Results of the Future Leaders Prizes Competition
The Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium (EPIC) is an integrated network for researchers, trainees and partners working to confront infectious disease challenges. We unite members across the University of Toronto and its hospital partners to accelerate cross-disciplinary work in the understanding and development of new countermeasures against pathogens. A key pillar of EPIC’s work is training the next generation of infectious disease research leaders that will help stop future pandemics and reduce the societal burdens of infectious disease.
The EPIC Future Leaders Prizes celebrate the best and brightest PhD students who graduated each year among the EPIC research community. These competitive prizes identify the most outstanding graduate in each of four streams:
- applied and/or translational research
- clinical research
- fundamental research
- population, global and public health research
The nominees will have successfully defended their thesis in the preceding calendar year. Prize winners will have submitted an excellent thesis, both in scientific content and communication style, as well as demonstrated a high degree of leadership outside of their scientific pursuits.
We are pleased to share the results of our Future Leaders Prizes competition.
2025 Future Leaders Prizes recipients
Patrick Budylowski
Unity Health Toronto, Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Thesis title: Antibodies in infectious diseases: HIV biomarker discoveries, complement enhanced SARS-CoV-2 neutralization and vaccine generation
Supervisor: Mario Ostrowski (Department of Immunology, U of T, St. George campus)
Co-supervisor: Goetz Ehrhardt (Department of Immunology, U of T, St. George campus)
Ashley Campbell
Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Thesis title: miRNA regulation in Epstein-Barr Virus lytic infection
Supervisor: Lori Frappier (Department of Molecular Genetics, U of T, St. George campus)
Julien Couture-Senecal
Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering
Thesis title: Rational design of ionizable lipids for intramuscular messenger ribonucleic acid vaccines
Supervisor: Omar Khan (Institute of Biomedical Engineering, U of T, St. George campus)
Hongxian (James) Zhu
The Hospital for Sick Children, Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Thesis title: LRRK2 regulates plasma membrane homeostasis via RAB10: Impacts on membrane repair and bacterial invasion
Supervisor: John Brumell (Department of Molecular Genetics, U of T, St. George campus)
2024 Future Leaders Prizes recipients
Eric Armstrong
University Health Network, Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Thesis title: Targeting the genital microbiota to reduce HIV susceptibility
Supervisor: Rupert Kaul (Department of Medicine, Department of Immunology, U of T, St. George campus)
Jonathan Burnie
Faculty of Arts and Science
Thesis title: Characterizing human and viral proteins in the HIV-1 envelope using novel methods in flow
virometry
Supervisor: Christina Guzzo (Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough)
Catharine Chambers
Unity Health Toronto, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
Thesis title: Human papillomavirus vaccine uptake and effectiveness among gay, bisexual, and other men
who have sex with men
Supervisor: Ann Burchell (Department of Family and Community Medicine, U of T, St. George campus)
Pailin Chiaranunt
Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Thesis title: Host-microbiota interactions shape the intestinal macrophage landscape
Supervisor: Arthur Mortha (Department of Immunology, U of T, St. George campus)
2023 Future Leaders Prize recipient
Hannah Kozlowski
Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering
Thesis title: Strategies for moving multi-target nucleic acid assays towards clinical use
Supervisor: Warren Chan (Institute of Biomedical Engineering, U of T, St. George campus)
