Investment in trainees boosts healthcare research

The contribution of trainees – undergraduate students, MSc and PhD graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and clinical residents and fellows – to clinical, translational and discovery research at the Calvin, Phoebe and Joan Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases is foundational to success at the Institute and to the advancement of health care. Put simply: investment in top quality trainees pays dividends many times over.

In 2014 Beverley and Gordon Phillips made a generous donation to the Snyder Institute, with the vision of attracting the best and brightest trainees to conduct research in chronic inflammatory and infectious disease, creating the Beverley Phillips Rising Star Award. To date, 37 talented young scientists have been supported by a Beverley Phillips Award and, aided by world-class research facilities and outstanding principal investigators in the Snyder Institute, these awards have been remarkably successful.

Support from the Phillips family has been leveraged three-fold, garnering more than $1,200,000 in trainee stipend support. Following a Beverley Phillips award, roughly 60% of awardees received competitive stipend support from other sources, notably the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and a host of other agencies, such as the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology.

The research performed by these talented trainees, in collaboration with their peers and laboratory colleagues, has resulted in over 120 research data papers and review articles, with more on the way. This is a remarkable body of work that adds to our collective knowledge. Additionally, data generated by trainees to support successful grant applications by their supervisor is the engine that drives innovative research, and the value of their contributions cannot be overstated. This, in turn, is leading to groundbreaking discoveries that will benefit our community.

It is gratifying to know that two-thirds of graduate students supported by a Beverley Phillips Rising Star Award are now post-doctoral fellows actively discovering new control mechanisms in health and disease. They are the next generation of researchers advancing the search for cures to chronic and infectious diseases; and they are society’s future changemakers in health care.

Beverley Phillips awardee Sonia Czyz, a recent MSc graduate, assessed how a mother’s microbiota shapes development of a baby’s immune system, with the goal of understanding early life events that can affect subsequent susceptibility to ill-health. Dr. Thaís Glatthardt (Bev Phillips awardee, 2021) graduated from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and is now testing new compounds to fight salmonella infection. Salmonella is one bacterial cause of diarrheal diseases, which are associated with high rates of illness and death worldwide, especially in young children.

All of us at the Snyder Institute are deeply grateful to the Phillips family for their commitment to and investment in advancing training and development for young researchers.

Congratulations to the 2023 Beverley Phillips Rising Star awardees, Bruno Marcel, Maxwell Bui-Marinos, Idaira Maria Guerrero Fonseca, Lucas Kraemer-Roca, and Mathieu Lesouhaitier.  You are in auspicious company, and we look forward to supporting your career aspirations and hearing about your ground-breaking research.