Jay Keystone Memorial Award

The 2024 recipient of the award is IMS MedDash, led by upper-year PhD Candidates Shaghayegh (Feri) Foroozan Boroojeni, Addison Pacheco and Archita Srinath. At this novel event, inspired by the popular TV show "The Amazing Race", senior high school students will embark on an exciting journey across UofT's St. George campus to solve innovative, hands-on science based challenges. Competing in small teams, participants will work collaboratively to solve the problems as quickly and accurately as possible to receive their next clue. The stations will be staffed and judged by IMS graduate and summer undergraduate research program students. After all teams have crossed the finish line, participants will enjoy a catered lunch, faculty keynote address and the awards ceremony.

The IMS is pleased to announce that the recipients of the 2023 Jay Keystone Memorial Award for Innovation in Scientific Communication are Priya Brahmbhatt​, Maggie Chen and Christian Lopez for their initiative REACHing with Survivors. This virtual Twitter event aims to bridge the gap between cancer survivorship researchers and public audiences.

REACHing with Survivors will take place on National Cancer Survivors Day, June 4, 2023, in partnership with Cancer Survivor Social Media. With support from the organizing committee, researchers will be invited to create short and engaging educational videos about their work. The videos will be shared throughout the day on Twitter, with researchers available for a virtual live Q&A following its release. More details here.

The 2022 recipient of the Jay Keystone Memorial Award is the Healthcare Innovation Challenge, led by Kayvan Aflaki and Serena Peck. Kayvan and Serena are both MSc students and the 2021-2022 IMS Students' Association (IMSSA) Co-Presidents. In this unique initiative, teams of IMS students utilized their creativity and critical thinking skills to solve a real-world healthcare challenge question developed by clinicians and faculty. In the first stage of the challenge, students competed through a written proposal. The top 5 scoring teams advanced to the final competition in June 2022 where they gave an oral presentation of their solution to an esteemed panel of judges and an audience of IMS community members.

Congratulations to Kayvan and Serena! Find out more about the Healthcare Innovation Challenge here.

The inaugural winner of the award was the new initiative Youth-of-T Talks. IMS students from U of T Talks and Raw Talk Podcast jointly hosted a Climate Change and Health Symposium on June 2, 2021 where experts discussed the far-reaching impact climate change has on science, communities, physical and mental health, as well as future perspectives on climate-related policy and healthcare.

By engaging community youth groups as partners, Youth-of-T Talks is working with young people to translate scientific information from the Symposium into accessible multimedia educational materials for younger audiences. Given the complexity of the subject matter, they plan to distill the information into infographics and short, interactive videos designed for three grade groups: juniors (grades 4-6), intermediates (grades 7-9), and seniors (grades 10-12). The Youth-of-T Talks materials will also include at-home activities for understanding individual carbon footprint for juniors, climate anxiety for intermediates, and climate activism for seniors.

The group includes Laura Best, Muzaffar Bhatti, Rachel Dadouch, Kimia Gannad-Zadeh, Jesse Knight, Swapna Mylabathula, Hannah Shuster-Hyman, Isis So, Sajeevan Sujanthan and Claire Wunker. The goal of this new initiative is to expose a young audience to the multifaceted science of climate change in an age-appropriate way and use education to empower them to partake in discussions of solutions for climate issues. Congratulations to the entire Youth-of-T Talks team!