2019 PRiME Fellows honoured with external funding awards
The PRiME Fellowships have consistently been awarded to an exceptional group of talented, young scientists working on bold interdisciplinary ideas since 2019. It is no surprise that two of these researchers, Anastasia Korolj and Rony Chidiac, have recently been honoured with additional accolades, recognizing their hard work and significant contribution to their respective fields of science.
Anastasia Korolj is a PhD student in Prof. Milica Radisic’s laboratory in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. In 2019, she was awarded a PRiME Fellowship for a project co-supervised by Prof. Axel Guenther and Prof. Ana Konvalinka, focused on developing podocytes-on-chip technology to predict recurrence of kidney disease. Earlier this month, Anastasia was awarded one of the 2021 Schmidt Science Fellowships. This prestigious award is delivered by Schmidt Futures, in partnership with the Rhodes Trust, to early-career scientists committed to harnessing interdisciplinary science for positive impact on the world. Anastasia credits the PRiME Fellowship for supporting her development toward this achievement. “The PRiME fellowship exposed me in an intimate way to the diverse research within UofT,” she says. “[It] empowered me to grow my skills in communicating my research with a wide audience, developing collaborative projects, and broadening my research direction alongside the multi-level PRiME community who were all motivated and talented individuals that inspired me.” With this award, Anastasia joins a small, esteemed group of only 84 Fellows since 2017. She will be using both engineered tissues and patient samples to unlock early disease detection by applying chaos mathematics to personalized medicine.
Another 2019 Fellow, Dr. Rony Chidiac, was recently awarded a 2021 Vision Grant, providing $200,000 USD as a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, from the BrightFocus Foundation for his work on novel antibody-based agonist for neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD). Bright Focus is a non-profit organization based in the US that funds outstanding research conducted worldwide in Alzheimer’s disease, macular degeneration, and glaucoma. This project builds on the work Rony, a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Stephane Angers’ lab in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, began in collaboration with Prof. Sachdev Sidhu developing Frizzled antibody agonists for the modulation of endothelial cell permeability, funded through a PRiME Fellowship. Blood retinal barrier dysfunction is associated with multiple ocular diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration causing impaired vision or blindness. The selective Frizzled-4 antibody-based agonist developed by the Angers and Sidhu team shows high efficacy in normalizing defective retinal angiogenesis and barrier function, providing a novel therapeutic strategy for eye diseases. This study was recently published in EMBO molecular medicine. The BrightFocus Foundation funding will allow Dr. Chidiac to study the therapeutic potential of the novel molecule in models related to nAMD.
PRiME is proud to have contributed funding to these promising scientists through support of their collaborative research at the University of Toronto and we look forward to the next phase of their careers. We truly believe in supporting the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers that are poised to make significant contributions to our biggest challenges in medicine and healthcare. Look for the 2021 cohort of PRiME Fellows to be announced in early September.