comorbidities may need an enhanced vaccine regimen to boost protection,” says Samson.

“We must design our assays so that all members of our community are fairly represented within these tests because without that, we would fail to recognize the actions needed to protect our most vulnerable populations.”

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