Thank you to all who submitted an abstract in the 2016 Abstract Challenge, it was a great success! With more than 30 submissions and a wide variety of topics, selecting only 3 winners very difficult! With that being said, here are the top 3 winners for this year’s Abstract Challenge:
Our 1st place winner is Dr. Folefac Aminkeng, Postdoctoral Fellow at The Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. Dr. Aminkeng’s research focus is the pharmacogenomics of adverse drug reactions. Dr. Aminkeng and his colleagues at the Canadian Pharmacogenomic Network for Drug Safety monitor for adverse drug reactions, identify genetic markers that are predictive of severe adverse drug reactions and implement these in a cost-effective diagnostic screening program to reduce the occurrence of disability and deaths. His abstract, Pharmacogenomic Prediction of Anthracycline-induced Cardiotoxicity, was also featured in Nature magazine. Folefac will be presenting a webcast to the community on April 20th.
Our 2nd place winner is Dr. Robert Hamilton from The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario. Dr. Hamilton was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia where he completed his undergraduate degree, his medical degree, pediatric training, and initial training in children’s heart disorders. He then underwent fellowships to complete his cardiology training spending a year each at The Alberta Children’s Hospital, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), and Toronto and Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston. He submitted an abstract on Whole Exome Sequencing in distant (eg: cousin) relationships identifying cardiomyopathy genes in families with variable penetrance and limited genetic samples. Dr. Hamilton’s webcast will be held on June 8th.
And lastly, our 3rd place winner is Dr. Rohan Palmer, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior in the Albert Medical School at Brown University. He completed his PhD in Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2010. In 2012, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship under Dr. Valerie Knopik in antecedents of addiction and psychiatric genetics at Rhode Island Hospital. Dr. Palmer joined the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior’s faculty in 2012. Dr. Palmer submitted his abstract named: Investigating shared additive genetic variation for alcohol dependence across individuals of African and European ancestry and will present his work on August 10th.
We want to thank everyone who took the time to make a submission, we really enjoyed reading all your abstracts and we can’t wait to see the submissions for next year’s competition!
